The value of Growth Hacking.

Business development manual for Emi-

Rent Properties
Velimir Elezovic

Bachelor’s Thesis
Degree Programme in
International Business
Globba 2017
 Abstract

Date: 2 June 2017

Author
Velimir Elezovic
Degree programme
GLOBBA International Business
Report/thesis title Number of pages
The value of Growth Hacking. Business development manual for and appendix pages
Emi-Rent Properties 46 + 3

This thesis was commissioned by Emi-Rent Properties, a real estate company based in Bel-
grade, Serbia. The main objective of this thesis is to help determine the value of growth
hacker marketing for the case company’s newly commissioned marketing campaign. Sec-
ondary objective of this thesis is to present practical advice on the implementation of a suc-
cessful marketing campaign with strong international aspects. The thesis will cover major
marketing concepts and provide an alternative view by benchmarking successful methods
against pitfalls.

The primary research is based on marketing theory concepts juxtaposed growth hacking the-
ories. The writer used academic material on both topics to provide the theoretical framework
for further study. The writer followed up with empirical evidence of growth hacking in market-
ing as presented by business professionals in educational videos and professional blogs.

The conclusion offers practical advice on the implementation of growth hacking upon a solid
foundation of established marketing presence. The writer then presents useful tools and po-
tential pitfalls in the implementation processes to create a manual in the form of a mind map
and quick tools. Thus, effectively creating a DIY growth hacking campaign to an existing mar-
keting framework.

Keywords
Growth hacking, corporate growth, marketing, hacking, corporate strategy, innovation, crea-
tivity
Table of contents

1 Introduction ......................................................................................................... 1
1.1 Background ................................................................................................. 1
1.2 Research and investigative questions ......................................................... 2
1.3 Demarcation ................................................................................................ 3
1.4 International aspect ..................................................................................... 3
1.5 Anticipated benefits ..................................................................................... 3
1.5.1 Corporate benefits............................................................................. 4
1.5.2 Stakeholder benefits ......................................................................... 4
1.5.3 Entrepreneur benefits........................................................................ 4
1.6 Case company ............................................................................................ 4
2 Project plan ......................................................................................................... 6
2.1 Goal of the product ...................................................................................... 6
2.2 Timetable .................................................................................................... 6
3 Theoretical framework and growth hacking scope .............................................. 8
3.1 Definition of growth hackers and growth hacking ........................................ 8
3.2 Product market fit ........................................................................................ 9
3.3 A/B testing ................................................................................................. 10
3.4 Stickiness and bounce rate ....................................................................... 11
3.5 Going viral ................................................................................................. 12
3.6 Criss-cross ................................................................................................ 13
3.7 Key metrics for successful growth hacking................................................ 14
3.7.1 Daily net change ............................................................................. 14
3.7.2 Core daily actives ............................................................................ 15
3.7.3 Cohort activity heat map ................................................................. 15
3.7.4 Conversion funnel ........................................................................... 16
3.8 Other marketing metrics crucial for growth hacking .................................. 17
3.8.1 Return on investment - ROI ............................................................ 17
3.8.2 Cost of customer acquisition - CCA ................................................ 18
3.8.3 Sales revenue charts ...................................................................... 20
3.9 Search engine optimization (SEO) ............................................................ 21
3.10 Social media for marketing and growth hacking ........................................ 22
3.10.1 Facebook ........................................................................................ 23
3.10.2 Instagram ........................................................................................ 24
3.10.3 Twitter ............................................................................................. 25
3.10.4 LinkedIn .......................................................................................... 26
3.10.5 Blogs ............................................................................................... 26
3.10.6 YouTube ......................................................................................... 27
4 Recommendations for application of marketing and growth hacking ................ 29
4.1 Improving the domestic marketing ............................................................ 29
4.2 Creating an international marketing strategy ............................................. 31
4.3 Growth hacking tools for managing online marketing ................................ 32
4.3.1 Google analytics ............................................................................. 33
4.3.2 Google AdWords, alerts and SEO................................................... 34
4.3.3 Social media presence and optimization ......................................... 35
4.4 Benchmarking the success of growth hacking .......................................... 35
4.5 Suggesting the expansion of the business functionality ............................ 36
5 Discussion and further recommendations ......................................................... 38
5.1 Development scope .................................................................................. 38
References............................................................................................................ 40
6 Appendices ....................................................................................................... 43
Appendix 1: Business manual useful external links for real estate companies to
follow ................................................................................................................ 43
Appendix 2: Business manual mind map .......................................................... 45
1 Introduction
This chapter will introduce the concept that is the focus of this thesis work, growth hack-
ing. Furthermore, this chapter will lay foundations for the theoretical framework of the the-
sis by asking relevant research and investigative questions. Likewise, this chapter will
present the benefits of the final product of this thesis which is the business manual, and
will discuss the potential application to the international scene. Lastly, this chapter will
present the commissioning company, and present the anticipated value that the company
would gain from this thesis work.

