As we continuously explore everything related to marketing, we’ve studied major companies like Facebook, LinkedIn, Dropbox, and Airbnb. These companies didn’t reach valuations in the tens or hundreds of billions of dollars, and continue to grow at an exponential rate, due to a single moment of inspiration.

Behind these groundbreaking ideas is a well-developed process and a marketing approach rooted in measurement and testing, not the traditional methods everyone else uses.

What sets these companies apart in terms of promotion is their use of the growth hacking marketing approach.

Below, we’ll outline the growth hacking marketing process, which, with minor variations, has been used by all the companies mentioned above. This process can help you find the best, sustainable, and repeatable marketing strategies for your startup.

• Ensure Product-Market Fit

Before you start any marketing process, the first criterion you need to ensure is product-market fit. In other words, make sure that what you're offering is something people need.

• Set Goals and Come Up with Ideas

Before you get to work, you need to know exactly what you want to achieve. Surprisingly, this is often where many businesses go wrong.

Why? Because they set general goals. For example, "We want to increase sales." While increasing sales might seem like a good goal, even a small increase can technically meet that objective. What you want is something more specific.

A good growth hacking goal could be something like: "Increase Google Ads visitor conversion rate from 2.4% to 4%". Now that’s specific.

Once you’ve set the goal, it's time to brainstorm ideas for how to achieve it. This is a critical step.

Some recommendations for brainstorming:

• Use brainwriting instead of brainstorming: If you’re brainstorming in a group, everyone may end up thinking in the same direction. It’s more efficient to work separately, do research, and then compile ideas.

• Don’t just focus on customer acquisition: Many mistakenly associate marketing only with attracting new customers. However, it’s often more effective to optimize conversion rates and increase the lifetime value of existing customers.

• Prioritize Ideas

Now, how do you choose the best ideas? You can evaluate each idea based on three criteria:

• Potential: What impact will this idea have on your business? Is it something that can radically change things (like Dropbox did), or just a small but valuable improvement?

• Ease of implementation: Do you already have the resources and logistics to execute this idea, or will it require significant changes?

• Confidence: How confident are you that this idea will have the expected impact?

Depending on your business context, the importance of each criterion will change. If resources are limited, focus on ideas that are easier to implement and are more likely to succeed. However, if you have the time and resources, you might want to invest in ideas with greater potential, even if they come with higher uncertainty.

• Implement Measurement Systems

Without effective measurement systems, it’s like painting in the dark. You're not ready to move forward if you can’t tell whether you’ve achieved your goal.

Measurement is crucial because it helps identify areas for improvement and guides future decisions. Measurement should not be limited to the online environment either. You can measure the effectiveness of offline campaigns too. For instance, if you're running a flyer campaign, ask customers to bring in the flyer for a bonus. This will tell you how many people responded and how effective your flyers were.

• Rapid Implementation and Testing

Test as many ideas as possible. Often, we’re wrong in our marketing assumptions. Let the market decide which ads and messages are most effective, rather than relying on subjective team opinions.

Always write down the expected results of each test. This is important because our brains often trick us into thinking we knew the outcome beforehand. Documenting expectations will provide clearer insights into whether an idea works or not.

• Analyze and Optimize

When analyzing results, follow these rules:

• If an idea fails, remove it from the list.
• If the results were below expectations, but not significantly, see if you can improve it and whether it’s worth pursuing further.
• If it went as expected or far exceeded expectations, double your investment in it.

If you integrate this process into your team's culture, it will significantly increase your chances of success, regardless of your business type or the goals you’ve set.

Growth Hacking Success Stories

Growth hacking may seem like a new methodology, but many successful companies have been using it for a long time. Here are a few examples of how it’s been used effectively:

• Netflix

In its early days, Netflix was a DVD rental company. Rather than spending millions on marketing, they contacted their existing customer base directly through online communities and DVD rental bulletin boards. In just three months, they gained 100,000 users without spending a dime on traditional advertising.

• Shazam

Shazam’s growth hacking wasn’t confined to online marketing; they also applied innovative offline tactics. The app asked users to hold their phones close to the speaker to identify songs. This caused curiosity, as people wondered why others were holding their phones in the air. It became one of the most memorable offline campaigns in growth hacking history.

• Airbnb

Airbnb leveraged Craigslist to get backlinks and reach a larger audience. Instead of investing in paid ads, they manually contacted users who had posted on Craigslist and encouraged them to list on Airbnb. It was a time-consuming process, but it was cheap and effective.

• Hotmail

Hotmail used a simple yet powerful growth hacking strategy. They added a banner at the end of every email sent by their users, saying, “Get your free email at Hotmail.” This resulted in 3,000 new sign-ups per day, and within six months, Hotmail's user base grew from half a million to one million. Microsoft later acquired it, with Hotmail boasting 12 million active users.

• Dropbox

Dropbox used multiple growth hacking techniques. They launched their platform on TechCrunch50, a perfect platform for such a method. Founder Drew Houston created a humorous video aimed at Digg users, explaining how Dropbox could help them. This brought 10,000 Digg users to Dropbox in 24 hours and added 70,000 people to the waiting list. When Dropbox launched officially, they offered 500 MB of free storage to Digg users, growing their active users from 100,000 to 4 million in just 15 months.

By following these steps and learning from the successes of companies that have applied growth hacking, you can increase your business's growth potential without spending a fortune on traditional marketing.