Transforming your business with practical growth hacking techniques and by taking inspiration from successful growth hacking examples.
Today, I want to give you a list of growth hacking examples that worked for many companies in the world. I suggest you have a look at those in order to get inspiration and boost your creativity. However, I want to make it clear that these growth hacking examples worked for these companies because they have experimented a lot before succeeding. There are many growth hacks and we chose for you what we consider the best growth hacks of all time.
A bit about growth hacking first.
If you’re new to growth hacking, our free tutorial Growth Hacking 101 will help you get a nice overview of what growth hacking really is, successful examples, the 5 phases of the growth hacking process and will it work for your business.
Growth hacking offers a very exciting opportunity for emerging businesses to gain awareness and increase market share through alternative marketing techniques. While there is a proliferation of growth hacking methods that could be adopted and implemented, the key to identifying a growth hacking technique that most adequately promotes your business would be through testing. In most cases, companies would have to test a variety of growth hacking methods before identifying the one that most suitable grows the marketability of organization’s product or service.
The approach to marketing that is adopted by growth marketing is entirely motivated by the need to grow profitability. Hence because the fundamental focus of growth hacking is to identify the most suitable marketing strategy that grows a business, all effort is concentrated on discovering and utilizing the most effective marketing strategy that grows business hence growth hacking is particularly effective when it comes to increasing profitability as oppose top traditional marketing because growth hacking has only one target which is growth.
Growth Hacking is a mindset rather than a toolset
Contrary to erroneous impression about growth hacking, growth hacking is a mental attitude and approach to marketing that has been developed by technicians and experts who are constantly driven by ways to grow a business market share and profitability from nothing to millions. Even if you can find many great growth hackings tools around, if you don’t have the right mindset, they will be useless. Growth hacking explores various channels, procedures and creative content in the bid to examine their efficacy.
The general idea behind growth hacking is to grow customer base and profitability. Hence, once this mental attitude is incorporated in all procedures and stages of business, you can expect to see a noticeable upsurge in customer base and patronage.
To start the growth hacking process, you should define a marketing strategy first but that’s not it. Growth hacking is not entirely focused on the marketing phase of business as the development of creative content and product development would also require iteration. It is imperative to understand that you would constantly have to modify creative process and product development to suit the ever changing customer trend. The phases involved in creative process would typically consist of the incubation, conceptualization, and elaboration phase where the idea is carried out.
When it comes to growth hacking, all of these processes are not straightforward as they appear as each phase would have to undergo a series of testing and modification to ensure conformity and alignment with customers’ preference and taste which is constantly evolving. Essentially, growth hacking is not only a marketing approach but is also an integral part of product development as products would have to be tailored to meet customers’ liking.
At this junction, it becomes an absolute necessity to understand the various methods to growth hacking. However, before we dabble into the various approaches to growth hacking, it is important to note that growth hacking is entirely centered on customers.
Customer preference and satisfaction is the focus of growth hacking. For effective and practical growth hacking, you would have to find out a great deal about your customers in the form of who and where. Understanding what your target market is inclined towards and what they would like to see and experience in the product is fundamentally crucial to growth hacking.
Through the use of scientific approaches to data collection such as a survey, you can gather relevant information about customers which would be incorporated into product development. This is a continuous process as the product would have remodeled to suits changing customer taste and preference. Growth hacking has to be persistent and information has to be gathered constantly from customers through a variety of credible methods.
While growth hacking is a marketing strategy, it can also be incorporated into product development with astounding results. Gathering information through scientific methods, interviews, and other online survey tools for accuracy is vital to the entire process as erroneous customer information can be misleading. Consistency of growth hacking in product remodeling and modification is imperative to meet up to changing customer preference.
At Growth Hackers, we’ve seen that the right mindset consistently outperforms any tool, because a curious, data-driven approach will always find ways to grow a business even when resources are limited. I recommend you to check the complete growth hacking definition to know all about it.
Understanding the astounding practice of growth hacking
Growth hacking has tremendous benefits that would increase profitability and revenue of the business. Furthermore, growth hacking is particularly advantageous to small and upcoming businesses in ways that amplify the effectiveness of marketing and marketing results in the form of conversion rates, sales and increase in customer base.
Growth hacking is a consistent and systematic process that effectively integrates inventiveness, analytics, marketing, product design and other variables to improve product awareness and acceptability while propelling sales and profitability forward.
It is quite pervasive to find the flawed impression about growth hacking being a fraudulent and unscrupulous practice, this mistaken notion is because of the illegal practice of “hacking” which involves breaching security and firewalls to sabotage and extract organization information. Growth hacking on the other hand shares no similarity with hacking as it is completely legal and entirely focused on profitable marketing.