1.1 Background

What is a growth hacker? The term itself is still fresh and is seldom recognized, even
among the greatest connoisseurs of marketing. However, it is gaining popularity rapidly
and especially in the more innovative SME’s of today and particularly in the start-up sce-
ne. First coined and defined in year 2010 by Sean Ellis, the basic premise of growth hack-
ing was to set one goal for companies, obsession over growth. In essence, growth hack-
ing is a more “outside of the box” way of marketing which often disregards the traditional
marketing principles. Unlike traditional marketers who focus on more old-style ways of
bringing a product to market with a somewhat constricted strategy and budgets alike, a
growth hacker works to not only create buzz around a product, but also to improve the
product in such a way that it will fit the market. This often constitutes going through many
product changes and iterations in the process ensure that the product/service is up to date
with customer demands.

The term growth hacking is often misunderstood due to the word “hacking”. However, the
act of growth hacking does not constitute the use of IT and does not have to be applied
and/or constrained to any IT aspects, although some of the most successful growth hack-
ers are in tech industry.

Growth hackers excel at being cross-functional and often have no previous experience in
marketing, or for that matter, bringing a product to market. In SME’s and particularly start-
ups, a growth hacker could bring more value than a marketing specialist in terms of at-
tracting and retaining customers and ultimately, ensuring rapid growth. Successful growth
hackers understand which customers are fit for their product and as such can identify and
implement effective hooks for their products with practically no budget. A splendid exam-
ple of a commonly used growth hack is a membership type sign-up service some compa-
nies offer for their products, where there would be a limited pool of users which would
gradually increase with time. The idea behind this is that, should the product be satisfacto-
ry of course, the customer would feel special and more incentivized to become a preacher

1
of the product by sharing in their circle of influence, in addition to being able to send in-
vites to the service as a member.

1.2 Research and investigative questions

As a part of the bigger picture, this thesis will focus closely on issues where growth hack-
ing has a clearly positive impact, SME’s, by offering an objective view of some successful
growth hacking campaigns but also on some failures.

Research question: What is the value that growth hacking brings to SME’s and how a
manual could help the company?

Investigative questions:

1. How does growth hacking compare to traditional marketing efforts in stimulating

growth and virality?
2. How could growth hacking be implemented in the SME corporate structure?
3. What are the long-term possibilities of growth hacking strategies in SME’s?
4. How could growth hacking be sustained and applied through the transition from an
SME to an LSE?

Table 1.1 Investigative Questions

Investigative Theoretical Research Methods Results
question Framework (chapter)

IQ 1. 1.How does Marketing strate- Literature study and Chapter 5

growth hacking gies, corporate benchmarking current
compare to tradi- growth evaluation, corporate structures.
tional marketing resources required
efforts in order to
stimulate growth
and virality?
IQ 2. 2.How could Corporate structure Literature study and Chapter 5
growth hacking be and evolution over quantitative research in
implemented in the the years. Current questionnaire form.
SME corporate willingness to inno-
structure? vate and adapt.

2
IQ 3. 3.What are Views on future, Literature study and Chapter 5
the long-term pos- potential of the quantitative research in
sibilities of growth phenomenon. questionnaire form.
hacking strategies
in SME’s
IQ 4. 4.How could Adaptability poten- Literature study and Chapter 5
growth hacking be tial to the current quantitative research in
sustained and ap- structure, educa- questionnaire form.
plied through the tional possibilities,
transition from an future views.
SME to an LSE?

