How Corporates Can Adapt Growth Hacking?

Being a marketer for past 3 years, I have closely served 150 brands in both, India and UAE. In the past whenever I came across the term “Growth Hacking”, I have always felt that it was a western version of our Indian slang terminology- ‘Being Jugaad’ and my thoughts on it were that it was okay for a start-up company to find some out-of-the-box methods to grow faster across sales, operations, human resources or even customer satisfaction. It has worked for few in the past but for some, it may not work at all. As the director of www.brandstory.in I now consult some of the largest brands who have dominated their respective verticals over decades and have introduced new stars (BCG Matrix) in their product portfolio, which needed some immediate attention. Many challenges come into the picture when the management wants to adapt growth hacking towards their stars. Let’s see how we can implement growth hacking in the corporate structure by overcoming certain challenges.

Attitude

Let’s be honest here. For some, growth is a wish, for others it’s a plan and very few plan and work hard(er) for the phenomenon called growth. We may have many perspectives outside but mostly it depends on the core expertise of the deliverer which can be coding, marketing, analytics or even execution.

It is easy for a startup to adapt growth hacking since there is no definite pressure to achieve a definite number through an activity. Usually, startup’s adapt growth hacking with the mindset of “Become Big or Die Hard”. So it’s easy to list out 20 odd ways to promote the business and get benefited from that one activity to gets things right.

So the question is do the corporate heavy-weights have a growth hacking mindset? Can they prepare a team to work hard in order to get results and then prepare that team to be willing to fail frequently?

Will a corporate accept to work hard with experimental activities and indefinite time frames based completely out of the usual “insights and stats” scope?

Because that’s what growth hacking is! If your corporate hierarchy, doesn’t let you fail quick and small, you are missing the most important component of growth hacking.

Agile

Within corporates, strategic planning and management are present in the system to assess the current internal and external factors, where you ideate and formulate a high-level strategy to get them executed flawlessly.

Then you reevaluate and refine the ongoing strategy. Growth Hacking works on Agile. Period.

Agile gives you the flexibility of frequent adaptation to dynamic business circumstances. People with different skill sets and their frequent interactions are crucial above the business processes. With very limited planning agile helps you to get start with the project.

Activity

So Attitude and Agile can be sorted by the few management and innovation enthusiasts in the corporate system but that doesn’t exactly prove that the existing rating systems will help to rate a growth hacking enthusiast/team in the company.

A corporate system appreciates an employee only through the quantity of results he can provide whereas most of the growth hacking activities may not bring in any immediate results to the key business objectives.

Because in reality, we can measure a growth hacker only by the number of activity (+ sub activities) done, with the frequency of the activity against the time period given to drive the growth metrics. That transforms to (Activities+Frequency) / Time Period.

Analyze

Measure every single growth hacking activity and its impact, so you can optimize quickly as and how every activity demands. Add or Remove tools to have the impact you desire. There is a list of tracking tools for product management, project management, acquisition, sales and retention. Have them in a loop to monitor, optimize, experiment and to analyze, so you can activate a better process with immediate effect.

Definitely growth hacking, isn’t a rocket science. Just these 4A’s should be fun experimenting! It certainly was fun adopting these and hacking all the way.