Becoming a Growth Hacker: Skills & Learning Guide

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What is growth hacking?

Growth Hackers are systematically exploring new growth opportunities (through Growth Hacks) at any point in the customer journey, from brand awareness to recommendation by its ambassadors by optimizing the product.

Using an experimental approach, they use data to test and make the right marketing decisions to generate growth.

Democratized in 2010 by Sean Ellis, it is mainly used by startups due to their limited budgets and resources. Since then, it has shown an incredible increase in popularity among all businesses.

Growth Hacking is based on an experimental and data-driven approach to Marketing.

READ MORE: What is GROWTH HACKING?

How do you become a Growth Hacker nowadays?

Growth Hacking is one of the super skills of the future and is vital in today's world.

Growth Hacking is an emerging practice that is defined every day by new advances. Many startups fail because they can't hire the right Growth Hackers.

As a founder, it's crucial to hire the right people and find good Growth Hackers.

Before we get started, here's some useful information about Growth Hacking.

  1. Why is growth hacking important?
  2. How does Growth Hacking work?
  3. When should Growth Hacking be used?
  4. How do you develop skills to hack growth?

What are the rules covert Growth Hackers?

The hidden weapons of Growth Hacking are very simple: think outside the box and let your creativity run wild..

La transgression of the rules is at the heart of the Growth thought and how the Growth Hacking process works.

  1. If a rule works, find a better way to break it.
  2. If a rule doesn't work, replace it with a better one.
  3. If a rule is about to fail, let it happen and then break it.
  4. If a rule is about to succeed, break it too.

The state of mind of Growth Hacking or Growth Mindset is a very different way of working than other professions.

Their primary objective is correlated to a metric called North Star Metric. This main main growth objective is based on the benefits provided to customers.

READ MORE: What is the GROWTH MINDSET?

What does Growth Hacking look like in practice?

AirBnB used Craigslist — a platform where thousands of people search for hotels — to dramatically increase its user base.

The lack of a public Craigslist API led AirBnB to find intermediary solutions to automate actions on Craiglist forms to contact its users.

Most of Growth Hacks have a definite lifespan. Craiglist quickly scrambled to “fix” the vulnerability that allowed collect data and automate the sending of messages.

Now, while these are traditional examples of Growth Hacking that we're familiar with, they serve as a big guide that we can all refer to because we've seen it happen.

In today's work, Growth Hacking, and Growth, growth hackers are taking much deeper and more sophisticated approaches with the analysis of custody data.

READ MORE: How do you collect data on the web?

Analytical data guides the goals of Growth Hackers

Experiments are the key to Growth Hackers to ensure results are produced.

Les Analytical help them define their goals and nature of the next experiments to be carried out.

These elements give a Growth Hacker the ability to see growth opportunities where others don't. This is essential to gain a competitive advantage.

Understanding analytics data makes success repeatable

If you know that the fourth quarter brought in more money than the third, you don't need to understand what happened.

  • How many users signed up to use your product before the conversion and how many didn't?
  • What are the features added by the new website?
  • Can an Adwords campaign really increase its effectiveness without being stopped?
  • Are Google advertisers really using it to increase ad spend?
  • How?
If you know what leads to a positive result, you can repeat what works (and stop what doesn't). If you don't take analysis seriously, you won't be able to effectively repeat past successes.

Scalability is the key, and being able to take an experiment and turn it into a growth hack is not an easy task.

But make sure that he can be scaled is the key. If you can simply repeat it over and over again, then you will have a hack with a high success rate.

Analysis allows Growth Hackers to remain honest

The analysis of your performance will determine how you need to improve yourself.

Some experiments will not give the expected results and will be a failure. By ignoring analytics, you won't be able to discover your mistakes.

The analyses make it possible to update the growth strategies, the aim is to learn more about marketing.

READ MORE: Marketing KPIs - Growth Metrics Guide (definition + example)

How do you hire a Growth Hacker?

As a growing business, you'll need a growth mindset = the GROWTH MINDSET but also a broad set of skills.

The model”T-Shaped“makes it possible to assess all of skills needed and used by a Growth Hacker.

It should be versatile and good in several areas at the same time: the T-Shaped skills are a challenge for traditional marketers.

Last important note: Growth Hacking is not digital marketing.

It's one of the biggest misconceptions in the world today.

Growth Hacking has a lot more reach than marketing or digital marketing.

What are the skills of T-Shaped Growth Hackers?

