“The Lost Art of Simple”​, an observation on ‘Growth Hacking’​.
By: Andreas Obel
Tags: Digital Marketing, Growth Marketing, Marketing, Growth Hacker, Growth Hacking

Disclaimer: There are many good, true growth hackers that are exceptionally good at what they do. They are also the ones who, when reading this, will know the issues and that this observation doesn’t apply to them ;).

“Simple and efficient” is cooler than “complex and efficient”!

In recent years I’ve observed a shift in the marketing industry where we, as a collective, have been glorifying intricate, complicated setups in marketing and naming it “growth hacking”.

Naturally, when it comes to the term growth hacking, there are people on either side of the fence: Some love it, some don’t. But in the end, all marketing activities, no matter the name, boil down to one thing; a single coalesced question: Does it generate revenue?

In this particular observation, I am not thinking about branding activities, sponsorships etc. where direct revenue impact can be harder to measure, as that is an entirely different kettle of fish.

Walking on the grass

At it’s very core, growth hacking is taking something that would otherwise be a long-winded cycle in any area and shortening or “ hacking” it. It is then made scalable, replicable, and used to increase the “ growth” of the company in one or more areas.

Essentially, it’s cutting across the grass instead of following the trodden path all the way around like everyone else. — This is how it started out and this WORKS.

Think Dropbox’s famous example of a referral “growth hacking” mechanism where they build a viral loop that rewarded people with extra space when their friends signed up.

It grew the company by 3900%.

This is true growth hacking. A well thought out experiment that was tested and once results started to show, everything around it was amplified and simplified to support the rocket-ship as it hit the stratosphere.

The amalgamation and the quest for glory!

Lately though, it seems as if this pure-bred growth steed has become something else; an amalgamation of marketing-ambition and a hunger for glory.

A hunger where there’s less focus on company growth, team growth and uncovering potential, and more focus on being the person who invents a new “hack” and can style themselves a guru, regardless of actual value added from the experiment.

I’ve seen a lot of this in start-ups and scale-ups the last few years.

This hunger, this drive, creates a need for over-complicating existing things. To “growth hack” them into oblivion.

But since many things are tested, by very intelligent people all over the world, the ever-increasing need for complexity has slowly tipped the scales towards odd and abstract experiments with little to no impact and now… Now the basic things are forgotten. The foundation has eroded.

And so, in the end, after the dust settles, the CEO’s are standing with their glorious “5-step-LinkedIn-to-Zapier-automation-that-checks-against-Clearbit-and-bounces-against-a-database-for-localization-tags-and-funnels-the-leads-into-a-system-and-ranks-them-based-on-country” and with no ROI and no results except a database of leads with no purchasing intent.

In the meantime, the guru, hands raised above head in victorious salute, moves on to the next project/company/role.

And the rest of the team, confused on the sideline, wondering why they didn’t just use the standard integration that was available all along and save a few hundred hours.

Wax on, wax off Daniel-san!

So how do we get back to true “growth hacking”? We simply need to remind ourselves that we are trying to get to our destination faster and more efficiently, so there is no need for building architectural wonders, if a simple sturdy bridge will work equally well.

Otherwise, we will end up using tons of resources to build a monument with no purpose.

What then, one might ask, is the foundation for this? Well, that’s different for all companies but at the very least you should know what happens after you’ve generated the traffic and understand how it morphs through the company.

I see tons of people with good intentions being hamstrung because they stay in silos, rather than seek information in other parts of the business.

They see that they can grow more webinar sign-ups by doing a specific type of video ad or get a ton of traffic from specific headlines in SEO posts and then spend endless hours optimizing flows upon flows to get this number growing and yelling from rooftops about the new ‘hacks’ they’ve used.

All the while confused that no one appreciates their hard work. But… What does it matter that you generated 1.000.000 visitors if none of them bought your product?

Simple is harder than complex. Simple does not mean easy.

One answer on how you could get back to the true value-driven growth hacking could be, to simply ask more questions.

Find out what happens just before we close a deal/get the sale, then walk back through all the steps right up until the visitor initially entered the site.

We already knew the marketing part of things before, but now we know the full value-chain and each step currently in it. This means that we can optimize any step along the way while being fully aware of what impact it will have later down the line.

Had we not done that, we might have spent all our time trying to generate more email-signups in a complex flow of webinars and random video ads, thinking that it was important.

- But now, using the data and knowledge we have gathered, the focus is on a different part of the funnel.

Maybe the clear growth-potential lies in better collaboration with the sales-team, or in optimizing the speed of packing and shipping. Or in simply getting the current visitors on the site to buy multiple products rather than trying to cram the website full of more non-relevant visitors.

Knowing the full chain, we can pinpoint places in the business that we can have the most impact in.

It could fx. be to have all single-item purchasers see more relevant related products, so that they buy 3 items each instead. We know that we can save tons on the shipping, pack it faster and make a lot more revenue from the extra sales.

Now, here is something we can use. How do we make this happen? After the first 500 successful upsells, how do we make that number 50.000? Can we expand on it?

The last questions though, are the most important ones:

How do we keep it as simple as possible and make it scalable?

The questions are simple, the answers usually are as well, but this does not make them easy.

“Simple and efficient” is cooler than “complex and efficient”!

- Andreas Obel