Growth Hacking has become all the rage. It’s gotten to the point that even if you don’t know what it is, you’ve heard about it and probably nodded along so as to avoid appearing out of the loop. Over the past five years or so, it has become increasingly difficult to talk about marketing without somebody bringing it up, and business and advertising blogs have devoted untold bandwidth to declaring it the greatest marketing invention since BOGO.
But have you ever noticed how all this talk relates to digital startups? We have. And we know why: it’s because well-established brick-and-mortar retailers already have a word for growth hacking—it’s called market research.
What is a Growth Hacker? Run Some Tests and Find Out
Ok though, let’s back up. What is growth hacking? In its purest form, it is a data-driven experimentation process to shortcut traditional marketing methods to increase usership/sales. And many of these tricks are relatively simple. Consider the most famous of growth hacks, DropBox’s referral program. Rather than spending on traditional marketing, Dropbox built its userbase through a classic growth hack—incentivizing referrals. According to CEO Drew Houston, by ponying up gigabytes of storage per referral, Dropbox increased users by 60%.
Whereas Dropbox leveraged its existing userbase, Airbnb got even more creative—they let Craigslist do their heavy lifting. Their engineers figured out that they could include a “post to craigslist” button when users were adding a new listing, which would automatically add the post to the appropriate section on the local Craigslist page. Lacking any traffic of their own, as well as the budget to increase it, they leveraged Craigslist’s daily traffic to put themselves on the map. Seems straightforward and easy, right?
Not entirely: remember, nobody just landed on these tactics. They were the result of rigorous data analysis after rounds and rounds of aggressive testing. And that is, when you take away the fancy and aspirational language, all that growth hacking comes down to: using data to inform strategies.
Sure it’s at a faster pace and its practitioners do call themselves magicians, wizards, and ninjas. But Salisbury steak is still just a fancy hamburger patty, no matter how you cook it.
Growth Hacking is a Fancy Word for Market Research
Growth hacking is great for a tech company or digital retail startup to get themselves from zero-to-sixty as quickly and efficiently as possible. It requires quick decisions and even quicker pivots, making it ideal for small, digital operations but far more cumbersome for large, traditional brick-and-mortar retailers who are already cruising but want to optimize their pace.
Indeed, for larger and predominately brick-and-mortar businesses many of these sandbox startup tricks do not apply, but that’s not to say that the mindset that informs growth hacking—relentless testing, reiterating, and optimizing—cannot be valuable for any business, whatever its size and model. It’s a matter of adapting this ethos to a brick-and-mortar setting, and it’s possible you are already doing some of this. Maybe you already employ a growth hacking ninja and you don’t even know it because their title is something yawn-inducing like Senior Research Analyst, Consumer Goods Division.
But how can you start thinking like a growth hacker? It starts off pretty simple.
For example, a slick growth hacker at a hip startup may test certain landing page layouts and forms against one another by sending 10% of website visitors to each landing page and then analyzing the data. This testing will tell her which page layout boasted the largest engagement rates, click-through, and conversions, and has become a hallmark of digital marketing. How would this translate into a traditional brick-and-mortar operation?
A traditional retailer could similarly test store layouts (what is a storefront if not the original landing page?) by distributing different concepts around a region. But this is where it starts to get complicated. There is no automation software to record and analyze foot traffic to determine which layout is the most successful. Moreover, with so many other demographic variables at play (no two store locations are exactly the same), testing their traffic or sales against one another cannot tell you all that much. So what to do? How can you pursue the same testing and analyzing in a brick and mortar setting? How do you turn real world foot traffic into data?
How Retailers Can Think Like Growth Hackers
Think of brick-and-mortar retail growth hacking as an ethos, not a strategy. You want to be testing, experimenting, and retesting to rapidly build a robust, reliable data set to inform your decisions. It’s just that with larger brick-and-mortar operations, that data is so much harder to come by. So how do we turn real life foot traffic into the rapid insights you need?
Customer intercepts would be the obvious starting point. Positioning Field Agents at your locations’ exit points will give you rapid insight into their immediate impressions of their in-store experience. As one QSR discovered, this is a great way to test new layouts against one another in the prototype phase. You could schedule an intercept program in a product development phase and use the data streams to test ideas.
A market research shopalong could also give you the data you need to “hack” your way to growth. By having a professional moderator follow customers through your location, you will get a sense of how people navigate your stores. This can tell you quickly how marketing campaigns are landing with customers, if at all, and further allows for A/B testing of formats and products.
Both customer intercepts and shopalongs are great for getting rapid data and insights from your customer base. They keep your finger on your customers’ pulse, and will alert you to any changes in their experiences with your product and marketing experiments.
So that gets you halfway there. But what if you need data on consumers who are not already your customers? How can you test a new tactic’s potential to drive new customers to your store if you don’t have a sample of the everyday consumers you are targeting? In these cases, panel survey are the way to go. You can demographically restrict the panel to the type of consumer you are hoping to target and then test away. Test, for example, how single, middle-class, thirty-something women will respond to different product iterations before you make the final decision. Get as specific or as broad as you like.
All three market research solutions give you the rapid data you need to drive your strategies. And they all seem like old-school tricks, right?
Well, think back to DropBox’s referral hack. While the incentive (cloud storage space) and the platform (mobile and desktop devices) may be unique to the tech world, the method itself is nothing new. Companies have no doubt been offering incentivized referrals since the dawn of capitalism. And the process the used to arrive at that strategy, relentless testing and analyzing—well, that’s just market research.
