Growth Hacking versus Marketing : What is Growth Hacking?

From the link: http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/05/05/the-actual-difference-between-growth-hacking-and-marketing-explained/

(Please do read the complete article from the link above. It is an awesome article !!!)

A growth hacker really is just a marketer, but one with a different set of challenges to tackle and tools to work with. There are a few key differences between startups and big companies (for simplicity’s sake, I’ll call them “corporations”) that best explain the difference:

• Startups are organizations with extreme uncertainty. 
• Startups are designed for astronomical growth. 
• Startups don’t have access to the same resources or brand equity. 

Thus the term growth hacking. Growth hackers utilize analytical thinking, product engineering and creativity to significantly increase their company’s core metric(s). Growth hacking is not a new practice, just a new term. Anyone who figured out how to game Google’s algorithm (aka SEO) was leveraging both creativity and analytics to rapidly grow their company. Amazon’s legendary use of A/B testing surely fits into the category of growth hacking. So does LinkedIn’s ingenious email importing scheme (where users were prompted to let LinkedIn import their email contacts and send them a note inviting them to the service).

What tools does a growth hacker use?

• Viral Acquisition 
• Paid Acquisition 
• Call Centers / Sales Teams
• Content Marketing
• E-mail Marketing
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
• A/B testing and Analytics

Final word: