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The “must know” secrets of growth hacking.

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It’s 2016! Happy New Year to all readers and I hope you were able to enjoy some rest over the holiday.

My Twitter feed suggests that the new buzzword phrase for 2016 is “growth hacking”. Now, while we’re all beginning to realise that articles headed “the secrets to five great growth hacking tips” may not necessarily represent cutting edge thinking, it does seem that growth hacking is on a course to become the MySpace of the next few months. Or weeks…

Having done a fair bit of reading, it seems that the key components of growth hacking are:

Ongoing access to deep data: agility of approach; working with small budgets; analytic skills; customer insights and endless cycles of beta testing.

At its best, growth hacking assesses customer activity, their dispositions, likes and dislikes in real, forensic detail and applies tweaks to your product or service to do more of what works. Excellent.

At its worst, growth hacking is simply an emperors new clothes style catch all term that suggests an approach to marketing that somehow inherently cleverer and more creative than the “traditional approach” employed by businesses that aren’t start ups. Whatever that might be?.

In the age of disruption, it’s pretty easy to heckle some large companies for having out of date marketing approaches. It’s true that many do (and that’s one of the reasons why we’re seeing huge organisations like Dick Smith, HMV and Masters disappear from our lives) and any high level marketeer keeping their brands head above water nowadays deserves some sympathy, but the idea that marketeers in big organisations would ever (especially now) be blindly choosing “costly” approaches when viable cheaper routes are available belongs firmly in the 1990’s with red specs and the DeLorean.

The last ten years in marketing have been the hardest decade I’ve known. By far. Media audiences are declining (and everyone fast forwards through ads), nobody buys newspapers, specialist media are closing and worst of all customers have stopped being loyal, often making last minute decisions to buy the competitors product on a whim, damn them.

Think about being a consumer for a minute. Almost nothing, apart from property, costs more in real terms now than it did 10 years ago. A TV the size of your house? A walkman without batteries that stores every song you’ve ever owned? Cars with bluetooth and all mod cons as standard? The internet has opened the doors to competitors from the whole wide world and as costs of production have fallen so have profit margins.

And it’s the toughness of the marketplaces, the increased competition and the fickleness of customers that’s making marketing difficult, not any lack of effort or intransigence of approach. To make things worse for marketeers (better?) we’re now drowning in information about customers, from barcodes to stuff about who clicked on what, to attribution and social media listening.

Start Up experts tell us the biggest challenge in business isn’t technology but finding customers. It was ever thus.

Try launching a magazine called Fishkeeping Answers (oh yes I did) without using growth hacking techniques! And by the way, for all those content experts, has there ever been a better front cover teaser than “the fish that can live out of water”?

If growth hacking is absolutely about taking a new approach to putting customers front and centre, about getting to understand then better and streamlining and tweaking products on the fly, then I’m all for it and we should all be looking into it. Experts please make yourself known.

But if its main purpose at the end of the day, like all other tactics we employ is just to help our clients sell more of their stuff, (what else could it be?) can we make life simple and just call it marketing?

(If nothing else it would stop another generation of people being ripped off by snake oil sellers running training and courses on the “secrets of growth hacking”. Nobody needs that.)

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