A comprehensive insight into growth hacking and its applicability and relevance would begin with emphasizing the fact that growth hacking is a highly specialized form of marketing so much that it may be considered somewhat different from marketing because its focus is much more streamline when compared with marketing.
This is the reason why the growth hacker job description requires so many skills and requirements. The purpose of growth marketing is to stimulate growth and escalate revenue in the form of increased sales, increase in conversion rates, increased traffic, heightened customer’s engagement and enhanced retention.
The growing relevance and increasing pervasiveness of growth hacking could be largely associated with its affordability and effectiveness. When compared with traditional marketing and other forms of marketing, small companies that are looking to grow market shares and increase customer base can look to growth marketing as a comparatively inexpensive and result oriented approach. Growth hacking can be leveraged by any organization regardless of the size and scale for growth and increase.
Growth hacking is reliant on the integration of four basic principles which are consistency, testing, measurement and inventiveness to drive sales upward. Growth Hackers’ experience proves that growth hacking is not a trick or shortcut… it is a disciplined, strategic process that integrates marketing, product development, and data to drive real results.
In the course of this article, you will find an extensive list of growth hacks, growth hacking examples, growth hacking techniques and approaches listed. However, these growth hacking approaches may be incongruent with your business. When it comes to growth hacking, testing and adapting your approach to meet your organizational requirements and prospective market is important. It is important to stress that a growth hack is a highly individualistic process that must be customized to the product or service type and cannot be traded off.
There are countless types of growth hacks and growth hacking techniques, all that is required is for you to scrutinize and identify the most suitable that you could adapt to your company’s product and potential market.
There are an infinity of growth hacking examples and samples that have been used by many presently celebrated companies and growth hacking agencies, you can explore the following listed samples that are succinctly exemplified below. In history, there are a lot of B2C and B2B growth hacking examples to take inspiration from. I am going to give you 33 of the best growth hacking examples to get inspiration from but I can ensure you there are so many more.
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The Top 33 Growth Hacking Examples to Spark your Inspiration
1. Facebook’s growth hack: “mentioning people”
Facebook is the largest social network in the world with approximately 2 billion monthly active users. We cannot deny that Facebook growth hacking strategy was a success. While this may come as a surprise to some people, the biggest social network platform used growth hacking to implement its agenda and currently boasts of the largest traffic with an estimated 2 billion subscribers.
Through the use of email notification mechanisms, they were able to engender an unparalleled level of participation. People started receiving mails that they were tagged on Facebook. This ingenious approach was able to stimulate a heightened influx thereby making Facebook the biggest online success thanks to growth hacking.
2. Airbnb’s growth hack: “Leverage community of a larger community”
AirBnB is among the $1B Club and you can definitely learn lessons from them. AirBnB is a website which lets people give out their empty rooms for rent to complete strangers by posting a listing on their site. The audacious growth hacking approach implemented by Airbnb was directly responsible for its success. Airbnb utilized Craigslist customer base as a springboard to success through a converse engineering combination that merged the customer base and creating an exponential online growth with Airbnb becoming a leading brand when it comes to house listings.
AirBnB’s strategy they developed for viral growth is recognized as one of the best growth hacks of all time. At this junction, the apparent question would be why other companies had not exploited this avenue before Airbnb. Craigslist had a thorough preventive mechanism that made it very difficult for other companies to access and integrate. However, Airbnb was able to maneuver the entire process without accessing the Craigslist code base. This ingenious and daring move by Airbnb made it into a giant with a dramatic rise in traffic and customer base.
Note: what people often forget when mentioning AirBnB growth hacking example is that AirBnB experimented a lot such as distributing flyers or going door-to-door before finding this CraigList growth hack.
3. Drорbоx’s growth hack: “2-sided referral program”
Dropbox is a cloud file hosting storage that gеnеrаtеd virаl growth through itѕ ‘Rеfеr a Friеnd’ ѕсhеmе. Referral marketing strategies can be very powerful for business growth when done well and Dropbox did it very well. Dropbox was one of the first companies to use a referral program. They offered users 250MB extra storage space for every friend they invited as new user. Users could easily invite their friends via Facebook or Twitter, and Dropbox would store your contacts so you can send them an invitation automatically.
Exploiting the numerous advantages and approaches available to growth hacking would certainly foster the realization of desirable results just like in the case of Dropbox. Dropbox emerged as a company with an innovative idea that was centered on file hosting with cloud storage, organization, software and much more. It was apparent that this company had introduced an efficient dimension to office operations and file storage, retrieval and utility.
