Written by: Natasha Zo, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
If you aren’t asking yourself how you can grow your business more, then you’re missing out on endless opportunities. Growth hacking is fundamental to scaling any business right now. The ability to decide on a clear north star metric, focus on experimentation, and learn continuously is key to scaling your business.
Digital marketing sensation Alessio Pieroni knows a thing or two about growth hacking. As the former CMO of Mindvalley, founder of a successful digital marketing agency, Scale For Impact, and author of the book Exponential Marketing, Alessio has the wisdom about why successful business owners need to have a growth hacker mindset. Below is an extract from the “Scaling a digital Strategy” ‒ 1st chapter of Pieroni’ “Exponential Marketing”,
“First you nail it, then you scale it”. If you look at your business, you probably have some products that are scaling up and some others you still need to improve. It’s important to be aware of this since you’re going to use different strategies depending on where your solution is.
Throughout all of this, it’s essential to bear the right mindset for scaling up a business. If I had to summarize it in a basic concept, it would always be to wonder, “Can we scale up this process?” For example, you could take a look at the production process of a product. You’re currently making 100 units a day. How can you produce one thousand? Ten thousand? One hundred thousand? From a marketing point of view, the question is: How can I attract 10 times the visitors I’m currently engaging? How can I convert them into twice the current conversion rate? How can I increase my advertising budget while increasing the investment’s outcome as well?
Once you start asking yourself these questions, you'll find many answers. Maybe you'll realize that the email system you're currently using can only support you at the present stage and in the future, you'll have to migrate to another platform or maybe you'll be able to identify which channel you should focus on to grow your business.
On the other hand, this question could generate other questions as well. Maybe you still don’t have the right solutions to scale up your clients or your production or maybe you just can’t improve the conversions. It’s alright. Most companies don’t have all the answers at this stage. However, it’s vital to identify which are the questions you should be answering at this point. Only through this, you’ll be able to find the right answers.
Now, here comes the keystone. You need to find a way to answer these questions as quickly as possible. This requires an ‘experimentation process’. It’s important to create an environment where ideas can actually be generated and implemented at the earliest.
Growth hacking is all about finding your keystone. This is where we think about companies that had genius intuitions: from Steve Jobs decided to create the first complete touchscreen phone, to Elon Musk finding a way to make electric cars accessible to everyone. These ideas have changed the destiny of those companies and consequently our habits as well.
So, is this all there is to it? Do you need to be a genius to scale up a business? Thankfully, no.
Growth Hacking is one of the most debated topics within the Marketing world in recent years. Some see it as a Holy Grail that is almost impossible to apply. For others, it's the remedy to all evils and still for others, it's a set of tricks to grow their business.
This discipline has evolved and Growth Hacking today, is considered as a process of experimentation. Yes, a step-by-step process which is followed regularly, can lead any company to achieve important results. Therefore, intuitions like those of Steve Jobs or Elon Musk are not necessary. Anyone can do it.
But it’s not enough to just copy what other companies have done in order to grow. In fact, when looking at the growth of the biggest businesses in the world, it was never a single hack that made all the difference but rather the sum of all these experiments that enabled exponential growth. Growth is always the sum of many small things rather than just one single trick.
The only way to achieve exponential growth is by creating a system that helps us experiment and learn increasingly more. In order to do this, we need to pursue four main goals that will allow us to grow not only our business but also our team. Some of these may seem at odds with each other but it is the combination of these features that can make the process simply magical.
The first goal is definitely learning. We need to transform our organization into a learning organization. During each step of the process, we must always be learning ‒ from our customers, from our products and from the channels we use.
We cannot talk about ‘growth’ without discussing speed as well. Our world is constantly changing and it is inconceivable nowadays not to keep up with it. On the contrary, in growth hacking, we want to be ahead of our time.
One of the other mandatory conditions to gather a good growth hacking team is autonomy. Trusting the people on the team and making them free to experiment with what they want.
Finally, the other side of the autonomy coin is accountability. That's why each person should work on several tests but they are still expected to complete the entire process and keep everything moving in a certain direction. No one expects every test to be a success but there is definitely an expectation to improve.
Natasha Zo, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Natasha Zo is a former journalist from Siberia turned international media relations specialist. She is a founder of Cosa Famosa media – a boutique PR agency on a mission to amplify messages of conscious leaders, health, and wellness entrepreneurs through earned media. Known for her connector skills, she guided a number of authors to Amazon bestseller status, booked national TV, top-tier media, and over 400 podcast interviews.
