As the digital world evolves, giving rise to the increased demand for growth marketing as a result of the ever changing market and changes in consumer preferences, growth hacking has been continually leveraged as an innovative low-cost strategy to help developers make superior products, keep up with trends, identify potential investors, and understand where their products and services are most valuable.
However, not without challenges as Tobi Adekunle, Marketing Manager, Eskimi, West Africa, points out that growth marketing shouldn’t only be about selling products or selling services, but rather about changing behaviour, making an impact, delivering value.
“You can’t growth-hack a product that is not solving anything, or a product that is not meeting people’s needs, because it is when your solution is hinged on the principle of delivering value that you can growth-hack.”
“Growth marketing is about growth. And when I say growth, what I mean is revenue, new customer acquisition, and retention. But it also goes beyond growth, because growth starts from you identifying the problem you want to solve, how you want to solve it, the impact you want it to make, how you intend to make this impact, and the value you want people to get from using your products. If you leave out these key things, you’ll not only fail, but you’ll also end up creating a product that is not needed in the market,” Adekunle shared.
The first step probably is to demystify the myth that growth hacking is only meant for startups. As much as it is an effective strategy for startups, growth hacking also matters to large corporations as it helps companies explore innovative ways to achieve their objectives and expand their customer base.
To achieve these growth-oriented goals, Adekunle advised growth marketers to take into key consideration the challenges at different levels in the growth hacking funnel in order to build a successful growth hacking strategy.
“Everything is tied back to strategy,” he explained.
“As a growth marketer, you are faced with the challenges of acquiring customers, retaining customers, and driving revenue for organisations, and this is because some products are serving the same customers; everybody is struggling for the same market. Sometimes it would seem like you don’t know what you are doing or you don’t have the best of strategy, meanwhile it might probably just be that the market is saturated with enough products and people have options, and they don’t find yours valuable. So, you can come up with all the sales promo, and all the growth hacking strategy, but if you are not addressing people’s pain points, offering value, or providing solutions to problems, people will still not use you.”