a realistic guide for real-world businesses

Growth Hacking is the new buzzword.

Every day there are thousands of videos, articles, PDFs and courses promising to explain this “new strategy” that promises to solve your company's problems, hunger in Africa and all the ills of society.

We are exaggerating. See the evolution in the popularity of this term on Google over the last ten years.

If you have read other content on the Portal, you probably already know our position on these magical formulas that appear and disappear in marketing: no, Growth Hacking will not solve all of your company's problems overnight.

But yes, Growth Hacking is something real that, if applied strategically, with consistency and maturity, can accelerate the growth of your business.

The objective of this text is to present an extremely practical guide on what Growth Hacking is and how to apply it to real-world companies.

What is Growth Hacking

Growth Hacking is nothing more than experiment-oriented marketing, as the creator of the term defines it.

No, Growth Hacking is not a profession, much less a tool.

It is more of a mentality that assumes that, rather than investing energy in more robust resources and projects without any prior validation, it is more intelligent and productive to have an internal routine of experiments where those that yielded results remain for future developments. and those that did not show results are left aside and recorded as “learning” for other people on the team.

Despite the hundreds of thousands of Growth Hacking courses and gurus, I dare say that this strategy can be understood by a single image:

Is it possible to do Growth Hacking without money?

In the same way that it is possible to travel the world without money, it is also possible to do Growth Hacking.

But, obviously, the level of challenges and the speed at which they will be overcome will depend a lot on the money you will invest – and here it is worth paying special attention to the word “invest”.

Having at least one person on your team concerned exclusively with running marketing experiments and validating the results, with agility and data intelligence, has long ceased to be a luxury.

In a world where everything changes very quickly, especially in marketing, understanding what can bring results before your company is forced to do it overnight means that in many months you will guarantee not only financial success but survival of your business.

Imagine, for example, how many restaurants would have survived if they had already tried having a delivery channel before the pandemic? Or how many artists wouldn't be desperate if they had thought about doing lives?

Of course, in the business world there will always be surprises and there simply isn’t that El Dorado for every entrepreneur called “stability”. But having a history of learning from successful and unsuccessful actions certainly increases your company's chances of growing faster and, in some cases, surviving.

In other words, Growth Hacking should never be seen as a luxury accessible only to startups, but rather as a good investment for any type of business.

If your company has the cash to make this investment, I recommend it. However, if that's not your case, keep reading until the end because we give you some ideas for Growth Hacking experiments that don't require any investment.

Step by step to use Growth Hacking in your company without spending a penny

Now, let's get to the practical part.

1. Define someone responsible

For it to work, it is very important that your company sees Growth Hacking as an important pillar of your company's marketing, and this means delegating someone responsible to make a plan and ensure that it is carried out within deadlines and good practices.

Choose someone who has a broader view of marketing, the more general this person's knowledge, the better. It is also important that she has at least 5 hours a week for the routines that we will explain below.

2. Set up a weekly meeting to brainstorm ideas

It's impossible to talk about Growth Hacking without brainstorming with the team. This is because, as we are talking about experiment-oriented marketing, the larger (and more diverse) the source of ideas, the broader the testing spectrum and the more chance your company will have of finding innovative and out-of-the-box solutions.

Therefore, schedule a weekly meeting (I recommend Monday morning) with your marketing team or partners at your company. Dedicate at least 30 minutes of this meeting to coming up with ideas for experiments and write everything down – remember, the idea of ​​brainstorming is not to define anything, much less to judge the ideas presented.

3. Define ideas that match both qualification criteria

Still in the brainstorm meeting, after everyone has had the opportunity to present their ideas, organize everything in the following order: from the easiest to execute to the most complex.

With this list, define which 3 experiments your current team can undertake and which can be tested in a maximum of two weeks. Yes, some experiments may need more time (depending on the seasonality of your solution and volume of data processed daily) but as the goal here is to be practical, let's determine two weeks.

Ideas for experiments that were not selected must be recorded so that, if possible in the future, they can be revisited and put into practice.

4. Create an action plan and execute it within two days

With the experiments selected, it's time to get down to business – and we can safely say that this is usually the moment where everything starts to go downhill.

For experiments to get off the ground, it is absolutely necessary that an action plan (actions, deadlines and people responsible) be defined at the weekly meeting. This prevents other demands and “emergencies” from putting your company’s Growth Hacking to the sidelines.

As we are talking about an activity that initially does not bring immediate results, it is common for everything that was discussed in this weekly meeting to be placed at the bottom of the priority list – and this is a terrible mistake considering the growth of your company in the medium and long term. .

5. Schedule a meeting to review the results after 7 days of implementation

Ready! You have already met, selected and – most importantly – put into practice the ideas from the brainstorm meeting.

Now, it's time to analyze the results.

Meet with your team after 7 days of experimentation (or 14, or 30 depending on the amount of data you obtain in the period) to discuss the results. For the meeting to be productive, I always recommend bringing the following questions to the agenda:

• Is the information we have enough to draw a conclusion?
• Did we achieve the analysis objective of the experiment?
• How can we implement the learnings?
• How can we increase the productivity of upcoming experiments?

It is very important at this stage to record all the results of the experiment and what the insights were, preferably in a document where everyone on the team has access to the information.

After all, the objective of Growth Hacking is precisely to help the company grow faster, and there is nothing better than ensuring that other people in the company can take advantage of the insights.

7. Repeat the process

In years of helping people implement this process in their companies, especially startups, I can say that the biggest challenge is maintaining consistency in this cycle of ideas, experiments and insights.

Emergencies will always arise that prevent your team from putting experiments into practice, or a sequence of unsuccessful experiments can discourage you.

Therefore, ensure that the person responsible for Growth Hacking at your company has the discipline to maintain weekly meetings and monitor results. After all, as they say, creating a successful company is much more of a marathon than a 100-meter sprint.