Growth Hacking is not only a tool sought after by high-growth startups, it is also a great approach to research used by large corporations as they innovate and adopt new methods and frameworks.
Corporate innovation programs have increasingly adopted startup methodologies like lean and agile product design and development, the MVP, and growth hacking.
Growth hacking allows startups to grow fast — with less time and resources. Corporate innovation programs, on the other hand, use growth hacking to get customer feedback quickly, while spending less time and budgets than their traditional research methods.
Here’s why corporates are increasingly using growth hacking for customer research:
#1. Understanding and empathizing with your customer is key to building a great product
A great product, as well as great marketing, starts with understanding and empathizing with the end user or customer. New approaches to product development like design thinking encourage looking at the product from the human perspective.
#2. Growth Hacking lets Product Innovation teams go to the audience faster
Compared to traditional research methods, growth hacking allows product teams to reach a large sample size of the audience faster, especially using digital channels.
#3. Growth Hacking gets multiple touchpoints with the audience within the product design cycles
Not only can you reach a large audience faster, you can also get feedback from them at various touch points in the product design cycle. This fuels any iterative approach to product design.
#4. Growth Hacking uses Minimum Viable Testing and goes hand-in-hand with the concept of MVP
Minimum Viable Testing is a lean and agile approach to getting user feedback. Learn more about Minimum Viable Testing here.
#5. Growth Hacking allows corporates to get both qualitative and quantitative data
While A/B testing and split testing are great ways to test which version of a product-related concept the audience likes better, growth hacking also uses detailed surveys to get qualitative data from the audience
#6. Growth hacking leverages other channels to get results
One key characteristic of growth hacking is to piggyback on large channels like social platform algorithms and databases to find winners and gather feedback. This reduces the requirement to build your own audience first, as you can just filter the audience of these existing channels to find your right target segment.
#7. Make pricing and packaging decisions with real feedback
While corporations can come up with a pricing range for their product, growth hacking can quickly test all the price points in that pricing range to find the winning price of the product. The same goes with packaging. Different packaging designs can be tested with growth hacking to find the design the audience likes the most.
What are corporate testing with growth hacking?
Corporates also use growth hacking to test and find the following:
- Product ideas and Audience needs
- Narrow or discover target audiences
- Product ingredients or components
- Product benefits and value proposition
- Product name and tagline
- Product pricing and packaging
- Product variants
These are testing in 3 different stages: the creative-level experimentation stage, the landing page and survey page experimentation stage, and finally the shop testing stage.
Tools corporates are adopting to implement growth hacking:
Large corporates are using the following tools to implement growth hacking for customer research in their innovation teams:
- Social Channels like Facebook, Instagram, Google, YouTube, LinkedIn
- Ad Platforms like Facebook Ad Manager, Google Ads, LinkedIn Ad Platform
- Analytics tools like Google Analytics and Facebook Analytics
- A/B Testing tools like Google Optimize, Optimizely, and VWO
- Landing Pages and Forms like WordPress, Unbounce, Google Forms, Typeform, Survey Monkey
- Integration platforms like Zapier and Integromat
If you’re part of a corporate innovation program and would like to find more about our services and consulting, feel free to contact us at rishabh@mapplinks.com.
We execute and manage end-to-end growth hacking experiments for corporate innovation programs.
