This document discusses growth hacking, which involves experiment-driven marketing techniques focused on product usage to drive growth. It provides examples of growth hacking techniques used by companies like Dropbox, Buffer, PayPal, and Twitter to increase user acquisition, activation, retention, and revenue. The document also outlines a sample growth hacking problem-solving process addressing a common challenge of low conversion rates. This involves defining growth hacking areas and goals, approaches, techniques, skills needed, and metrics to measure success. Finally, it notes that companies now offer growth hacking as a service to help other businesses implement these strategies.

1. Growth Hacking
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2. Content
1. What is Growth Hacking?
2. Success stories: Dropbox, Buffer, Paypal, Twitter
3. Growth Hacking Problem Solving
4. Growth Hacking as Service

3. What is Growth Hacking?

4. The term Growth Hacking
Sean Ellis (CEO of GrowthHackers) coined the term "growth hacker" in 2010:
"Growth Hacker is a person whose true north is growth. Everything they do is
scrutinized by its potential impact on scalable growth."
Andrew Chen’s (leading GH at Uber) definition:
"Growth Hacker is the new VP Marketing. Growth Hackers are a hybrid of
marketer and coder, one who looks at the traditional question of 'How do I get
customers for my product?' and answers with A/B tests, landing pages, viral
factor, email deliverability, and Open Graph."

5. Growth Hacking does not happen overnight.
But it is a process that can be tested, measured, and scaled.
Source: wegrowth.com

6. Growth Hacking Areas
If you have an eCommerce website those areas could be:
● Customer Acquisition – bringing people to your website.
● Customer Engagement – people finding your product.
● Customer Activation – people registering and buying the product.
● Customer Retention – people returning and buying something again.
Source: wegrowth.com

7. AARRR principle:
Developed by Dave Mcclure

8. Growth Hacking Goals
A goal can be set inside of a Growth Area.
For example, “improving Retention by 20% in the first month”.

9. GH Approaches and Techniques
You can achieve the Growth Hacking Goal by using various Growth
Hacking Approaches.
For Retention it could be — email notifications, retargeting, loyalty cards.
Inside of the email notifications approach, you can try such Growth
Hacking Techniques as “thank you” emails, email notifications for similar
products, or emails with information about discounts.

10. Growth Hacker Skills
Growth Hacker is a cross-functional, multi-tasking person focused on achieving a
certain objective.
It can be a programmer with an excellent understanding of marketing and
analytics, but also a marketer with strong programming skills.
The skills required for this profession are actually a combination of marketing, data
analyzing, product understanding, and creative and analytical thinking. Combined
together, they need to provide you with a solution that might have been
overlooked by others. Source: wegrowth.com

13. Growth Hacking Structure
Area
Acquisition
Activation
Retention
Review
Revenue
Goal
Increasing X
by n%
Approach
website analytics,
content marketing,
SEO optimization,
copywriting,
remarketing,
referral, A/B testing,
users feedback,
guest blogging,
social media
campaigns, paid
search optimization,
viral loops, word-of-
mouth marketing,
etc
Skills/Tools
i.e. for Data Analyst:
reporting packages
(Business Objects
etc), databases (SQL
etc), programming
(XML, Javascript, or
ETL frameworks),
etc.
Technique
i.e. for SEO: link
building, keyword
research, SEO
copywriting,
sitemap, re
optimizing
existing content,
keyword planning,
developing
linkable asset,
personalization,
etc.
Measurement
Google Analytics
KISSmetrics
MixPanel
Event/People-based
Analytics
Custom Analytics
Niche Analytics
KPI: Customer
Lifetime Value, User
Acquisition Cost,
Viral Coefficient,
Cohorts, Segments,
DAU/MAU

14. Growth Hacking vs. Marketing
— All successful growth hackers are marketers, but not all marketers are growth hackers
Digital marketing teams are usually composed of non-technical people that often rely on
developers, designers, and data scientists to implement their ideas. On the other hand,
growth hacking teams are made of people that generate ideas and execute them from start
to finish (wegrowth.com)
— Growth hacking is experiment driven marketing focused primarily on how the product is
used to create growth both from the distribution and retention side. The key differentiator
being the product-level focus vs. the channel-level focus of traditional marketing effort
(Morgan Brown, COO of Inman News)
— Growth hacking does not separate product design and product effectiveness from
marketing (Ryan Holiday, marketer and entrepreneur)

15. — Marketers interaction with product stops at the landing page. While a growth hacker can
play in the activation and retention arenas, most marketers would feel uncomfortable leading
a development team
(Aaron Ginn, Silicon Valley technologist, early founder of the growth hacking movement)
Growth Hacking vs. Marketing

16. Gagan Biyani, the co-founder of Udemy and a growth hacker himself,
said, “many of the growth hacking descriptions on the web are
unnecessarily restrictive. I don’t believe growth hackers must be formal
engineers when many of the most well-regarded growth hackers don’t
code regularly.”

17. In fact, Sean Ellis, the godfather of growth hacking, called himself the
first marketer at Dropbox. Marketer was the title he most associated with
when there wasn’t another label for his role. Many of the best growth
hackers working today continue to sport the title of Chief Marketing
Officer or VP of Marketing. More and more companies are choosing to
have a Growth Lead, a VP of Growth, or even a Growth Hacker, but they
used to just be called marketers, so let’s not forget our roots.

18. Success stories

19. Airbnb
Airbnb created an integration which allowed Airbnb hosts to also post their rental
on Craigslist, from within the Airbnb UX. Cross-posting as a form of marketing has
existed for a long time. But the integration wasn’t a marketing campaign. It was
product focused. The Airbnb integration reverse-engineered how to post on
Craigslist (there wasn’t even a public Craigslist API). No traditional marketer could
do it.