1.3 Demarcation

This thesis will contain some research that draws from traditional marketing studies, which
is expected due to the nature of the topic. However, research will not necessarily dissect
some of those aspects of traditional marketing if it is not directly applicable to the real-
world practicality of growth hacking. Furthermore, this thesis work will focus on applied
growth hacking in the business world thus far and the work that had been done on the
academic level to explain and more closely define what growth hacking is.

1.4 International aspect

The topic of this thesis has strong international implications. Thus, the potential for inter-
national application of growth hacking is abundant and this thesis will cover how easy it is
for growth hackers to penetrate the global markets. Lastly, it is important to note that as
growth hacking originated from IT companies, growth hacking holds its roots in interna-
tional relationships.

1.5 Anticipated benefits

The benefits of growth hacking are split into multiple areas but converge on one, corpo-
rate growth at any cost. Growth hacking employs an outside of the box way of thinking to
create value for not only the company it stems from, but also the customers, and all with a
long-term perspective. The benefactors of a successful growth hacking campaign are
many and a few will be explained in the following subchapters.

3
1.5.1 Corporate benefits

Growth hacking impact on the corporation that is applying it to its growth strategy can po-
tentially bring terrific value for its money. As growth hacking is often a freelance effort, a
corporation does not need allocate too many resources to make a growth hacking cam-
paign successful. As a matter of fact, growth hacking is often most efficient when working
with a constrained budget and limited resources. Thus, growth hacking creates a unique
blend of efficiency in growth for a low monetary and even time investment. A growth hack-
ing manual will in this case be very useful to the company and could be applied without
outsourcing a growth hacking specialist, or a “growth hacker”.

1.5.2 Stakeholder benefits

Stakeholders of any company that choses to use growth hacking as one of its growth
methods can enjoy the benefit of often better customer communication, closer stakeholder
engagement and a more intimate relationship with the products and services that the
company provides.

1.5.3 Entrepreneur benefits

Growth hacking often tends to be more in-depth and hands on and specific, juxtapose
traditional marketing. Thus, any individual and/or entrepreneur in this case benefits in the
form of a unique outlook on the corporate structure, world at large and the product/service
potential growth when dealing with growth hacking.

1.6 Case company

The company chosen for the research of this topic is Emi-Rent Properties. Emi-Rent
Properties is a family owned company situated in Belgrade, Serbia. As the name might
suggest, the company deals with real estate, namely building smaller objects for rent or
sale. The aspiration of this thesis work is to help the company grow to create a more or-
ganic communication with its buyers and more importantly tenants. Currently, the compa-
ny has 8 different companies as tenants across its rented real estate space and each ten-
ant has a distinct business model, making the case company somewhat responsible for
how they could improve the conditions of their tenants as far as business environment and
marketing are concerned. Furthermore, as a secondary but equally important goal, the
business manual will offer advice on how the case company could use growth hacking to
internationalize their operations and create a new subsidiary in Finland.
4
The primary requirement for the case company to benefit from growth hacking is to im-
plement some aspects of growth hacking strategies to its current rental space and more
importantly, to plan in accordance for future building, how to make their spaces more at-
tractive to tenants and customers of those tenants alike. Furthermore, as real estate, and
specifically construction, does not really have an international expansion template per se,
a growth hacking manual can offer a somewhat ubiquitous way of applying growth hack-
ing efforts across international space when the company decides to expand their con-
struction efforts outside of Serbia.

The case company has given access to their company’s structure, marketing strategies,
and investment budgets as documents to be used in the creation of this thesis work. As
such the writer is privy to the company’s secrets that are necessary in order to create the
business development manual.

5
2 Project plan
This chapter will present the writer’s goal of the thesis and the objectives set forth by the
commissioning company. The expected outcome of this thesis work is a product which is
the comprehensive business manual. The product will contain a visual representation of
concepts presented in this thesis work, and additionally, it will be illustrated in a concise
and visually appealing context – pocket manual.