Like every other business, Dropbox began to explore advertising with little or no impact. In fact, the number of new signups fell far below the cost of advertising. It was clear that advertisement was not working. By implementing a referral system, Dropbox was able to stimulate a massive amount of traffic as people generally warmed up to referrals as they felt it to be much more credible than ads. The company witnessed exponential growth with more than 200,000 businesses on Dropbox. Dropbox was able to build an unassailable reputation while substantially increasing customer base.
By exploiting the benefits of growth marketing, Dropbox was able to get existing customers to undertake the responsibility of marketing to potential customers with a little incentive. Using the referral system Dropbox overcame a seemingly insurmountable challenge while reinforcing brand awareness and increasing customer base and support. This is personally one of my favorite growth hacking examples as it really results in a viral effect.
Growth Hackers has helped startups leverage their existing customers to attract new ones, proving that a simple reward system can create viral growth that far outpaces traditional advertising. There are many successful startups who created a referral program. Here you can find get some inspiration with these 14 referral marketing examples.
4. TicketMasters’ growth hack: “limited offer: FOMO – Fear of Mission Out”
Ticket Masters is an online company to purchase venue tickets (Concerts, sport events….). The company was able to push itself towards business success in the way of creating a timer to evoke urgency in the minds of target markets. This strategy worked very well for TicketMasters as they became a household name from this growth hack technique.
5. PayPal’s growth hack: “taking benefits of a bigger platform”
Paypal is an online payment system and PayPal growth hacking strategy is one of the most successful ones. The reputation of PayPal as a preferred online payment option began after the company was able to penetrate the biggest online market in the world. What I am going to explain is probably one of the most famous growth hacking examples. When PayPal began its operations, it was not listed on Ebay as a payment alternative. This precarious situation was very harmful to the reputation of PayPal and would also affect its customer base as most people would likely to use a payment system that is accepted on Ebay.
Paypal employed growth hacking system which entailed the formation of thousands false accounts with the specific intention of claiming to use and prefer a PayPal payment option on Ebay. The results of this stratagem were remarkably outstanding as PayPal was able to break into Ebay customer base as Ebay had no choice but to agree to list PayPal due to the increasing demand for PayPal payment option.
This growth hack gave PayPal a huge boost with a big share of Ebay’s gargantuan customer base. With Ebay being categorized with existing giants like visa and MasterCard its credibility skyrocketed with tremendous concomitant benefits. In an attempt to intensify efforts, PayPal initiated a referral system with a monetary incentive to both parties that is the existing customer and the just added customer. This amplified referral system provoked a massive influx of customers with a rapid progression into becoming one of the biggest online payment option.
6. Quora’s growth hack: “behavioral study”
Quora exploited the benefits of growth hacking systems in the form of behavioral testing which was directed at understanding the peculiar attitude of users on the platform. By closely examining the behavior of various users, Quora was able to configure the site to behave in accordance to users behavior.
Then, by engineering and remodeling the entire process to meet users requirement. The testing approach which was implemented by Quora was an effective marketing approach as it opened up the company by increasing number of users dramatically.
7. Hotmail’s growth hack: “email signature”
Hotmail is a free, personal email service from Microsoft (Now call Outlook). This might be the best growth hacking example in this list. Hotmail adopted an exceptionally brilliant growth hacking strategy that utilized existing customers sent emails which were embedded with a captivating message and a link that referred recipients of the letter to a page where they get to sign-in.
Hotmail’s growth hacking strategy is one of a kind because it is effortless and very effective with little or no additional cost. Once you send a mail, the email is embedded with a catchy message and a link. This approach was able to grow Hotmail exponentially with over 1 million users in a very short period of 6 months. The surreptitious marketing and growth hacking technique adopted by Hotmail was very beneficial to expanding the market share over a very short period of time.
8. Gmail’s growth hack: “exclusivity hack”
Gmail is another free email service. There are many growth hacking methods out there and the Gmail growth hacking technique was geared towards creating a distinctive image and an ambiance of uniqueness which made it a sort after by many people. Gmail began by allowing only invited individuals to sign-up. This was an irresistible high-value offer to attract more clients to their business. This arrangement made many people eager to join the email network. This impression caused a rapid influx into Gmail email service with a staggering increment in user base over a short period of time.
If you love hotmail or Gmail growth hacks, you should know that email marketing is the best marketing tool to convert leads into sales. You might be interested in those 2 articles explaining you how to create great email marketing campaignsand a guide to automated email marketing.
9. Twitter’s growth hack: “working on retention”
Twitter is a social media or a “social news media”. Just like all of the aforementioned companies, Twitter is a very practical example of the applicability and relevance of growth hacking as it was used to overcome the peculiar challenge of gaining and losing customers almost immediately.
