A growth hacker is not a traditional marketer, not a software hacker, and definitely not a botanist. Growth hack pioneer, Sean Ellis, defined it beautifully as “…a growth hacker is a person who’s true north is growth.”
Using strategy, creativity, and experimentation, they achieve successful user growth for a business and rarely veer away from that purpose. Hence, posing as an invaluable skill and career for me as a digital marketer.
The Challenge
To explore this concept further, I decided to “learn by doing” and growth hack my personal website. To begin, I set an objective:
- Grow my unique visitors & viewership by 100%, comparing the 1st 6 months to the last
The Solution
Growth hacking 1st begins with a phenomenal product before any strategy takes place. Thus, there were some crucial web design & digital marketing elements to be tweaked to create uniformity in look & feel.
1st, I renamed the site to “Jakub Kubicka” for easier recall, purchased the domain, and created a completely new brand identity with curated typography, colors (primary, secondary, and accents), and imagery.
2nd, I experimented with podcasts as a new form of media to drive traffic. Not only would this allow me to leverage the social network of guests on the show (in-turn, driving viewers to the site) but also provided content variety in a media channel that is exploding in popularity. On Being A Man released 5 episodes over a 12-week period with on-site streaming capabilities.
And 3rd, I created a full content strategy for the website with a focused theme on the concept of disruptive marketing: (counter-intuitive & unique tactics to grow and engage your user base through digital marketing). I created an editorial calendar spanning 18 months, launched a simple email marketing function (pop-up form to build a mailing list), and tied the backend to Google Analytics.
The Result
Comparing 2017 time periods of January-June to July-December, we exceeded the goal and saw the following increases:
- 289% growth in unique visitors
- 465% growth in viewership
- 463% growth in average views per day
- 114% (unique visitors) and 194% (views) overall growth from 2016-2017
Skills Used
- Growth hacking
- Strategy
- Emailing marketing
- HTML & CSS
- Creative direction
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