Understand growth hacking in one article - growth methodology, my experience summary
1. What does growth hacking do?
Improve the key indicators of the product.
For example, one or more of the number of users, order volume, conversion rate, daily active users, etc.
Therefore, the first question to determine when doing growth is:What is the first key indicator of the product at the current stage?
1. How to determine the first key indicator at the current stage
To determine the first key indicator at the current stage, my experience is that you must first clarify which indicator can best determine the value of your product at the current stage.
For example, for a social product, its first key indicator may be daily active users or the number of users.
For an e-commerce product, its first key indicator may be order volume.
For a PC website, its first key indicator may be UV.
For an app that sells air tickets, its first key indicator may be the number of tickets issued.
. . . . . .
The specific product direction, strategy, stage and other factors will have an impact on the first key indicator.
2. The first key indicator is phased
For example, in the early stages of a social product, the first key indicator is the number of users, because at this stage, without the number of users, the product has no value. When the number of users reaches tens of millions, the first indicator is likely to be daily active users, because at this stage, how many people use the product every day is the key to determining the value of the product.
In short, the key to determining the first key indicator is to clarify which indicator can best determine the value of your product at this stage.
2. Strategy - How to improve key indicators.
To sum up, growth can be achieved from three major directions.
1. Open Source
Open source does two things:
(1) Expand the number of traffic entrances.
(2) Improve the conversion rate of each traffic entrance.
SEO and ASO are both typical open source.
Open platforms, exchange cooperation, community marketing, social traffic, media matrix traffic, etc. are also open source.
In the early days of the Internet, mass email, group forum, and group text messaging were all open source.
2. Fission
Let your users spread the word for you.
There is only one thing to do for fission:
Find and build product communication points. (i.e., points where users can trigger user communication fission when using the product)
Regarding communication fission, please refer to my "Law of Communication Power".
3. Use Depth
Improve user usage depth to increase order volume and improve the completion of specific tasks/processes/paths.
Improving the usage depth can usually be considered from two directions.
(1) Triggering participation
This can be considered from two aspects.
- How to trigger user participation in something?
- What can trigger user participation?
(2) Optimizing user behavior paths/optimizing process design
Shorter, more logical, and easier to understand.
(3) Optimizing user behavior feedback
What feedback should be given to the user for every action he takes?
Good feedback can greatly motivate users to participate and complete the entire process, ultimately increasing order volume, conversion rate, etc.
For more information about user behavior paths and user behavior feedback, please refer to my series of articles. (Coming soon...)
3. Execution - How to do it
1. Discovery
Two questions:
- For the first key indicator and the factors affecting the first key indicator, where is the low point?
- For the first key indicator and the factors that affect the first key indicator, where can it be improved?
There are three aspects to discovering these two "places".
(1) User feedback and user surveys
It is very easy to fall into blind spots when developing products. The same is true for growth. The simplest, most direct and effective way to break the blind spots is through user feedback and user surveys.
(2) Personal experience and usage scenario analysis
For many conversion funnel improvements, personal experience and usage scenario analysis make it easy to find areas for improvement.
(3) Data analysis
Data analysis is a powerful and indispensable weapon for product development. For growth, it is easier to find growth, or even large-scale growth, by analyzing user characteristics and behavioral features.
2. Assumptions
Based on the findings, hypotheses are proposed, which are used to determine whether changing one or several factors can lead to improvement.
For example, a picture, text or other elements on a page, a step in a process, etc.
Analyze elements such as user usage scenarios, corresponding pages or steps, and propose hypotheses.
3. Verification
Make the hypothesis into a minimum viable version or AB test, analyze the final data, and verify whether and how much improvement there is.
4. Key points before growth
1. The core value of a product to users determines its growth.
Therefore, if this point is ignored, even if rapid growth can be achieved through certain means at a certain stage, the company will eventually fall into growth stagnation or even the failure of the entire product.
For more information on this, please refer to my other article:
2. The key to growth lies in user dependence.
If the growth strategy is not based on user dependence, the entire product will become a "straight tube" that leaks out as much as it comes.
For more information on this topic, please refer to my other articles:
5. Ultimate Growth
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The ultimate form of growth is products, or more precisely, the snowball effect of products.
Simply put, when users use a product, they will influence and drive a group of people to use the product.
For example, take the various self-media/social media today.
When a creator creates content, the platform will bring him a lot of fans, so the creator will do everything possible to create more and better content. And those more and better content will bring more and more "content consumption" users. With these "content consumption" users, the platform can bring more fans and reading/viewing volume to the creator.
Whether it is Weibo, WeChat public accounts, Douyin, Kuaishou, etc., the basic approach is the same.
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