Twitter had a powerful reputation as a social information media that was built with strategic publicity and awareness. In the case of Twitter, its publicity had overwhelming customer engagement which culminated into a very vibrant reception with millions of users over a short period of time. While this was the case with Twitter, the social platform began to notice an undesirable trend which was characterized not being able to keep users on the platform.
Using a growth hacking approach, Twitter growth hacking strategy was based on testing and uncovering the nature of user experience on the platform which prompted them to remodel the platform for improved user experience. Prior to the remodeling, users were not motivated to stay because there were little because people could not really catch on as there were no friends to interact with.
However, with the autosuggestion feature, which provided a long list of potential followers, people started to find the platform much more engaging and user retention went up instantaneously. By comprehensively testing and remodeling twitter, users became more likely to stay as the challenge which they formerly struggled with was obviated completely eliminated.
This growth hacking technique is fundamental to boosting sales, conversion rates and overall profitability as clearly demonstrated by twitter.
10. Puma’s growth hack: “influencer Marketing”
Puma is a shoes, clothing and sportswear company. The strategy adopted by puma is forthright and can be applied by many products and services. Puma was worn by the greatest footballer of all time, and was brought to the notice of the world when he stopped to tie is shoe lace during an important match. This was the defining moment for Puma, as everyone knew that Pele wears Puma.
Influencer marketing if done right, is an effective way of increasing awareness about any business regardless of size or budget restrictions by using influencers with influence over people’s buying decisions who are able promote the product through posts across various platforms such as Facebook, Twitter etc.. This was leveraged by Puma for company success and profitability thanks to leveraging Pele’s fame and engaged community.
11. LinkedIn’s growth hack: “having your own discoverable profile on Internet”
LinkedIn is a professional social network. Linkedin utilized one of the best growth hacking strategies out there to attain tremendous success over a short period of time with an exponential growth from 2 million to 200 million users. Linkedin is a professional and business network that utilizes growth hacking technique by allowing customers to create their own profile.
This approach offers staggering benefits to clients by allowing their names and company information to pop up more readily when searched on search engines, which provoked a heavy traffic to the network. The key to success is solely based on allowing customers the chance to create their own profile.
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12. Clinklе’s growth hack: “waiting list”
Clinkle is a mobile payments company. The company had a great start with sponsorship from financiers which accrued to a whopping $25 million. Clinkle adopted a innovative growth hacking strategy that presented a waiting list to fresh users that showed a long list of users above them. The queue could be maneuvered by spreading the word about Clinkle on social media and so on.
This technique converts fresh users into Clinkle marketers as they market to their network of friends on various platforms. This strategy has a lot of credibility and exploited the social networking of fresh users to bring in hundreds of new users.
13. Reddit’s growth hack: “Giving feeling that platform is active + Easy process to signup”
Reddit made use of direct links to provide content and a convenient sign-in arrangement to create tremendous amount of content with little or no hassle. At the onset, Reddit did not have enough content and views to create buzz and to pull users. So, both founders submitted all the content with fake accounts month after month until they got some traction.
However, with the implementation of this growth hacking strategy, Reddit was able to boost content and provoke a hefty community of users. Convenient registration was an effective growth hack that Reddit exploited for success.
14. Mailbox’s growth hack: “waiting list + viral video”
Mailbox was a freeware email management application for mobile phones. Just like Clinkle, Mailbox used a growth hacking system that creates a long queue that new users would strive to get ahead of by provided a major boost for the application. The queue growth hacking system increased the value of the mailbox application, making it anticipated by many who eagerly join the application. Additionally, the integrated approach and features of the mailbox offers had a profound impact on pulling a large number of customers.
The use of a viral video certainly increased overall awareness by creating an irresistible buzz that increased the number of users.
15. Pinterest’s growth hack: “exclusivity + keeping users stay longer on the platform”
Pinterest is an image-sharing social network. Most people are drawn to things that appear classy and prestigious which is the focus of Pinterest growth hacking strategy. The online social platform was able to create an impression of exceptionality with the use of an invitation only arrangement which made many prospective users eager to join the platform.
Apart from the use of this growth hack, Pinterest also modeled the site to appear endless which unique approach to engaging users was for a long time. The use of the scrolling method was preferable as it had a way of captivating users thereby causing them to spend much more time on the platform. Pinterest was able to evoke an impression of exclusivity through the invitation scheme and they also designed the site to engage users for extended periods.
16. Mint’s growth hack: “content marketing”
Mint is a personal financial management service. The company adopted a content driven approach towards promoting their brand and stimulating growth. The growth hacking approach used by Mint was entirely focused on providing considerable amount of well-written content articles with exciting features that focused on some the most interesting aspects of finance.
