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The terms “performance marketing” and “growth hacking” have been used interchangeably in the digital marketing space in Egypt, for quite some time. One way or another, all marketing is about driving performance and growth. However, the terms are not as similar as some marketers might think. Some digital marketing agencies in Egypt when they think of growth, they automatically associate it with high performance when tracking metrics.
So is there a difference between performance marketing and growth hacking?
In this blog, I will define each term separately and prove to you that performance and growth marketing are definitely not the same.
Performance marketing involves promoting your brand through various digital channels. A performance marketing strategy involves building a strong relationship between your brand and customers to increase conversions (leads, sales, etc.) It is driven by return on ad spend (ROAS) and return on investment (ROI). In other words, if you put EGP 1 into your marketing budget, you want to get EGP 2 back. For this to work, performance marketers focus on relevant content creation, conversion rate optimization (CRO), media buying, search engine optimization, A/B testing, and multi-channel engagement to help businesses achieve their marketing goals.
Sean Ellis the godfather of the “growth hacking” approach in his book “Hacking Growth” states that growth is not achieved through traditional marketing plans, expensive launch, and huge ad spend, but rather utilizing software development to build marketing into products themselves. Our capability to collect, store, and analyze huge amounts of data, and being able to track it in real time, is now allowing business to experiment with new features, messaging, or any marketing efforts- at an extremely low cost, higher speed, and higher accuracy. The result from this was the surfacing of an approach to fuel growth through cross-functional experimentation, high-speed, for which Sean Ellis coined the term “growth hacking”. Growth hacking is not just about acquiring new customers it’s about how to retain these customers and keep them coming back for more.
A growth hacker is a person whose true north is growth. Everything they do is scrutinized by its potential impact on scalable growth.
Growth Hacking is not…..
- Managing social media platforms for an SMB
- Creating facebook ads to drive traffic to a website
- Following people on Instagram to get follow-backs
- Going viral on YouTube
The growth teams bring together people who have a great understanding of the strategy and goals of the organization, and have expertise to analyze data, implement changes in design, functionality, and marketing of product experiments to these changes.
The Team consists of the following:
- Growth Lead
- Product Manager
- Software Engineer
- Marketing Specialist
- Data Analysts
- Product Designers
The hacking process provides a set of activities that growth teams should tackle to find growth opportunities through rapid experimentation to find the best performers. It is a continuous cycle including four steps: 1. Data and insight gathering; 2. Idea generation; 3. Experiment prioritization; and 4.Testing the experiments best project management software.
Performance marketing is focused on acquiring new customers, while growth hacking is also concerned with keeping existing customers happy so they buy again and tell their friends. It is important to note that performance marketing and growth hacking aren’t competing against each other. In fact, many performance marketing tactics can be used as part of an effective growth marketing strategy.
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