Growth Hacking | User Growth Tips from Google!

The concept of growth hacking has always been very popular. Based on his own work experience, the author of the article summarizes 5 key points about user growth. I hope the content will inspire you.

In Silicon Valley, growth hacking is more than just a buzzword; it is the core competency of leading technology companies to systematically expand their customer base. Over the past 7 years, I have worked in several global growth roles at Google. During that time, I realized that the strategies that successful technology companies in Silicon Valley used to address growth challenges were fundamentally different from those used by companies in other regions. I have compiled 5 excellent growth hacking courses where you can learn from the leading growth experts in Silicon Valley.

01 Make growth hacking part of your corporate culture

Most marketing and product teams in Silicon Valley understand the importance of growth hacking, which they often refer to as “Growth.” Growth is at the core; it’s the DNA of the most successful technology companies.

In Europe, most Internet companies don’t know what growth hacking is, let alone how many companies have used it. We recently conducted a growth survey and found that 74% of digital professionals had not heard of the term “growth hacking” or had no experience with it.

Many people promote growth hacking as a “silver bullet”, “a set of secret growth hacking tools” or a “quick fix”. This view is too short-sighted. So, what exactly does growth hacking mean? The most applicable definition comes from growth expert Andrew Chen:

Growth hacking is a multidisciplinary skill set that integrates elements of marketing, product management, data analysis, and development to answer the question, “How do I acquire and retain customers?” It can be done by optimizing the entire customer lifecycle or embedding your product into a large platform so that your product has the ability to sell itself. Additionally, most growth strategies are free or don’t require a large budget.

Here are some typical examples of growth hacking applications:

• From the perspective of customer lifetime value and retention, optimize the interactive experience in the entire user conversion funnel. In contrast, traditional optimization practices tend to focus on acquiring cost and quantity.
• Align product and marketing channels to create powerful and innovative user acquisition and retention opportunities, such as Growth Loops (see Lesson 4 for more information).
• Integrate your product into large platforms like Facebook or YouTube so that it can be supported by those platforms.
• Continuously optimize customer experience through experiments and practice of behavioral economics principles.

02 Keep experimenting

Silicon Valley’s most successful companies recognize that relentless experimentation is the key to growth. A growth expert from Google summed it up like this:

Any traffic that doesn’t contribute to experimentation is a missed learning opportunity. Keep trying and experimenting.

This illustrates that growth hacking is all about continuous learning and is always intertwined with experimentation. But what does a real growth experiment look like? A key part of growth experimentation is data-driven hypotheses. You can think about which adjustments to your product or marketing can improve performance based on data. You can try to express this idea in a concise sentence:

If ___, then ___, because ___.

Next, try to “translate” this adjustment into an adjustable variable in the current product experience. For example, different login pages or app flows as variables. Finally, through A/B testing, different experimental groups are randomly assigned to real users to compare the performance of the variable group with the control group (usually the rollback version or the current version). The goal of the experiment is to find a difference significant enough to further reject or accept the hypothesis.

Generating hypotheses is a core part of the growth experiment process

You can learn how to master the Growth Experimentation method and avoid some common pitfalls. Here are two experimental pitfalls you need to be aware of:

1. Assumptions should be made before testing and based on data

You might ask yourself, “Why do I need to do an experiment if I have data from market research or customer analysis?” It is tempting to misuse this data to draw causal conclusions: either find data points that support your hypothesis; or, if you cannot find confirmatory data, simply revise your hypothesis.

But we still need to use this data from a more systematic perspective, establishing a baseline in the form of a hypothesis before looking for evidence. Of course, these sources are still crucial for growth experiments, but they are more important for generating conjectures rather than drawing conclusions about causality, which is the first benefit. An added benefit is to use them to pre-validate your hypotheses, which will greatly increase your success rate.

2. Don’t run multiple variables in one experiment

The most common pitfall in growth hacking experiments is testing too many variables in one experiment. Ideally, each test should set only one variable. For example, change only the pricing and keep all other variables constant. In this way, price changes can well explain the differences in data performance.

If you change both your definition of value and your price, you will likely not be able to explain why the data is performing differently. Furthermore, testing multiple variables in one experiment also requires more traffic and longer time to obtain significant results. To avoid both of these problems, most companies with less traffic adopt a phased testing plan, testing systematically and optimizing one by one.

03 Build the ability to apply behavioral economics

Another new trend in Silicon Valley is injecting insights from behavioral economics into growth hacking to create products that are valuable to customer needs. Once you understand how growth hacking is rooted in growth experimentation and data analysis, this is a natural and logical extension.

Behavioral economics sits at the intersection of psychology and economics and has been gaining traction thanks to influential researchers such as Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman and Wall Street Journal columnist Dan Ariely. Compared to classical economics, this school of thought abandons the idea of ​​rational people and explains how people make behavioral choices such as purchasing decisions.

