Growth hacking is more than a buzzword. It relies on tangible and practical methods that can easily scale with the right data-driven approaches. Learn more from the world's leading pricing and growth specialists at Simon-Kucher Elevate.
Traditional marketing is expensive and sometimes leads to frustrating results. Marketing teams spend huge budgets. And even with modern tracking techniques, it's difficult to predict which part of your marketing creates rapid growth.
The same goes for traditional pricing, sales techniques, UX design, and many other strategies trying to grow a business. Often, it’s expensive to invest in innovations – technological as well as structural – and it’s hard to measure immediate effects and impacts.
However, in today's digital age, there are techniques to overcome traditional business challenges and effectively scale your conversion rates.
The most popular: Growth hacking!
Examples of growth hacking success stories
PayPal stands out among the many growth hacking success stories. It was one of the first real growth hacking companies, mastering the concept before the term was even coined.
Already in 1988, Peter Thiel and his cofounders knew that traditional marketing was too expensive for a small startup to reach a big audience. They were looking at ways to scale fast with a minimal budget. After initial considerations, they started offering $10 to every new user.
And another 10 dollars for every friend referral: This created a daily growth rate of 7-10 percent!
Other early marketing success stories are …
- Hotmail with their famous email marketing slogan "PS: I love you. Get your free e-mail at Hotmail" which they posted under every email sent through their accounts – scaling rapidly in their early years
- Dropbox, where you could get more free storage capacity if you referred a friend to the platform – turning Dropbox into the first successful cloud startup
- But there are also successful offline examples, such as the backpack marketing campaign ran by FitnessFirst. For many years, every new member received a free backpack. This laid the foundation for their continuous growth at the beginning of the 2000s, creating brand awareness through the target group themselves
In the end, effective growth hacking is all about outpacing traditional marketing and sales efforts. This might mean the growth hacks of yesterday become the new standard marketing tools of today.
The essentials: Growth hacking is not just a model for startups
Growth hacking is more than a technique: It is the mindset to achieve business results in short-term with the highest possible impact – using only light and cost-effective resources.
Successful growth hacking strategies go far beyond traditional marketing and sales techniques to scale your business as fast as possible. And these growth hacking techniques are still easy to apply, and you don’t have to be a startup to take a growth hacking approach.
Taking this concept into action, our experts have established many growth hacking success stories at major companies and enterprises. Check out the following case studies, where we have helped …
- Increasing one of our banking client's click rate by 8-10%, their path to purchase by 10-12%, and topping up their conversion rates by 3-4%
- Increasing one of our retail client's monthly revenue by 450% and their D2C run-rate by 2700%
- Increasing another banking client's fixed-term deposit volume by 40 million within one year
At Simon-Kucher Elevate, we have more than 100 individual growth hack examples and a proven track record of success in achieving growth and increasing efficiency.
In the first step, we always recommend a strategic testing approach to ensure the measures are effective and in line with your company and market environment.
Let's dive more into the history of growth hacking and the different techniques to apply.
The story behind growth hacking: Success is the only goal
Initially, the term growth hacking was coined by Sean Ellis, specifically referring to expert marketers: "A growth hacker is a person whose true north is growth. Everything they do is scrutinized by its potential impact on scalable growth."
Whatever a growth marketer does, it must be highly efficient. There should always be the chance to go viral and earn a true breakthrough for your brand.
Techniques rely on creativity, constant experimentation, testing, and establishing the marketing techniques that truly work. That's why every project with Simon-Kucher Elevate relies on combining technology, data, and creativity with our commercial consulting expertise. Our specialist focus covers:
- Advanced analytics
- Customer experience
- Technology strategy advice
- Strategy & transformation
We're not just talking about quick wins here. Instead, long-term orientation and data are key whenever building a growth hacking strategy.
It's all about risk-taking, but also backing your strategies with the right data.