2.1 Goal of the product

The main goal of the product is to create a tool, a guide for the case company to use as a
step-by-step guide in creating a successful growth hacking marketing campaign. The
product will stem from growth hacking theories presented in this thesis, and will bench-
mark the successes of other growth hacked businesses, products and services. The writer
will suggest additional tools that are either essential in growth hacking, or a crucial sup-
plement.

For the purpose of creating an objective and realistic study of growth hacking, the writer
has chosen to research the publicly available material on growth hacking from companies
and entrepreneurs who coined the term and used said growth techniques to bring success
to their own businesses. The material is presented online in blogs, academic articles, ed-
ucational videos such as TED conferences, and lastly, academic books that contain mate-
rial on similar concepts.

2.2 Timetable

The timetable presented herein will serve to be a rough guideline of the deadlines the
writer has pre-set for himself in order to keep the thesis work structured and on target.
The timetable will also be a reminder for the writer not to spend too much time on any
single part of the thesis and keep the workload spread equally over the work period. Ac-
cording to this timetable, the writer should be able to finish the thesis by the end of the first
school semester in 2017.

1 December 2016 Thesis started

15 January 2017 Commissioning company goals set

6
 20 February 2017 Theory work compiled

10 March 2017 Theoretical structure completed

25 April 2017 Empirical structure completed

13 May 2017 Results completed and ready for presenta-

tion

Table 1. Thesis work timetable

7
3 Theoretical framework and growth hacking scope
The goal of this thesis is to determine the value that growth hacking can bring to the case
company and to similar companies that share the characteristics of SME’s within a specif-
ic industry. Thus, the theoretical framework of this thesis will focus on pragmatic, practical
evidence and history of growth hacking application in companies rather than taking a
purely academic standpoint.

This chapter will cover the growth hacking theoretical concepts from its inception, all the
way through the weak signal stage and finally the widespread implementation in many
startups today that are becoming SME’s and the target of this research.

For the backbone and empirical evidence of growth hacking methodology, highly useful
yet vaguely academic material will be used, in order to support the premise of the thesis.
Specific material will be centered around the most prominent growth hackers out there
and the people who are behind the concept to begin with. This unique approach to the
research will serve to create a comprehensive guide that is the key to understanding the
value of growth hacking for the case company.

GH

Growth Strategies

Limited Resources, Need for In-

novation in Communication

Marketing and Corporate Growth

Figure 1. Growth hacking scope illustrated

3.1 Definition of growth hackers and growth hacking

A growth hacker is an employee with a job description that constitutes growing the busi-
ness by any means possible. Namely, a growth hacking position effectively replaces the
8
more recognized “VP of Marketing” job. Growth hacker’s main job is to build great market-
ing ideas into the product/service during the development process, and to keep doing so
throughout the lifetime of the product/service. Growth hackers often have a programming
background, and this was especially true in the infancy years of growth hacking. Nowa-
days, however, it is not uncommon to have a growth hacking position with little to no pro-
gramming skill. Growth hackers are exceptional at hypothesizing, testing and creating
multiple iterations of their respective products/services to create a “hockey stick” growth
for their companies as the ultimate goal (Holiday, 2013, 54).

Growth hacking, according to Sean Ellis and improved by Ryan Holiday (2013, 62), is de-
fined as a business strategy that throws out the playbook of traditional marketing and re-
places it with customer acquisition techniques that are testable, trackable, and most im-
portantly, scalable. Its tools are e-mails, pay-per-click ad, blogs, and platform APIs instead
of commercials, publicity and money. Where traditional marketing choses to pursue no-
tions like brand image, growth hackers single-mindedly pursue users and corporate
growth – and when they do it right, those new users beget more users, who then beget
more, a self-perpetuating growth engine. Growth hackers are inventors, operators and
mechanics of this self-perpetuating and self-sustaining growth machine which can take a
company from nothing to something.

