Growth Hacking & Growth Driven Design are Like Two Peas in a Pod


Culture, Website
Vye-Blog-_0037_Growth Hacking & Growth Driven Design are Like Two Peas in a Pod

The term, ‘growth hacking’ has been gaining popularity these last few years especially in the Twitterverse. It has become so prevalent, in fact, that people are actually referring to themselves as Growth Hackers, and including it on their LinkedIn profile as a skill or even a job title.

With all of the hullabaloo on the topic, there are several conflicting ideas of what growth hacking actually is. Let’s turn to Wikipedia, the God of Definitions:

Growth hacking is a process of rapid experimentation across marketing channels and product development to identify the most effective, efficient ways to grow a business ... Growth hackers are marketers, engineers, and product managers that specifically focus on building and engaging the user base of a business.

Back in 2010, a guy named Sean Ellis coined the term out of frustration when trying to find a replacement for himself. Here’s how he defines it – in much simpler terms:

“A growth hacker is a person whose true north is growth." –Sean Ellis

True north. Think about that for a minute. It applies to anyone who’s passionate about anything. Your true north is your hunger in life. It’s what you strive for in your short existence on Earth. For marketers, if your true north is growth, you’re a growth hacker.

Enter Growth Driven Design

Ready for another definition? According to Impact Inbound, Growth Driven Design (GDD) is “a fusion or marriage of sorts between site redesign and marketing, where the two goals become one.”

Let’s pull that apart and examine each piece a bit closer.

First: A Fusion between Your Website & Marketing

That right there is the essence of GDD. It takes two things and makes them one, as they should be. As they should always have been, honestly. When your marketing efforts and website update process work in tandem, your business will see growth. Period.

All too often, business websites fail to hit the mark because they’re only touched once or twice every couple of years. Content updates aside for adding copy and new pages, after the initial buildout, the website is essentially static until the next redesign is budgeted for – typically two or even three years down the road. How foolish is that? Especially in this day and age.

This is why the old-school way of building websites is dated and broken.

Second: Where Two Goals Become One

Growth Hacking and Growth Driven Design are Like Two Peas in a PodThis adds a layer of traceability and accountability into the GDD process. Most marketing plans have some sort of goal to achieve over the course of a given time frame – typically a quarter or a year. Those goals could be anything from brand awareness to a number of sales qualified leads passed on to the sales team.

Growth driven design also requires metrics of success to function properly. Without a goal, your website will fail at achieving much of anything other than being an online brochure. Which is exactly what you wanted to avoid with the whole redesign, right?

This is why GDD isn’t a set-it-and-forget-it thing. The beginning phase of any website project revolves heavily on research. It can be anything from quantitative analysis like Google Analytics, HubSpot or HotJar, to qualitative analysis like surveys, persona interviews, or focus groups.

All of the research done at the beginning will set the course of success for the entire website over the course of its long life on the interwebs. From the research, you can create some core assumptions about how your users (read: personas) will interact with your website and how you can optimize each step of their journey towards hitting your marketing goal.

That’s when you’ve come full circle. When, like the growth driven design definition says, your website and marketing merge to share a single set of goals.

With GDD, your website is never complete, but it’s never incomplete either. It’s in a constant state of change or being monitored and analyzed for what to optimize next to make the user experience fluid and frictionless.

Back to Growth Hacking

Growth hacking is about continuous improvement. Growth driven design is about continuous improvement. It’s about getting better, but doing so systematically and strategically. You can’t just throw darts at the wall and hope for something to stick. You’ll fail miserably.

Getting better is something I can get behind. In fact, to get better is our credo around here. If we’re not getting better – personally, professionally, or otherwise – then what’s the point?

Give a little.
Get a lot.

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