Marketing
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Growth Hacking and AARRR Framework: Everything You Need to Know

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Growth hacking has only been around for a couple of years but has been growing exponentially since the term was first conceived. While it may have turned into a buzz word in advertising domains, many actually fail to understand what it really means or how it works.  Along with the digital transformation of business, competition steadily began to rise with more competitors than ever able to enter the game. For this reason, new businesses need to demonstrate that their idea is beneficial, so they can get the required funding to develop. This is the place where growth hacking comes in. Growth hacking is a mix of laser-sharp instinct, analysis, and development to get the most ideal results in the shortest time.  In this post, we'll clarify what it is, the strategies that are vital to use and understand the AAARRR funnel. Let’s get started!

What is Growth Hacking?

Growth hacking is a technique for rapidly testing and performing advertising and promotional activities that are just focused on successful and quick market growth. Growth hacking achieves the expected results rapidly, with the minimum cost.  Growth Hacking is more like a mentality than an advertising tool that includes the five phases of the customer's life cycle into a funnel called the "AARRR Framework", intended to help identify where a business should concentrate its efforts to elevate marketing and sales goals. 

What is AARRR Framework?

Back in 2007, Dave McClure coined the expression "Private Metrics". He used the appealing term to refer to the abbreviation AARRR, which represents Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, and Revenue.  These five metrics have one thing in common: they are highly important for a business’s growth and for organisations overall. If a business neglects to follow these metrics, they will need both sustainability and adaptability, and they'll have no effective way to know whether they are performing well or not.  Each one of the metrics in the AARRR framework addresses a domain, from attracting more visitors to your business, to creating more revenue. The domains don't overlap but shape an ideal sequencing that, when mastered, will ensure your business is ready to be as productive as possible.

Key Strategies to Maximize Your Growth Hacking Funnel

In this section, we will explore some strategies you can use to enhance your growth hacking funnel to ensure success from the very beginning. 
  • Create a product that your target audience really needs
You'd think this is a primary focus for any company, wouldn’t you? However, in the past, if you had a large enough marketing budget, you could pull off an average product. But, the scene is very different in the present world, where customers are well-versed in researching their purchases. If your product is flawed, the world will know it quicker than you think. You need to get your product out there, as quickly as possible to start receiving feedback; however, it shouldn't be at the expense of quality. Spend time to get it right then continue to develop your product-market fit consistently. 
  • Be kind to your customers
An indispensable growth hack can be offering a free or a lite version of your service to customers, to build awareness and acquire the consideration of your target audience. You should ensure that you set a limit on your free offers, consequently leaving the client longing for more. You can do this by: 
  • Restricting the number of downloads possible. 
  • Setting a limit on a particular activity. 
  • Setting a time duration from login. 
You can confine specific activities to a greater part of free users and place a limit on them. When a free user reaches that breaking point, they get a notification to upgrade their plan to a paid one. 
  • Try not to target everyone through growth hacking 
All new products entering a market should first effectively go through trailblazers and early adopters. Products either dazzle the first 15% of the market or they fail right there. If your target audience is "everybody," it's basically impossible to growth hack through that first 15% because you don't have a clue who to persuade to purchase. Segment your audience, figure out who you can add the most value to and then target them with your efforts.

Embracing the Growth Hacking Mindset 

As we have mentioned previously, the idea of growth hacking is tied in with adopting an attitude instead of simply considering it as a metric. Let’s understand how you can use growth hacking to drive your business growth. 
  • While there is a lot more than simply metrics to the Growth Hacking mindset, these metrics are certainly at the core. AARRR metrics will play a vital role in the growth that you need to achieve over time. The incredible thing about these metrics is that they cover the whole journey of a customer from the inside out. 
  • It's through the collection of information collected via AARRR metrics that you'll have the option to analyse it and take action. The information you collect can be used to do experiments and make changes so you can discover new opportunities for progress. Fundamentally, you will hack each phase of your growth funnel. 
  • A decent approach is to focus on a different phase of the AARRR metrics, each month, and do experiments to further develop that stage's primary KPI (key performance indicator). That will give you the most effective results, by having focus, and realising that you'll go through different phases of AARRR metrics, in due time. 
  • In growth meetings, the leaders of your business should continuously make corrections and afterward review the updated AARRR metrics to understand how those progressions impact the organisation's growth and productivity within a given time. Collaborating together, the team will be able to identify what changes were positive and which ones didn't have a significant impact on the business.
Article updated on: 09 August 2023
Talent Garden
Written by
Talent Garden, Digital Skills Academy

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