After a bit more than a month working for bunq as a country marketing specialist for France, I got the opportunity to take part in a growth hacking course offered by Growth Tribe. With three colleagues from radically different departments - HR, onboarding, product - we spent two days learning about growth hacking and trying to understand the ins and outs of it.
Before doing this training, I thought (probably like the majority of people) that growth hacking was only applicable to early-stage startups who need massive growth, in a short time, on small budgets. I also thought that growth hacking applied only to the marketing strategy and no other parts of the business.
Doing this training with the idea of applying growth hacking to a company with more than 120 employees and attending the training with colleagues from HR or product departments drastically changed my definition of growth hacking and helped me better understand the core principles of it.
Let me take you briefly through the content of the training.
Two days to growth hack Fintech
We began by observing and gathering information about our users, our target audience and our product.
From there, we defined new personas by crossing different sources. For instance, we used Facebook audience insights to get some demographics and understand where our customers are. Based on what we found, we scanned LinkedIn with Recruit’em to find profiles matching our personas. Then, we went through some of those LinkedIn profiles with Crystal to understand how we should talk to them and what our messaging should be.
We then defined our current activities and tried to spot the main gaps by applying the pirate funnel (AAARRR): Awareness, Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referrals, Revenue) to bunq.
The next step was to channel our inner James Bond and spy on the competition. We used similar web and SEMrush to analyze our competitors’ website. The objective was to localize the source of their traffic and make sure we are visible there. In summary, we tried to forget what we thought we knew and UNDERSTAND based on observations.
After that, it was time to actually get shit done – something we particularly love at bunq.
Based on the soft data we got about our landing pages, we created a landing page within 30 minutes using Landen following simple copywriting and other tips and tricks, and we tested it. We also tested a new referral program built based on the personas we had previously identified.
The final step of the training was to think about how to implement all the ideas we had in our specific context.
In other words, once we have understood our potential users and our product, we worked on two key stages of the new strategy: TEST and IMPLEMENT.
Yet another definition of growth hacking for the web
In my view, this is the best way to summarize growth hacking: UNDERSTANDING, TESTING and IMPLEMENTING. Once you know what you would like to grow, you just have to put yourself into a growth hacking mentality and follow this path. No matter what you want to grow. No matter the size of your organization. Tools exist to overcome any roadblocks that you might come across.
Growth hacking is not magic. In my very personal and humble opinion, it’s not a list of 26 hacks to double your traffic. It’s a methodology that goes along with a certain state of mind.
Growth hacking is about being skeptical and open-minded. It is a methodology based on observation, test and decision, no matter the industry or the metrics you want to impact with growth hacking. It’s the opposite of speculative marketing. In a way, growth hacking is philosophical, a Cartesian school of marketing.
These two intense days were a great experience and a way to learn tactics, tools and other tips to do my job. But it actually goes beyond my job. For this reason, I am very grateful to bunq for offering the possibility to growth hack myself as well as the opportunity to growth hack France!
Gauvain - Country Marketing Manager - France
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