Insights from behavioral science give us the opportunity to improve the user experience to address growth challenges from a completely different perspective. This is especially useful for creative work in growth, such as hypothesis generation or landing page optimization. The product insights brought about by some classic effects (such as Social Proof and Endowment Progress Effect) not only provide additional value to users, but also successfully accelerate the growth of many technology companies.

Here’s an excellent example of using the “social proof effect” as a strategy to promote growth. On LinkedIn’s new user registration page, new users can see photos of people similar to them and are encouraged to “find colleagues.” Seeing that other like-minded professionals have already joined will increase the conversion rate of new users to registrations, as practitioners are deeply influenced by their peers. The skills module displayed on the profile page is also built on the social proof effect - it takes advantage of the perception that recognition from your peers can enhance the credibility of your professionalism.

LinkedIn also uses the “process empowerment effect” to motivate users to fill out their profiles. The closer or closer a user is to a goal, the more likely they are to persist in moving toward it. Therefore, showing progress rather than just reminding people to fill in the form can improve the completion rate of resumes.

Navigating the nuances of these behavioral economics effects requires a specific set of skills, requiring not only specialized knowledge but also strong ethical judgment. In the long run, to scale up business growth, it is necessary to think about how to use the outputs of behavioral economics from a systemic and ethical perspective. As a result, startups and innovative established companies have begun to form dedicated behavioral economics teams or seek out consulting services from behavioral experts, such as BEWorks, which was co-founded by Dan Ariely.

Growth Akademie (an organization that teaches growth hacking courses) has industry experts from the fields of psychology and behavioral economics, and will provide a solid and complete explanation of how leading technology companies apply psychology and behavioral economics.

04 Growth is a circular leap, not a linear dead end

Silicon Valley technology companies recognize that big-picture thinking and ambitious goal setting go hand in hand. To achieve these goals, product and marketing teams must completely rethink their growth strategies. That’s why growth experts are starting to design predictable growth models based on growth loops rather than traditional linear campaigns that evaporate quickly after implementation. Let’s take a closer look at why growth jumps are such an important part of growth hacking:

• Growth jumps are usually embedded in a product, aiming to leverage more new users to join through the interaction between new users and the product (see the example of a customer acquisition loop: Instagram’s new user registration is designed to invite your friends to join).
• Additionally, for existing users, Growth Jump leverages useful and repeated product interactions as notification triggers. They will ultimately help your product become a top choice by attracting repeat customers and enhancing your product’s value. (See the retention loop example: HubSpot sends notifications via Chrome Extension once a contacted lead changes status). This growth-jumping strategy creates a powerful and predictable compounding effect that applies to all new users.

Growth Leaps vs Linear Strategies

Most European tech companies have yet to adopt this innovative approach, preferring to focus on linear funnel activities. In contrast to growth jumps, linear strategies can be defined as “dead-end” campaigns — they do not have a multiplicative, looping effect (e.g., ad impressions typically only drive one visit per click and do not generate additional visits). This is not wrong, as you need strong linear pathways to develop and initiate growth jumps. However, if you focus most of your energy on linear pathways instead of thinking about growth jumps, you’re not unlocking your huge growth potential.

05 Focus on speed, not perfection

I am amazed at how quickly Silicon Valley companies release products. On several occasions, I have witnessed products being released even though they were not 100% finished. At first, this seemed counterintuitive and confusing to Europeans like me - we seem to naturally care more about quality and excellence. But it makes sense when you understand three main characteristics of most tech and internet products:

(1) An important advantage of technology products is that they can quickly and easily collect real user data, which helps to quickly optimize the product experience after release and even optimize the market to be matched.

This also means that if you don’t launch a product, you can’t optimize it. You can do as much market research as you like and perfect every product detail as you can before launching, but there’s no truer market feedback than user data.

(2) Compared with traditional products, digital products usually have inherent network effects, that is, the individual value of users increases with usage.

An example would be payment solutions or digital wallets, because you need to transfer your money to other people and once these network effects kick in they attract customers exponentially and therefore often form a quasi-monopoly situation, which also means that once the number of players increases the barriers to entry are high.

This doesn’t mean you can’t enter the market again, but you should focus on a niche that’s slightly different from the mainstream market. For example, Snapchat has successfully focused on ephemeral messages and stories, as opposed to Facebook’s feed, status updates, and regular messages.

Growth hacking is a systematic solution to the distribution problem

(3) This gives you an idea of ​​why, in today’s competitive tech world, the best product doesn’t always win.

This doesn’t mean that Silicon Valley leaders are abandoning technology solutions or product design. On the contrary, solving real user problems and excellent product design become basic requirements, while the difference between a successful product and a successful one lies in whether there is a smart distribution and marketing strategy. In the words of Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and early investor in Facebook:

Even if the product is undifferentiated, superior sales and distribution can in itself create a monopoly. The opposite is not true. No matter how powerful your product is, even if it easily fits into existing user habits and anyone who tries it for the first time will fall in love with it, you still have to support it with a strong distribution plan.

Author: A lot of grass

Source: A lot of grass