20. Dropbox
Dropbox increased their signups by 60% with a referral tactic. Namely, they offered their
existing users the possibility to get more storage space. How? By inviting their friends to join
Dropbox. Those friends would then get extra storage space, as well, if they used a friend
referral link to sign up to Dropbox.

21. Buffer
Buffer is a sharing tool that lets users schedule
when a post goes live. Their growth hack was
done by purchasing the Digg Digg floating bar.
This bar follows you as you scroll up and down
the page. From here, they made their button an
option on the bar which gave the company much-
needed promotion.

22. PayPal
PayPal, the online merchant platform, had a growth hack through eBay.
Sellers originally had to post via text that they accepted PayPal. Because
of its overwhelming popularity, PayPal made their logo usable for eBay.
This logo was displayed next to company giants Visa and MasterCard.
Soon, users from all over created accounts since PayPal was thought to
be as trustworthy and prestigious as Visa and Mastercard. Other online
retailers began using PayPal’s service as an acceptable form of payment
because of its rapid growth and popularity.

23. Twitter
Twitter struggled to keep a steady user base initially.
A large number of people would be active for a few
days and then log out for months at a time. Using
testing and gathering required information, they
rebuilt the site to lure their users back instead of
using offers or promotions. They realized that if users
select five to ten accounts to follow when they sign
up, they would be more likely to return. People are
willing to invest time and effort into things they have
an interest in. They also realized that tweeting
randomly doesn’t keep people around; rather,
interacting does.

24. Growth Hacking
Problem Solving

25. Defining the problem
Let’s take a problem many companies face after they
overcome the early-development stage.
It often happens that a large traffic is already driven to the
company’s website due to its high position in Google search
results. But the website has a low conversion rate — users
come and leave without submitting their data.

26. Growth Hacking Area and Goal
Area
User Activation
Goal
Increase the
number of users
submitting requests
for a startup tour by
100%

27. Growth Hacking Approaches
To increase the user activity we need to work in
several directions:
● Making it easier for potential customers to
start the communication;
● Creating an additional interest for users;
● Reminding and stimulating visitors to
interact.
Website Widgets
Content creation
Email marketing
Approaches

28. GH Techniques for Website Widgets Approach
A Pop Up can be Time-Driven (appears after a
certain time spent on the website) or Behavior-
Driven (appears when user clicks on a certain
page or reaches the end or 3/4 of the page).
Exit Popup is an AI tool tracking mouse
movement. It appears when the user decides to
leave the page.
Website Widgets
Pop Up
Time-Driven
Behavior-
Driven
Exit

29. GH Techniques for Website Widgets Approach
The Pop Up may suggest:
Website Widgets
Pop up
Pick a spot in our calendar
Pop-ups helped Entrepreneur.com increase subscriptions by 86% and sales by 162% (source)
Have a question?
Let’s talk!
Get a free ebook with our expertise now!
Book a free online consultation with our team

30. GH Techniques for Website Widgets Approach
Floating bar is visible for the user
at every point of the website
offering users to download some
of your content, register or
subscribe for a newsletter.
Website Widgets
Floating bar

31. GH Techniques for Website Widgets
A Chat Widget is the easiest way for the potential
customer to contact you. It is a great solution to
generate leads if your customer has a specific
need that may not be describe in your offer.
Website Widgets
Chat

32. GH Tools for Website Widgets
www.exitmonitor.com,
Free: www.tawk.to, www.purechat.com, www.mylivechat.com,
Paid (+integrations): https://www.comm100.com/livechat,
https://www.livehelpnow.net, https://www.websitealive.com
Website Widgets
www.wisepops.com, www.powr.io,
www.popupdomination.com,
www.popupmonkey.comPop ups
Exit Pop ups
Chat

33. GH Techniques for Content Creation Approach
Remaining in the user's’ internal storage and
bringing them some practical knowledge or
entertainment could create a memorable and a
positive image of your company and also extend
your email database.
Many people would be interested in our
company expertise and especially in getting in
for free by submitting their email.
Content Creation
eBook
Company
Presentation
Guide

34. GH Techniques for Email Marketing Approach
Having decided to work with you, some users
still can’t decide immediately about what kind of
your services do they want to have. However,
after postponing this decision, they may forget
or not being able to find your website.
Offering users a possibility to complete the
survey/registration/request form later by
submitting their email (with the form being sent
there) will create a good reminder for the visitors
and will also provide our database with a new
email address for the further offers.
Email Marketing
“Submit your
email” plugin
Adaptation of the
survey for being
sent

35. Skills for implementing GH strategy
The implementation of these approaches highly
affects your company’s image, so involving
your internal team members would be the best
option. However, it shouldn’t be a problem to
work together with experienced freelancers
who have some understanding of your
business.
Website Manager
Skills
Content Creator,
Copywriter
Growth Hacker
or Marketer

36. Measuring results of GH
The results can be tracked by Google
Analytics or other Web Analytics software.
Some Pop Up Widgets also offer a
possibility to track the effectivity of the tool
excluded.
Measurement
Google Analytics
Integrated
measurement
Other Web Analytics
software

37. Growth Hacking as Service

38. Growth Hacking as Service
Area Approach Skills/ToolsGoal Technique Measurement
Set up by client
together with
GH Team
Set up and executed by a GH Team

39. What do companies offering
Growth Hacking as Service do?

50. Nestim provides our Venture Camp participants with
full-cycle Growth Hacking services.
Participate in our program if you are an early-stage
startup or contact us if you need our services:
bastian.halecker@nestim.com
+49 30 994045 78