With this approach, Mint son became one of the foremost blogs as they were able to create an unassailable reputation for themselves as an authority in the world of finance. Content marketing is now used by so many companies and I have countless examples of content growth hacks.
From our work at Growth Hackers, we know that well-crafted content not only educates your audience but also fuels viral growth and brand credibility, just as Mint demonstrated with their blog. I recommend you to check content marketing tactics to improve your content strategy.
17. Uber’s growth hack: “in-Real-Life hack + leverage offline advocacy”
Uber Transportation Company introduced a totally new dimension to car transport with a very upfront growth hacking technique that convinced investors and business owners in the SF area with a distinctive campaign that involved driving them around the area. Uber used a viral growth hacking strategy that was amazing. This brilliant approach to marketing was able to generate a lot of buzz for Uber, while penetrating the market instantly, which was a fantastic way to gain grounds and achieve growth. You should definitely take inspiration from Uber if you want to implement a customer advocacy marketing strategy for your business.
18. Lyft’s growth hack: “in-real life / offline marketing too”
Lyft is Uber’s main US competitor. Because Uber was so big, they had to come up with creative growth hacking strategies to stand out. After noticing that most of his users had trouble locating their driver, they had the idea to add a pink moustache put at the front of all of their cars. The effect was twofold since in addition to solving a problem, these pink moustaches that wandered in the city nourished many discussions allowing the brand to gain notoriety.
19. OKCuрid’s growth hack: “content marketing”
OKCupid is a dating site. Here is again one of the many best growth hacking examples involving content marketing. The company used content driven campaign to propel user traffic and brand success. The site was developed to provide a substantial amount of information and graphics which attracted a lot of users to the platform.
Also, the dating platform incentivized potential users which large amounts of data which allowed new users the opportunity to explore the platform and enjoy its many interesting features. The growth hacking strategy adopted by OKCupid was both content based and the use of free data which incentivized people to join the platform.
20. Tinder’s growth hack: “offline event organization”
Tinder is a dating app. Tinder is probably one of the biggest dating platforms with a commendable status for some of the most impressive campaign strategies. Tinder used some of the most creative strategies to stimulate growth at an unprecedented rate. The approach adopted by Tinder is clearly demonstrated by the Kiss (keep it simple stupid) campaign which created a lot of sensation amongst many youths in the country with highly targeted campaigns in colleges.
This is why their growth hack was to organize Tinder FRAT parties on Universities around the world where the only “fee” was to download the free app. The user base of Tinder grew astronomically while thrusting Tinder into becoming one of the foremost dating sites.
21. Youtube’s growth hack: “making sharing easy”
Youtube is a video-sharing website. The flexibility and convenience offered by Youtube is one of the reasons why the company has gained massive users and has enjoyed an unchallenged dominance of the online video content category. Youtube growth hacking strategy is fixated on facilitating upload and distribution of video content.
This innovative approach and engineering adopted by Youtube, makes video distribution convenient for users to take videos from Youtube and upload it on various sites. This made Youtube an online video archive for many people looking for content. Furthermore, people saw Youtube as a platform to display videos and get ratings and publicity. All of the growth hacking tactics offered by Youtube made it into one of the biggest online success of all time.
22. Squidоо’s growth hack: “gamification”
Squidoo was a revenue-sharing-article website (Closed in 2010). Squidoo adopted a very convenient approach to content creation that allows users to generate their own content without having an understanding or the know-how of html. This very fascinating approach increased the user base of Squidoo as many users enjoyed creating contents on the platform. Content creation was incentivized with badges which made users all the more excited to create content on the site. Squidoo experienced exponential growth with high returns from affiliate sales and advert placement.
23. Buffer’s growth hack: “purchasing related product and integrating them with each other”
Buffer is social management and sharing tool. Buffer has grown tremendously through the acquisition and implementation of their solution to other sites. The growth hack the company employed was acquisition of the Digg Digg floating share bar. After they purchased the social sharing bar, they used the Buffer button on it by default.
Buffer has been able to take over many social platforms to which they introduce their Buffer feature which makes the site much more appealing, while attracting a large number of users.
24. Michel&Augustin’s growth hack: “Storytelling”
While Starbucks sought to expand its range of products, they pre-selected a list of suppliers and asked them to send products for tasting at a steering committee. Rather than sending their recipes, Michel&Augustin challenged themselves to fly to Seattle and hand-deliver the package to Starbucks CEO, Howard Schultz. To get visibility, the brand created a craze around this event by filming their adventure. They were finally chosen by Starbuck and were able to meet Howard after his wife had heard about them on social media.
