Growth hacking explained in 3 steps

Growth hacking is a relatively new term in the world of online marketing. But what does it mean? And how does it work?

Step 1: Analyse the customer journey

Optimization starts with data. If you start by analysing the current customer journey you will create a marketing strategy based on what your customers want, not what you want people to do on your website.

So how does that work? How do you analyse the current customer journey?

The easiest way is to analyse your Google Analytics data, and transform the vague statement ‘customer journey’ into a clear number (or percentage).

Naturally not all businesses have a similar customer journey, we will mention two basic ones below.

1.1 If you have a webshop, you can use the conversion ratio of ecommerce as a starting point. You will then analyse the moment someone visits your website, until they become a customer. However, you will also want to analyse one step before that. Ideally, an ecommerce customer journey starts the moment someone sees your advertisement → until they become a customer. Which could very well be around 0,01%

1.2 If the goal is to generate leads, your customer journey is more difficult to analyse. A large part of your customer’s journey is happening offline. You will first need to map the stages that are happening both online and offline, so you can calculate the total customer journey from start to end in a clear number (or percentage)

We have created a case study were growth hacking is done at a business, named OPTI, similar to example 1.2, the goal was to generate leads. Their customer journey from start to end was 0,001696%. Meaning that on average 58.962,26 people had to visit the website to generate one customer. (To put that in perspective, the company sells software packages between $6.000 and $40.000)

Step 2: Dissect the customer journey into different business processes

In the previous example we found that OPTI’s customer journey is 0,001696%. While this is good to know, where do you start if you want to increase this percentage? Well, you first need to know at what exact step in the customer journey people decide not to buy the software. We have named this ‘dissecting the customer journey’. For OPTI we dissected the complete customer journey into the following steps.

(Note Level 4 for should be 1.696)

We have now created a clear overview of where ‘growth can be hacked’, or where optimization should start. Only 1% of visitors of OPTI’s website complete the goal (filling in a form) and become a lead.

Step 3: Convert data into action

When analysing why only 1% of people after visiting the website filled in a form, we noticed that OPTI was using their information related homepage as a landing page. It was not conversion oriented at all.

We started using conversion oriented landing pages, and the conversion rate increased from 1% to 2,14%. Which is a gigantic increase, we more than doubled the amount of people moving from one phase of the customer journey to the next.

What’s your opinion on growth hacking? Or would you like more information? We have written an entire case study sharing all knowledge http://tj-da.com/the-book/