Many growth hackers rely on a cross-functional growth team from departments with various backgrounds (such as IT, marketing, and customer services) to brainstorm the best ideas.
The steps to successful growth hacking
There are many ways to turn your growth hacking efforts into a success – from strategic content marketing, over customized pricing approaches to innovative product packaging techniques in digital spaces.
In a typical project, our experts analyze your specific challenges. Next, we test and trial the most promising path to growth (relying on strictly scientific methodology). Here, we derive exact measures and use them to prepare the next cycle for our growth hacking sprints – until we are finally finding the perfect strategy for your company.
A typical growth hacking sprint
This approach can differ from project to project, but there are three underlying patterns that we are following in every project:
- A/B tests: The way to rapidly test any new measures
There are many ways to establish growth hacking within your organization, but first you need to define what you want to achieve and if you can measure these goals.
Usually, we recommend establishing goals that are clearly long-term oriented and are based on concrete hypotheses that are measurable through key performance indicators. This approach helps you to choose the initiative that has the potential to deliver the strongest results.
Do you need help in finding out what truly works? Our experts at Simon-Kucher Elevate have over 100 proven measures in their toolkit. We know exactly how to customize and implement these measures in line with your unique brand and marketing environment.
The four steps for implementing a growth hacking testing approach
Once we have set up the most promising of our measures, we use sophisticated A/B testing techniques to ensure their effectiveness, balancing risk and reward through a detailed target audience analysis. The goal? Drive your conversion rates and business growth while finally using your budget primarily on pre-tested initiatives that definitely work!
Through an iterative approach, we help you continuously update your landing pages, blog posts, or customer journeys to outperform your target KPIs. Contact us to learn more!
- Building the foundations with the right data and tech stack
To build sustainable growth hacking processes, it's important to update your tech stack. Successful projects run with detailed KPIs in mind from the start. As the economist Peter Drucker once said: "What gets measured gets managed."
Once you find a marketing, sales, or pricing lever that helps you reach fast growth, it is important to scale it and keep your customer acquisition at pace.
But this only works with the right tools, analytics software, and a modern customer relationship management system (CRM).
These tools help you gather data to reach your KPIs, automate repetitive tasks, and deliver personalized customer experiences that in return expand your growth rates. Get in touch with our Simon-Kucher Elevate experts today and let us set up the perfect systems to drive your business growth.
- Building innovative strategies and establishing the right growth mindset within your organization
What PayPal and Dropbox did in the late 90s and early 2000s needs an updated version for today's digital age.
Strategically bring your product or service to the forefront with new and fresh ideas. This can cover everything from referral programs, smart bundling, optimization for search engines and landing pages, to behavioral nudging techniques. Finding a way that pleasantly surprises and reaches your target audience, saves your budget, and upscales your product development.
Example for a growth hacking strategy in the banking sector
Find out how we helped a retail bank develop a personalized voucher recommendation system for their user base, reaching as many active users as possible. Read the case study here.
Achieving ambitious growth targets requires establishing the right growth strategy and growth mindset within your organization. Our experts ensure cross-functional collaboration, provide specific marketing training, and assess the effectiveness of your existing measures.
Want to know more? Contact Simon-Kucher Elevate today for a detailed discussion on how to hack growth for your business.
Find out why growth hacking works – with our Simon-Kucher Elevate experts
No other consultancy knows more about (digital) growth than we do. We live, breathe, and drive tangible growth, running over 1,500 projects every year.
Our digital practice Simon-Kucher Elevate provides true digital experts who leverage data, technology, and design to drive digital marketing and sales excellence. With our expertise, you will always find the growth hacking strategy that fits your company's individual needs with our …
- Track record of achieving (digital) growth for companies across all sectors and industries
- Large set of proven measures to be tested in your organization
- Experience in establishing a growth hacking culture in organizations of all maturity levels
Want to know more? Reach out to our experts to learn how we can growth hack your marketing strategy. It's time to join the tech revolution!