This Michel&Augustin’s example shows well that even if content marketing evolved a lot through time, storytelling has always been important. Growth Hackers has helped brands harness storytelling to create buzz and capture attention, proving that a compelling narrative can be just as powerful as traditional marketing tactics.
25. Dе Bееrs’ growth hack: “creating a hook / a need”
Above, I wrote that AirBnB was one of the best growth hacks of all time. If I had to pick the top growth hack ever done, the one De Beers used is surely my favorite. Let me explain…
The growth hacking strategy adopted by De Beers is nothing short of ingenious and brilliant. Due to economic hardship which in the late 30’s diamonds were increasingly becoming obsolete and was considered by many as an obsolete fashion trend for the super wealthy.
This perception certainly was not good for business and De Beers knew just what to do about it. De Beers at the time had purchased substantial amounts of diamond rings and decided and decided to create a viable avenue to sell these rings and at a profitable rate of course. In the bid to achieve this, De beers began making engagement rings and somehow managed to create a cultural shift that viewed the size of the diamond (rock) on a ring as a reflection of a man’s love for his bride.
This growth hacking example was very successful and has remained the norm till today. This growth hacking approach has set the standards for marriage in many parts of the world and seems to be inextricably connected with weddings.
26. Instagram’s growth hack: “cross-posting”
The social networking success utilized a very strategic growth hacking approach to gain instantaneous popularity and success. Instagram which happens to be a picture sharing network, was designed with a great deal of flexibility that allowed for users to share pictures on Instagram on other social networks from the Instagram platform directly.
This feature was quite remarkable as it not only hacked into the user base of other social platforms but also gave Instagram a heightened level of publicity and an exceptional opportunity to carry out free publicity and display its unique pictures to millions of users of various social networks. This growth hacking strategy escalated Instagram users with over 500% increase over a period of one year.
27. Booking’s growth hack: “Search Engine Marketing”
Booking is the largest online hotel booking platform. The way they grew might not seem very original but this is how they hacked their growth: they just spend a tonne of money with Google AdWords. You know these Google ads you see on the search engine. I am sure you have searched for hotels on Google before and if you had you probably ended up on Booking. This strategy was huge for customer acquisition and exposure.
From our experience at Growth Hackers, investing strategically in paid search can deliver massive customer acquisition results and boost brand awareness in ways organic growth alone rarely achieves.
28. Zynga’s growth hack: “grind, spam or pay”
Games like FarmVille, MafiaWars or Zynga poker were available for free on Facebook and have made more than one addict. Zynga set up a model called Grind, Spam or Pay that offered 3 choices to the user: rowing to advance, spamming all your friends with invitations or paying. This had a huge viral effect. But unfortunately for them the party did not last forever because Facebook put an end to spam.
29. TripAdvisor’s growth hack: “Mastering Programmatic SEO”
Hotel recommendation and review site Tripadvisor started out as white-labeled SEO company. This helped the startup having a deep knowledge and understanding about SEO. When TripAdvisor pivoted, thanks to the company’s commitment to SEO, the company always ranked high in travel related searches. Moreover, the constant flow of new comments boostsTripAdvisor SEO juice, with a relentless addition of new reviews.
30. WhatsApp’s growth hack: “word-of-mouth”
WhatsApp’s growth hacking technique and approach was totally inexpensive and effective by being entirely focused on creating the services that people need. The application was not only efficient; it was tailored for convenience with features that brings a new dimension to effective communication.
The pervasiveness of the app was largely promoted by word of mouth publicity which is the most credible forms of promotion. The key to the inspiring success of WhatsApp is simply hinged on creating a product that is functional, effective and productive.
31. Sроtifу’s growth hack: “cross-sharing”
Spotify is a music and video streaming service with features and functionalities that are very impressive. In other to create awareness, and increase users, Spotify designed the service in a way that allows users to post songs on Facebook. The growth hacking strategy is quite fascinating as Spotify could now access many users on Facebook who would like to share their songs on the platform as well.
32. Netflix’s growth hack: “directly talk and outreach to clients”
The company started in the DVD rentals business and is now the most successful video-on-demand channel. Netflix was a pioneer in the subscription economy and was able to drive growth by targeting communities of interest. To spread the word, the company used a pretty simple tactic: going to online forums and communities frequented by avid DVD renters. With this strategy, Netflix planned to have a soft launch but this approach went viral and the company received 100,000 orders in the first 3 months without the need of any marketing.