In summary of the concept, the process of growth hacking could be described as “desper-
ate” marketing. At a restricted budget, ever changing set of rules and often even without
any rules, growth hackers use a creative mindset to create something truly admirable in
terms of marketing a product/service. Growth hackers use data to discover what their cus-
tomers want, need, and then work relentlessly to make changes where needed to give
their customers exactly that. It is a splendid example of calculated risk taking with a much
bigger pay-off than investment.

3.2 Product market fit

Growth hacking can only ever be successful if the product is worthy of attention by the
potential customers. Holiday (2013, 27) describes growth hackers as inventors, operators,
and mechanics of their own self-sustaining and self-propagating growth machine that can
take a start-up from nothing to something. This notion indicates that a growth hacker is
intimately tied to both the company and product, and ultimately to the customers them-
selves.

Among the most important factors in creating a growth hacking strategy and the product
itself is the Product Market Fit (PMF), according to growth hacking pioneers. Whereas

9
traditional marketing VP´s work with the product they are commissioned to market, growth
hackers can and often do adapt the product during the pre-launch and even post-launch
phases, ensuring that they provide their customers with the product they want. Immediate-
ly we see a disconnect with some of the traditional marketing strategies and perhaps
goals, to create a brand. A growth hacker cares about the product, and gives little to no
attention to the brand, instead growth hackers rely on their customers to be the brand of
the company and carry the banner through the product.

A juxtapose way of thinking about PMF is actually looking to a market in order to find in-
spiration or create a product. In the words of Andy Rachleff, nothing is as irreplaceable as
a great market, which is not to diminish the value of a solid team behind a great product
(Rachleff 16 July 2016.)

Interestingly enough, however, measuring the success of a product’s PMF is often not
difficult, if not trivial, and seldom requires measuring tools to gauge whether the response
is positive or negative. Namely, some key indicators of success or failure include the cus-
tomers getting the value proposition the way the company hopes, spreading of word-of-
mouth, usage, press releases, of course the sales, and more (Holiday 2013, 64).

3.3 A/B testing

In achieving PMF for a product, growth hackers often go through one or more iterations of
the products/service and frequently end up with a much different final product than origi-
nally coined.

Holiday (2013, 80) argues that A/B testing is guaranteed to provide a much more concrete
insight into PMF than a gut instinct can ever hope to give. Namely, A/B testing is simply
creating 2 versions of a product/service and then comparing their success against each
other.

PMF is all about gathering feedback from the customer in order to create a better product
for them, but sometimes a customer may not have a clear image as to how they could
improve their product, this is where A/B testing comes in with distinct options on how the
product/service may function and thus offer the would-be customer a more tangible ex-
ample (Ellis 19 October 2016).

An example of A/B testing would be creating a version of a website and presenting it to a

focus group of customers, this is called a control version. At the same time, an alternative
version of a website with is created and presented to a focus group, this is called a varia-
10
tion. The version which receives better feedback is hence more successful and has a bet-
ter chance of success in the real world.

Figure 2. Website variation illustrated (Source: https://www.optimizely.com/ab-testing/)

3.4 Stickiness and bounce rate

The stickiness of a product is reflected in the product’s ability to retain a customer or have
a repeat customer and how likely would those customers refer your product to others.
Heath & Heath (2007, 14) present sticky ideas as simple, unexpected and credible, but
with concrete details, emotional undertow, and a memorable storyline. Stickiness con-
nects to growth hacking by expanding it to services and platforms, especially those online
and answers questions such as:

- When customers sign up for a service, do they stay and become active users?
- Does your product have a “wow” factor that keeps customers engaged?
- Based on previous stickiness factors, can more sticky features be added?

In essence, services that attract a customer to a product/service and keep them coming
back for more, are sticky.

Bounce rate, according to Holiday (2013, 90), is an objective measure of a prod-

uct/service’s stickiness and can easily be tracked and measured by readily-available
online tools such as Google Analytics, KISSmetrics and similar. Bounce rate refers to the
initial contact that customers have with a product/service and how many of those custom-
ers “bounce” or leave the service immediately and how many decide to give it a go. If the

11
bounce rate is very high, it usually indicates a problem with a product/service, in other
words, it “sucks” or does not have the perceived PMF for those customers.

