Growth Hacking — the Missing Link for Blockchain Startups

The blockchain scene is hyper competitive at the moment — thousands of startups with great ideas and talented developers are competing with each other for a limited pool of investment. For those seeking to gain a competitive edge, growth hacking is a term you need to become familiar with.

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What is Growth Hacking?

Growth hacking is a way for startups to expand their visibility and encourage more people to use their product or service. It is a combination of content marketing, optimization, analytics and the know-how to execute automated marketing on a small budget. A growth hacker is someone that uses creative, low-cost strategies to grow a startup’s community and help them gain and retain new customers, improve the credibility of the company, and create brand awareness.

Growth hacking is mostly associated with startups and is especially prevalent in the blockchain and cryptocurrency spheres, which had a high level of activity in the past few years. It plays an increasingly important role for blockchain firms, whose tight budgets preclude traditional marketing practices and are dependent on raising capital to be able to survive.

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Content Creation is the Basic Element

Content Marketing is the basic building block of growth hacking. The goal of content marketing is produce blogs, videos and social media posts that interest your target audience without being directly promotional. The key is to produce useful content across all channels in an efficient way without losing quality. Typical content marketing activities include things like writing blogs, creating valuable, shareable content, producing social media content, running webinars, joining relevant forums, groups and so one. This can be augmented with promotional or advertising content, such as social advertising on a pay-per-click basis.

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Data & Testing is the Heart of Growth Hacking

In 2003, Michael Lewis wrote the bestselling book Moneyball about Billy Beane, the manager of a financially weak baseball team who managed to make it competitive with clubs with much larger budgets. Rather than focussing on the tried-and-trusted statistics of the sport like batting averages and bases stolen, he found alternative metrics which provided a better indication of the impact each player made in a match. He removed the perception and “gut instinct” of scouts and let the data do the talking when making decisions about which players to sign and it was a strategy that proved highly successful. In this respect, you can think of growth hacking as Moneyball for start-ups.

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The difference between growth hacking and standard digital marketing is that you remove the gut instinct and concentrate on data, testing and use of the scientific method. The term was first coined by Sean Ellis, founder and current chief executive of GrowthHackers.com which was behind the breakout growth of startups like Dropbox, Eventbrite, LogMeIn and Lookout. He summarised the role of the growth hacker as follows:

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“An effective growth hacker … needs to be disciplined to follow a growth hacking process of prioritizing ideas (their own and others in the company), testing the ideas, and being analytical enough to know which tested growth drivers to keep and which ones to cut. The faster this process can be repeated, the more likely they’ll find scalable, repeatable ways to grow the business.”

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Just like sports teams of the pre-Beane era, most startups only track top-line and bottom-line metrics, such as web traffic and revenue. What happens in between, however, is the truly interesting and helpful part of the data. Analysing these datasets is essential, as they allow you to track the performance of each channel by impressions, engagement, follower rates, clicks and traffic. This helps to build up a more fine-grained and accurate picture of the relationship between traffic and revenue.

This is where building hypotheses comes into play — creating and testing ideas to spur constant innovation. Which content has the most engagement? How does this post differ from the others? Is my community more interested in the team behind the project or in the milestones of the startup? Creating different hypothesis and testing them allows a startup to get a deep understanding of the community — driving engagement and ultimately, sales.

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No universal recipe

Data is at the center of growth hacking and each hack must be tested to determine whether it is effective. Each startup needs to develop their own recipe depending on their budget, human resources, goals, target audience and overall marketing strategy. Executing a growth hacking strategy requires specialised knowledge regarding data, analytics, social media management, and content production.

If you are a startup on a limited budget hoping to grow your community, developing a growth hacking strategy is essential. At THE RELEVANCE HOUSE, we give startups the edge they need to thrive in the blockchain market. To punch above its weight, every team needs their own Billy Beane to guide the way. That’s why we have Vincent Tresno as our dedicated, in-house growth hacking consultant. Explore our website to find out more about us.

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Photo credits:

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels
Photo by PhotoMIX Company on Pexels  

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