The world of business is constantly changing, especially for startups and small businesses trying to find their own paths to success in an online world. For all businesses, new approaches to marketing and excellence in all areas of the company are needed to compete. This is where growth hackers, professionals whose job it is to help a business grow quickly and efficiently, come in.
Though professional growth hackers are a relatively new breed of business professional, they have already helped many small businesses expand and compete effectively with larger, more established businesses. But just what are growth hackers, and exactly [quotes]how do they bring businesses growth up to speed? [/quotes]
What Are Growth Hackers?
Though the definition of the term is somewhat ambiguous, a growth hacker is effectively a business expert who specializes in building businesses up rapidly through a system of process improvements gained from investigation and collaboration mixed with innovation, experimentation, and measurement. Growth hackers can work in a wide range of capacities.
Some use their skills to build businesses of their, own which can then be sold or turned over to someone else to manage while the growth hacker moves on to his or her next business. More frequently, however, [quotes]growth hackers are hired to help owners accelerate and ensure rapid business success. [/quotes]
What Do Growth Hackers Do?
[sidebar]
GET GROWING!
Discover how growth hacking by a professional business coach can accelerate your sales and improve your bottom line, give us a call. There is never any obligation. USA: 877.433.6225 feedback@focalpointcoaching.com
[/sidebar]
At their core, growth hackers are catalysts that help you generate tens, even hundreds of thousands of dollars in growth from your business. They work with you and your team on multiple growth strategies, often more than one at a time, gauging the results, and collaborating with you to set out and execute a comprehensive plan designed for rapid growth.
Professional growth hackers will generally oversee the growth of a business and help the owner adjust each area of their company as needed to make growth strategies succeed. In addition, they work with you at every stage, refining your processes and strategies all the way through the final push of an initial marketing campaign, closing sales and managing customer relationships. [quotes]The goal of this process is to ensure that, at every point along the way, the business is doing everything it can to position itself for long-term exponential growth. [/quotes]
Most growth hackers rely on a toolbox of methods, techniques and skills that they adapt to fit the specific needs of a given business at a given time.
Professional growth hackers bring a different level of business skill to the table. For example, it’s a rare company owner today who hasn’t been deluged with proposals from SEO experts. Most technical growth hackers are intimately familiar with social media marketing, as this is one of the best channels for small businesses to leverage their marketing resources. They also understand SEO, or search engine optimization and help companies to capitalize on free traffic from internet searches.
Any number of technicians can do a great job of SEO. The problem is having that single effort pay off with sustainable eye-popping growth. It can work wonders but over time, competitors copy and encroach, and this miracle solution regresses to the mean.
The professional growth hacker understands that [quotesright]trying to achieve fast growth piecemeal is like treating Ebola with Imodium.[/quotesright] It might fix one symptom temporarily but there is a far more complex underlying web of business factors that must be tackled and continually refined over time for sustainable high growth.
How do they do that?
It starts with taking a step back and making sure you have the business foundation on which to grow. Failure to take that step is like building that tower in Pisa on unstable ground... Great idea, fantastic design but it started with a fatal flaw that soon made it uninhabitable.
[quotes] Breakout growth isn’t simple. [/quotes] It’s multi-faceted and a result of a web of interactions, factors and actions which, without outside help, are rare and nearly impossible for any of us to find, assess, consider, and optimize. Result? Slow growth, even negative growth.
When growth hackers help a company scale up its reach, recognition, and sales, they begin with understanding your company. They work with you to achieve crystal clarity on your markets, products, customers, and what makes you dramatically different from your competitors. If there are deficiencies, a pro has the skills and tools to help you find the focus and differentiation needed so you are the standout best solution for your clients.
From here, a professional growth hacker will work with you as you analyze the results of your changes and efforts and see what is really bringing in the best results. Where a normal marketer might simply continue to do anything that is bringing in at least some positive results, [quotesright]professional growth hackers will shift the focus entirely into the strategies that are producing the highest return[/quotesright] on time and money invested.
By keeping the focus only on the one or two things that are producing the best results, growth hackers can help companies leverage their available resources to compete effectively with larger and older businesses.
[quotes]Engaging the right growth hacker, can be a huge asset to any small business.[/quotes] Bringing a professional growth hacker in at the right time is also critical, as you want to introduce him or her early to your business, products and ways of doing things. This will help you have a program that can produce optimal growth results.
