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Have you heard about growth hacking? It's talking a great deal, but we want to call things as they are.
In the last decade, the digital marketing sphere has become more and more competitive. The ever-changing digital environment is the birthplace and graveyard for many innovative ideas and marketing techniques. One, particularly capturing idea was introduced by Sean Ellis. He is the first marketer of Dropbox, founder of Qualaroo and CEO of GrowthHackers. The startup advisor is well-known for coining the term “growth hacking” in 2010.
What does growth hacker mean? Well, the foundation of the term was created to define a new job description. Namely, Sean Ellis consulted a lot of startups to help them achieve accelerated growth. Though, when moving onto the next project, he found it difficult to find a replacement for the company.
Andrew Chen, a writer at GrowthHackers, popularized the term with his article “Growth Hacker is the new VP Marketing” in 2012. In his article, Chen explains that growth hacking emphasises on coding and technical skills.He states that these skills are essential to provide great marketing services.
In short, growth hacker is a hybrid of marketer and coder.
Consequently, this service promises high-impact and low-cost strategies. Therefore, it is especially appealing to startups, that have limited capital.
As anything up-and-coming in the digital marketing sphere, the promising technique flared up the internet. Not to mention, it quickly found a home in many marketing agencies. The rise of “growth hacking” as the 'next big thing' naturally become popular in Google search results. For new and existing digital marketing agencies this popularity meant one thing – more traffic and new clients. So, now there are numerous digital marketing agencies that claim to specialise in growth hacking.
The issue is that many agencies market themselves as growth hackers because the idea is promising skyrocketing results. However, we have to look through a crystal clear glass with a dash of critical thinking and realise one thing. “Growth hacking” is a title for a service, that aims to do and assist in everything. That all to ensure the growth of the client's business. Unfortunately, the far-reaching approach is not sustainable nor strategic. Why? Because it can result in improper assistance due to a lack of expertise in “everything”.
As of now, growth hacking has begun a life of its own on the internet, being part of clickbait success story headlinesand auspicious digital marketing agency websites. What's important, is to recognise what these buzzwords stand for and why they are used. For that reason, it is important to investigate and call things as they are.
