Growth hacking

The disruptive jargon of digital marketing is sometimes difficult to follow, even if it presents innovative concepts that should be taken into account. Beyond the term which is much more than a simple buzzword reserved for digital natives, B2B growth hacking represents the growth hacking of companies with professional customers. This is an ingenious, demanding and valuable process that companies are initiating to ensure a prodigious expansion while minimizing the investments made.

What is B2B growth hacking?

B2B growth hacking is all about hijacking the system for rapid and significant growth. The idea is to generate the maximum number of leads, then quickly convert them into sales. To do this, he uses all possible digital and marketing means. It, therefore, represents a requirement for results, whatever the tricks to achieve it.

This growth hacking is above all a state of mind coupled with technologies and a methodology. It aims to respond to the problem posed by a large number of companies: How with a limited budget is it possible to maximize marketing results?

Originally, growth hacking was the prerogative of startups. His invention is attributed to Sean Ellis in 2010 whose mission was to grow the user base of Dropbox. Having proved its effectiveness, the approach then spread to all types of businesses.

Allowing considerable and if possible exponential growth, B2B growth hacking offers an excellent ROI, return on investment. Its expenses remain low since it involves inexpensive web tools, unconventional tactics, and permanent optimization of the resources involved. Many actions are even free: social publications, emailing, or blogging, for example. The creativity and imagination used will also make it possible to minimize costs while being efficient.

What has allowed the emergence of growth hacking is the observation of the growing powerlessness of traditional marketing in the face of changes in consumer behavior and the digitalization of the economy. No matter what industry your business is in, your customers’ buying journeys include the web. Your marketing and sales approaches must therefore integrate these new uses to be ultra-efficient.

However, B2B growth hacking is not so easily decreed. It remains a complex and demanding process that requires a great deal of know-how. The game is nevertheless worth the candle as it is a vector of prodigious results for those who know how to use them.

How does B2B growth hacking work?

Growth hacking isn’t all about driving traffic. Rather, it is about optimizing the entire sales cycle according to the AARRR matrix, to:

• Acquisition;
• Activation;
• Retention;
• Recommendation;
• Income.

Acquisition

The first step in B2B growth hacking is to acquire targeted traffic quickly by developing the visibility of your company on the internet. In other words, it’s about getting the first contact with a lead, usually through your website. Its optimization with search engines through natural referencing (SEO, Search Engine Optimization) and paid (SEA, Search Engine Advertising) is therefore fundamental. The goal is to attract as many potential customers as possible to your business.

Activation

Then, you have to activate this traffic by engaging your audience. Concretely, the contacts resulting from the traffic of your Internet site will subscribe to your newsletter, follow you on the social networks,… To achieve this, you must create interesting and attractive content for your targets. They just want to stay in touch with you and get to know you better.

Retention

The retention phase of B2B growth hacking is to get your first users to come back to your website. They will then regularly consult the content you offer, interact with your business and follow you over the long term. The major tool of this step is the emailing that your prospects receive directly in their inbox.

Recommendation

Your audience should then recommend your business. It is about starting word of mouth where your users become your ambassadors. They will thus themselves promote your company to their networks. The goal here is to multiply your leads in the most astounding way possible. To support this phase, web sharing tools are essential, as are sponsorship offers.

Income

The last phase, the most important, aims to generate and increase income. It is therefore about transforming prospects into customers. The quality of your content highlighting your expertise and your added value is therefore essential. The analysis of the performance of your campaigns, A / B testing, and the segmentation of your contact base should be optimized to maximize your ROI.

What is the profile of the ideal growth hacker?

To carry out efficient B2B growth hacking, you need to acquire a professional that is still quite rare, the growth hacker (GH). He is an atypical jack-of-all-trades who masters marketing as well as IT. Its ability to call on a very large number of solutions allows it to find those that are the most efficient for your company. Like a true digital alchemist, he constantly tests and evaluates his actions with the main objective of generating leads and customers.

The growth hacker spends his days acquiring data and automating actions. He establishes new hypotheses which he tests in marketing campaigns. Thus, to generate new business opportunities, he will carry out emailing scenarios, LinkedIn posts, Google Ads campaigns, Facebook retargeting, etc.

The growth hacker implements creative and original unconventional methods that hijack the system. He constantly analyzes data to understand and improve the performance of his marketing campaigns.

To carry out its various missions, the GH must have various skills. He must know how to write to carry out advertisements, articles, or posts and convince prospects. He must also have a web development basis to create the appropriate tools (website, landing page, etc.) and implement the automation of certain processes.

This B2B growth hacking expert must also be comfortable with numbers to analyze the performance statistics of his actions. It is important that he can understand the behavior of consumers to guide them more easily towards conversion.

In addition, the GH must be able to be very reactive to act quickly and learn from its mistakes: without a result, a campaign must be changed quickly for the sake of performance and economy. He must have an eye for detail to find all the necessary optimizations, the best versions and identify the various bugs in each of his B2B growth hacking campaigns. In addition, he must be non-conformist, inventive, and ingenious to create new actions and optimize his campaigns.

The growth hacker is in short a transversal profession that calls on several skills with the sole aim of generating growth. He is required to work closely with BDR (Business development representative) teams who will process and qualify the leads (or MQL for Marketing qualified leads) from his campaigns.

B2B growth hacking is an evolution of marketing that has adapted to digital. It prioritizes the end goal of converting more leads by using a whole battery of methods and techniques to achieve it. For several years, Insurance Noon has been implementing conversion tunnels for its clients with growth hacking strategies to generate a flow of leads for its clients.