CPD - Growth Hacking: Techniques to Scale Your Business Fast

Many businesses are still experiencing failure even though they have good products and services to sell. It is because they lack funds or resources. That happens because they don’t prioritise a good growth strategy to promote their offers. This is where growth hacking steps in to help them scale their business correctly.

Scaling a business is not a simple task. It is because it needs several special efforts, strategic planning, and adaptability to manage progression and potential problems. Moreover, using the right approach for growth marketing can help you avoid unexpected issues. To understand it more, this CPD programme provides you with lessons from industry experts.

Understanding growth hacking

Growth hacking or growth marketing is a marketing method that can help you grow your business. It combines marketing, data, and technology to develop the company at an affordable cost. Therefore, it is ideal for companies that have just started with limited resources, need to validate their product, and gain traction.

The term “hacking” refers to part of a business that uses shortcuts to get results for growth. Therefore, growth hacks typically use innovative methods to make them focus on designing a product based on customers' needs. You can do some research by experimenting and conducting a/b testing to find accurate information.

Additionally, you can get the optimal outcome for growth hacking if you combine several essential strategies, such as product marketing, advertising, and content marketing. These three can provide fast and analytical progress by focusing on customer acquisition, engagement, and retention. For example, product marketing can help you identify and use techniques to attract and retain customers with products. You can use advertising to test different messaging and channels, and you can use content marketing to build brand awareness, drive organic traffic, nurture leads, and engage with customers.

What is the difference between growth hacking and digital marketing?

The differences between growth hacking and digital marketing lie in several factors, such as focus, approach, strategy, channels, and goals. These factors can help you determine which marketing approach you can use to scale your business. To help you understand more about how to differentiate these two, below is the explanation you want to understand. It includes:

• Focus: Growth hacking focuses on finding new ways to grow your business. Meanwhile, digital marketing only focuses on optimising channels and strategies.
• Approach: Growth marketing uses experimental and repetitive methods to compile the data. Digital marketing works differently by making it more strategic with careful planning and campaign execution. 
• Strategy: Growth optimisation mostly relies on rapid experimentation. However, they may also need the data to deepen their understanding. Digital marketing, on the other hand, will heavily rely on data to make campaigns and informed decisions.
• Channels: Innovative growth strategies are using affordable channels that can maximise business growth with limited budgets. Meanwhile, digital marketing uses digital channels, like social media, email, search engines, and paid advertising, to reach the audience.  

Funnel of growth hacking

There are several frameworks of growth hacking, including awareness, acquisition, activation, retention, revenue, and referral. They are also known as the AARRR framework because the letters consist of -A-A-R-R-R. This framework can help you track and measure the success of your product or services. You can do this by focusing on the main method of the journey.

However, these can also bring problems if you do not use them correctly. It may lead you to a linear progression and possibly ignore the qualitative data and overemphasise acquisition at the cost of other stages. To help you avoid the problems, you can learn about the funnels in growth hacking below. It includes:

Acquisition

This is the first step to attracting potential customers through different channels, like SEO, social media, paid ads, and content marketing. These channels can help you provide relevant content to engage them. You can start by ensuring the value proposition of the product is what they are looking for. Doing so can trigger them to make a purchase. To measure the performance, you can analyse the page visits, unique visits, referral traffic, open rate, click-through rate, conversions, cost per click (CPC), and cost per mile (CPM) as metrics.

Activation

Once the customers are engaged, you need to motivate them to make a purchase. This growth hacking stage aims to guide the customers to experience the core value of your product and start to use it effectively. You can provide a clear call to action (CTA) to encourage them to take tangible actions. The metrics you can use to measure the performance include activation rate, time to activate, and free-to-play conversions.

Retention

This is the phase when you need to make one-time customers loyal to your brand. To do so, you need to keep them engaged by providing relevant features, content, and communication. Providing value and collecting feedback can make them come back to your product. Retaining customers is important for business growth because it is more affordable than acquiring new ones. As for the measurements, you can use retention rates and churn rates.

Revenue

Revenue is one of the growth hacking steps in which customers are actively involved with your products and services. This step aims to make more money by making the customers pay and buy more of your products. You can do this by upselling, using effective pricing strategies, and providing customers with premium offers. With this, you can make obvious benefits for them so that they are willing to pay for more.

Referral

This is the last step that focuses on changing satisfied customers to brand promoters. Referral aims to encourage regular clients to recommend your products or services to the people they know. They usually do these promotional activities through referral programmes, word-of-mouth marketing, incentives, or social sharing. As a result, it can give you a good improvement by promoting your business without spending more money on marketing costs.

Programme Overview

Many people are using growth hacking to scale their business. This is because it offers a comprehensive approach that can provide detailed information, affordable cost, and an agile process. With all of these, companies can think creatively and come up with innovative strategies. Doing so can help you make your brand stand out from the competition.

To help you with that, this CPD - Growth Hacking: Techniques to Scale Your Business Fast class explores several parts of managing your business development. It provides you with the best practices to develop the best strategies. It will equip you with the knowledge and skills you can use to execute the plans. By the end of the course, you will get a completion certificate to prove your competencies in contributing to and managing growth for a company. 

Programme Outline

The CPD - Growth Hacking: Techniques to Scale Your Business Fast class is a comprehensive training programme. It will teach you how to make progress for marketing purposes. It covers quantitative and analytical skills, technical skills, qualitative research, and channel acquisition. As you walk through the course, you will be able to:

• Understanding data-driven selling principles
• Learn how to differentiate between growth hacking and digital marketing
• Know how to evaluate and analyse data for marketing purposes
• Identify the different stages of performance marketing
• Know the best practices for growth marketing

Enrolment Criteria

This CPD - Growth Hacking: Techniques to Scale Your Business Fast training is for everyone. People from all backgrounds can join the discussion, even with no relevant experience. This is because it doesn’t require any special requirements. It will be suitable for entrepreneurs, marketers, or anyone else interested in having more exposure to the marketing field, because they may be familiar with the terms.

Best practices of growth hacking to scale your business

There are several best practices to scale your business with growth hacking. It includes building an email list, identifying your ideal customer and target audience, creating a value proposition, performing a/b testing, and more. These can be used in multiple channels because customers interact with a business through those platforms and at different stages. These need to be optimised to improve your business development.

To help you understand growth hacking better, the College of Contract Management has created several learning materials to guide you in your learning journey. For this reason, we collaborated with industry experts to provide high-quality learning materials. If you are interested in other topics, we also provide you with other exciting classes that you may like. You can visit our website for more information.

This CPD - Growth Hacking: Techniques to Scale Your Business Fast programme can help you scale your business using performance marketing. However, we will announce the course schedule separately as we are currently working on arranging the speakers and materials. We encourage you to explore our other exciting courses while you wait for the schedule of this training. You can contact our team for more details and further assistance.