Growth Hacking: Marketing for Tomorrow?

Growth Hacking is increasingly used in today’s businesses. The term was invented by Sean Ellis (entrepreneur, business angel and startup advisor) in 2010 in the United States, and popularized in France by the growth hacking meetup organized by the accelerator of startups TheFamily. But what is growth hacking? How does it differ from traditional marketing?

Definition of Growth Hacking

The Growth Hacking is all means set up a website  in order to bring traffic and turn it into success by spending more on the product than paid advertising. It is, in other words, the adaptation of marketing to the environment and current technologies.

The beginnings of Growth Hacking Hotmail “PS I love you. Get your free email at hotmail

Hotmail’s founders in their infancy have a lift of 000 300 euros fund. Their first idea was to spend on traditional marketing by buying a billboard on the highway. When Tim Draper, one of the investors who had entrusted 300 000 knew what they wanted to make money, he advised them to add at the end of each email sent to Hotmail: ”  PS: I love you. Get your free email at Hotmail . ” This technique enabled them to acquire 20,000 users in one month and 1 million in one semester. This method of Growth Hacking has also been adopted by Apple when you send an email using your iPhone you see the words:Sent from my iPhone.

Case Study: Dropbox and Growth Hacking

When you use Dropbox on a regular basis, the problem of storage space arises very quickly. To have more space you have two solutions:

 The first is to pay to have more storage space,

The second is to share and have your contacts registered on Dropbox. Once your friends have registered, you receive 500 MB of free storage, up to 16 GB.

This technique of Growth Hacking has enabled the company to increase the virality product and so to register more members on Dropbox.

The difference between traditional marketing and Growth Hacking

The big difference is the  real ROI . The Growth Hacking focuses exclusively on the real exchange rate , while traditional marketing is more focused on the impact and visibility.

The future of Growth Hacking

This alternative marketing is generally used by startups without great means; They prefer to spend less in their marketing and more on their product. For this, they had to find innovative techniques to attract new users. Many startups use the Growth Hacking  to increase their growth: Facebook, Twitter, Airbnb …

However, all the techniques of Growth Hacking listed above or you can find on the Internet, are no longer usable. Indeed, the purpose of Growth Hacking is to test different techniques to increase the growth of your business, they will not come to light so that everyone can use it.

That is why it is difficult to find recent examples of Growth Hacking . The competition is becoming stronger and all techniques are dying because users are becoming better trained and educated and falling less and less into the “basic traps”. The Growth Hacking certainly will not totally replace traditional marketing  ; This is an evolution of marketing along with a complement of marketing as we know it today.

As traditional marketing , it will not turn a bad product into a good product, but will only make it known .