33. Slack’s growth hack: “making a user-centric product by working directly with target audience”
This is my favorite growth hacking example because it really shows how they followed the growth hacking process and that you can always come up with new, powerful growth hacking ideas. This is in my opinion the best growth hack and the one you should try to imitate! Slack is another business that utilized a growth hacking strategy to increase business sales and grow customer base. The business platform began with an approach that concentrated on experimenting with a relatively tiny specific market segment. Indeed, they were working closely with just a few startups.
With all of the findings they were able to collate from this market, they began to remodel the platform incorporating all of the ideas. The platform was designed to satisfy all of the requirements that provoke active usage. Slack did not require any form of promotion before it caught on like wild fire and is currently being used by millions of subscribers globally.
So, how these top growth hacking examples can help your business?
I showed you 33 of the best growth hacking examples and growth hacking strategies I hope this will help you get creative to find your own growth hacks. Whether you have entrepreneurial DNA or not, I hope these growth hacking examples will help you get inspiration. It is nearly impracticable to utilize another company’s growth hack strategy.
Growth hacking strategies cannot be shared or copied by companies as it is a process that must be carefully tailored to the peculiarities of the product, business, competition, target market and other distinctive variables. But, with all the examples I showed you above, I believe you can now come up with innovative growth hacking ideas on your own.
In line with the aforementioned, a proper implementation of a growth hack strategy would require a series of experimentations, A/B testing, market analysis, product remodelling and other relevant processes. All of the information gathered would be used to modify product, medium, strategy and much more for an astounding result. Having a strategy and processes in place will improve the odds to drive your startup toward success and not failure.
You don’t have to start from scratch when it comes to growth hacking. You can use automation tools to help you do the tasks that you want. Here you may find a list of the best growth hacking tools out there. Enjoy!
Growth hacking is a specialized process and must be implemented to soothe the business for sure success. If you still want to start integrating some growth hacks. I suggest you to start with basic principles. Basic principles for the effective implementation of a growth hacking system would include the following:
• Uniqueness: This is the foremost consideration when implementing a growth hack strategy. Your number one priority would be to easily differentiate from the clutter and from competition. This is the most persuasive and compelling appeal that a growth hack strategy must bring to the table for success.
• Freebies: freebies are always attractive to potential customers and very effective way to expand market share exponentially. People are often inclined towards free which makes it a very beneficial appeal to buttress in your growth hack strategy.
• Meet a need: your growth hack strategy must be able to identify and solve a challenge. This is the most effective way to boost growth and profitability. When your growth strategy offers exceptional benefits that upgrade customer’s lives in a unique way, then you can expect exponential growth as many customers would be drawn to your product.
Your growth hacking strategy must test the product and identify various customer needs which should be incorporated into the business for success.
For instance, you don’t want to stаrt a rеfеrrаl program at the beginning if your customers don’t like your product. This would be useless. This is the mistake that many startups do. Instead of studying their target or working on their product, they just copy growth hacks they’ve heard. Then, they are surprised to see this is not working.
What you want to do is get inspiration from these companies and understand the process they follow before to find their own growth hacks. Follow a growth hacking process and you will find new growth hacks that fit your business.
Growth Hackers is an agency offering growth services. Therefore, we can help you find and define your unique growth hacks. We don’t copy growth hacking examples and strategies of others, we actually implement a growth hacking process in order to find unique growth hacks for your business.
35 Comments
Thanks Jonathan for listing these successful growth hacking methods! There’s a lot to learn from these big names. I hope you don’t mind me asking. I was wondering what growth hacking method do you personally do? 🙂
Hi Emmerey. I don’t mind you asking: growth hacking is a process rather than tactics. So, what I like to do is experimenting a lot until I find what works. Each startup or business is different: it’s impossible to apply a growth hack that worked with a company to another one. The goal is to A/B test a lot and always tweak the strategies or techniques.
My favorite channels, though, are content marketing, social media, viral growth (referral system) and email marketing. But the goal is really to experiment these channels a lot, analyze data/feedback and optimize. Then, it’s not over: a big mistake that a lot of people do, is thinking growth hacking is the same as marketing, it’s not. All these experiments and data usually allow me to work on product development in order to make the product more user-centric. This is why growth hacking goes further than marketing because we don’t only grow marketing channels but also grow the product itself. This is why a growth hacker is really between a marketer, a product manager and a data analyst.
Awesome. Thank you as always Jonathan for the tips! I can only learn from the best! 🙂
Thanks a lot for providing information about growth hacking and it’s usage in acquiring traffic, retaining users and growing revenue. As a travel start up, we are starting implementing the principles in order to maximize traffic on our website. Our ultimate goal is to use all the valuable info you provide to hack our way to success.
Thanks for your nice and encouraging comments. I hope the information we provide bring you value and help you succeed.