The approach T-Shaped is not the only model but one of the most popular with Growth Hackers. This involves several aspects such as:

1. Beginner Level

  1. Front-End Code
  2. Conception
  3. UX design
  4. Behavioral psychology
  5. SEO basics
  6. Web writing
  7. Finances
  8. Omnichannel marketing

2. Intermediate Level

  1. Analytics (not just Google Analytics)
  2. Conversion Rate Optimization
  3. Users/Customers Interview
  4. Funnel marketing
  5. Automation and APIs
  6. AI and machine learning
  7. Branding/Storytelling
  8. Copywriting
  9. Scraping (using tools)

3. Advanced Level

  1. Paid Social
  2. Organic Social
  3. SEO/WEEK
  4. Marketing tools
  5. Marketplaces
  6. Business/Commerce
  7. Email marketing
  8. Content Marketing (Content Marketing)
  9. PR/Influencer
  10. Qualitative Research
  11. Virality
  12. Retention
  13. Mobile Optimization
  14. Creation and optimization of Landing Pages
  15. Lead generation
  16. Revenue optimization (CAC/LTV)
  17. On-Boarding of users
  18. Web Scraping (using a development language)

These skills, spread over three levels, make it possible to distinguish a good Growth Hacker. of a growth hacker in the making.

READ MORE: What are the skills of GROWTH HACKERS?

What is a T-Shaped Growth Hacker?

The acquisition of knowledge and T-Shaped skills is one of the most valuable things you can do for your future career and personal development.

Growth Hacker - Modèle T-Shaped
Growth Hacker Skills - The “T-Shaped” Model

Les T-Shaped skills can be much more than just a gateway to IT; they can be people who can bring significant value to your team and organization.

The high-level blend of broad skills is technology, marketing, strategy, and business operations. Technology plays the most important role, helping to accelerate growth. It is therefore at the heart of the cross-skills approach.

Les Growth Hackers T-Shaped possess cognitive skills, emotional intelligence, and creativity, making them a complete package. Les T-Shaped skills integrate newly acquired knowledge with previous knowledge and give your team the ability to understand a variety of new information.

Agility is the key to the success of “T-Shaped” teams.

When you build a team, you should look for agile profiles composed of T-Shaped skills.

Teams composed of Growth Hackers T-Shaped - who possess and want to acquire these skills - tend to be more flexible and resilient. These profiles can produce more quickly on their own, allowing for more rapid experimentation.

By looking for the T-Shaped skills, you will empower yourself to build excellent interdisciplinary teams for your business. A good profile T-Shaped is:

  1. Someone who is flexible
  2. Someone who is creative
  3. A person who is a team player
  4. A person who wants to learn continuously
  5. A person who is ready to share knowledge and train
  6. A person ready to collaborate with others

It's more effective to learn at least some basic and general Growth Hacking skills and to learn on the job what you might need for your project.

However, it is still effective to improve your skills on more technical topics. To save time, a Growth Hacker will thus be able to put these solutions into practice and find solutions effectively.

READ MORE: What are the skills of a Growth Hacker?

A Growth Hacker must know how to work as a team

Les Growth Hackers must be able to work in very dynamic teams.

They need to be able to deal with different types of people and have great tolerance.

Diplomacy is not a skill well known to many Growth Hackers, and it is vital to keep teams running smoothly.

It is not a question of being passive but rather of asserting yourself in your approach to ensure the smooth functioning of growth teams.

Mastering Technologies is essential

Growth Hackers are often more technical than traditional marketing profiles.

To move faster and reach their business goals, they use technology to build their startups, automate their processes and get more analytic data.

If Growth Hackers are not programmers, they will still need to understand programming well enough to modify their website or build Web Scraping tools to collect data.

The mastery of technology will be Essential for business growth.

READ MORE: Selection of the essential tools used in Growth Hacking

Learning to analyze data is vital

Data analysis:

  • shows you what works and what doesn't,
  • gives you information on expansion or fall,
  • Provides you with enough information to draw a strategy

Does the data prove you right? They will help you understand user behavior and perspective.

All of this is not only acquired with raw data (Hard Data). You need to learn how to couple your analyses with behavioral data (Soft Data) to evolve as Growth Hacker.

Analysis is an essential part of Growth Hacking and an important part of the role of a Growth Hacker.

If you want to become a Growth Hacker, you have to master data-based analysis and decisions.

While new ideas are important, historical data can play a vital role for the future; it plays a critical role in acquiring new customers, retaining old ones, and even raising funds.

READ MORE: What is the Pirate Funnel? AARRR? AAARRR?

How do you learn faster to become a Growth Hacker?

Find a mentor who has already done Growth Hacking.

Find someone who does Growth Hacking successfully, not someone who just talks about it.

A mentor - or several mentors - can help you overcome obstacles and get the keys to success

Learn with online courses or training

There are a lot of Growth Hacking courses out there. All of them are generally very expensive.

Like many people, I myself had to work hard to understand all the subtleties of this job.

Moreover, the aim of this blog is to save you time to understand the different concepts and techniques of this core business.

Talk to people

Always remember to talk to your colleagues, from the technical director to the people in charge of customer support.

Growth hackers need to get feedback from anyone in the business; it's generally an incredible source of actionable data that's often overlooked.

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