Hey there, very good and informative list of strategies: perfect for inspiration! We actually use a couple of these tactics at the office ourselves but we’ve found Referral Marketing to be the most effective one of them all. Have you tried that one out yet?
Hi Rachel, such a pleasure to read your comment. Referrals are indeed a great way to grow and we started using it at Growth Hackers. A lead coming from a referral is so much easier to close! 😉
Hi Jonathan,
I found your content very interesting and useful. We have been experimenting a lot of marketing methods and trying to figure out our growth hacking point from 1+ years ..hope this will help us figure out our process. Can you suggest some engaging hacks for a SAAS product ? (Volunteer management software)
Thanks in advance!
Hi Ratish, thanks for your kind comment. For a SaaS product, what I recommend is to build and test your funnel a lot (Test acquisition channels, CTA, pricing, etc…). Also, implementing a referral system can be a great way to grow (Your happy clients will refer their network in exchange of a discount or something). Contact me via Twitter, LinkedIn or on our contact form to know more how we can help your SaaS company grow. 😉
Quite amazing. When I read your first post I knew I would have a lot to learn. You have brought out subtle methods of staying in business and maintaining brands by these big names. Thanks Jonathan. You are good at what you do.
Thanks Baranzan for your kind comment. Pleased to hear these big names’ examples help your business. 😉
Very interesting article! This is the first great article I read for a long time and I just wanted to tell you thanks a lot for the great content! Those growth hacking examples help me a lot to get inspiration. Thanks again and keep them coming.
Felicia
Thanks a lot for your kind comment. I’m pleased to hear you enjoyed our article and examples. Hope these help you for your growth hacking strategy.
Best,
Jonathan
Very interesting article! Thanks a lot for all those growth hacking examples. This gives me so much inspiration. Keep coming with more content like this.
Thanks for this very interesting article. Rare to find such great resource and insights condensed in one piece.
Hi Jonathan,
Your article is very well thought out and presented. Thank you for putting all this together.
I landed here while researching to put up a similar post – now it means I’d need to dig deeper to be able to scratch the quality loaded here.
Cheers.
It’s such as you learn my thoughts! You appear to know so much about growth, such as you wrote a book about it or something. Other than that, I think this is a magnificent blog and an excellent read. I will definitely be back.
Hi Hersteller,
Thanks for such a kind comment. I’m pleased to hear you find this post and also our blog very interesting. This definitely motivate me to write more and keep going.
Be back whenever you like. 😉
What an amazing collection of growth hacks! Thanks for the share. This is very inspiring and giving me a lot of ideas.
Hello there! This is my first visit to your blog! Your list of growth hacking examples is outstanding. We are a collection of volunteers and starting a new initiative in a community in the same niche. Your blog provided us useful information to work on. You have done a wonderful job!
Magnificent site. Lots of useful info here, especially with this huge list of growth hacking samples! I am sending it to some friends ans also sharing it with my channels. And obviously, thanks for your sweat!
Useful information. All these growth hacks are so inspirational!
We are a group of volunteers and opening a new scheme in our community. Your web site provided us with valuable info to work on. You’ve done a formidable job and our entire community will be grateful to you.
It’s a pity you don’t have a donate button! I’d certainly donate to this brilliant blog! I suppose for now i’ll settle for bookmarking and adding your RSS feed to my Google account. I look forward to new updates and will share this blog with my Facebook group. Talk soon!
Hiya, I’m really glad I have found this information. Today bloggers publish just about gossips and net and this is really annoying. A good blog with interesting content, that’s what I need. Thank you for keeping this website, I’ll be visiting it.
Hello Sir.
I found this article really inspiring so I wanted to thank you for that.
What is difference between t-shape marketing and growth hacking? Can you explain?
You’re welcome.
T-shape marketing is similar to growth marketing where you use multiple digital marketing strategy with a focus on acquisition and growth. Growth hacking goes a bit further than T-shape marketing or growth marketing. How? Because with growth hacking, you don’t just want to optimize your marketing channels, you also want to optimize and improve your product thanks to the data and feedback you gathered. With growth hacking, you improve your marketing channels as well as making your product more user-centric. That’s why growth hacking is a the intersection between t-shaped marketing and product development. Hope this helps.
Growth hacking is a concept that I am fully in support of. The idea behind it seems strong, powerful and prone to success.
Keep working ,great job!
Nice blog here!
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Write more, that’s all I have to say. Love your writing style!
Terrific blog!
I’ve been absent for a while, but now I remember why I used to love this blog. Thank you, I’ll try and check back more often.
In the great pattern of things you receive an A for effort and research. The article is pretty engaging which is possibly the reason why I am making an effort to opine. I do not really make it a regular habit of doing that. I wish you all the best in the future!