In order to improve the bounce rates, several steps could be undertaken, such as improv-
ing the PMF, redefining the intended target customer or even undergoing an A/B testing
process with existing customers, gathering feedback on how to improve the service in the
process. Rather than blindly pushing for exposure and trying to draw in as many potential
customers as possible, services/products that suffer from high bounce rates would have a
much better ROI (in terms of money and time) trying to improve those bounce rates in one
of the aforementioned ways (Heath & Heath 2007, 17).

3.5 Going viral

Virality is a concept that every marketer out there vies to achieve, to get their product to
go viral and explode with popularity. You can imagine that every CEO is aiming to guide
their marketing team to achieve virality, however, this is much easier said than done as
virality is somewhat of a science in its own right.

According to professor Jonah Berger (2013, 74), there are several important factors to
achieving virality.

Firstly, virality does not happen only online and as a matter of fact, only 7% of word-of-
mouth happens online. Majority of word-of-mouth transitions from online social media plat-
forms, such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn (crucial one for growth hackers) etc., do a
wonderful job at giving people something to talk about and often initialize virality (Berger
17 December 2013.)

Furthermore, virality is often measured in number of views, whether it’s a video, picture,
even a blog post, views give the observers something concrete to use as proof of virality.
The views, however, are worthless to a business unless those viewers or customers can
be turned into advocates, the ultimate goal is to get people to talk, share and promote
your product (Berger 17 December 2013.)

Diving into more measurable metrics for a moment, the thing that growth hackers focus on
when trying to achieve virality is really the amount or percentage of shares that the prod-
uct is enjoying. Namely, a company can simply pay to advertise their video on many web-
sites and achieve a large number of views with this passive method. Juxtapose that, share
percentage gives a clear insight into customer engagement and thus shows the clear val-
ue of said viral content (Berger 17 December 2013.)

12
Finally, when valuing virality, a successful marketer or growth hacker needs to recognize
the correct numbers in the evaluation of the campaign. A great example of this could be
seen in the Evian water viral video from 2009 which achieved over 50 million views. This
sounds like a great success, but the problem for Evian was that the viral video had noth-
ing to do with their product and thus created no value from the viral exposure, as a matter
of fact, they took a hit to sales in the following year and lost much of their market share in
the U.S. The value of virality is reflected, ultimately, in the amount of money or engage-
ment achieved, so connecting the viral content to a product/company is of utmost im-
portance for success (Holiday 2013, 67).

3.6 Criss-cross

Cross platforming, cross-posting, creating value for all parties included. Could it be that
simple? Namely, in everyday life, an average person probably encounters at least a few
cases when intentionally or not cross-connect in some way. Whether it’s uploading an
Instagram photo or going on a Twitter rant, chances are that a person will click that button
“share on Facebook” as well, just in case some of their audience does not use the seed
posting platform. As simple and intuitive as it sounds, cross platforming has been one of
the most sure-fire successes for growth hackers from all areas of business (Holiday 2013,
72).

Benchmark the example of Spotify and their rise to success through connecting and offer-
ing their services to Facebook users. Spotify used to offer a one-time deal, in return for a
free trial (day, week, month), refer a friend who will sign-up for our service and claim your
reward. Now, Spotify had a little bit of an unfair advantage in achieving such an amazing
deal with Facebook, but that was due to one of the main investors in Spotify was also an
investor in Facebook, but the success is evident (Holiday 2013, 84).

Another example of the brilliance of cross platforming can be seen in most user’s e-mail
folders, in an average inbox, the chances are that in the 5 most recent e-mails received
will contain a text at the bottom citing something along the lines of “Sent from my I-phone”.
Mentioned previously, turning users into advocates by engaging them in virality is incredi-
bly powerful, but it is possibly to turn those customers into advocates without them even
knowing it, and in the process, it costs nothing for either side. That is exactly what many
companies are using today to give a gentle reminder for their users’ peers exactly what is
the hottest service to use. Likewise, it is a proof that growth hacking has a massive pres-
ence even in the largest of corporations such as Microsoft or Facebook.

13
 3.7 Key metrics for successful growth hacking

As with any other form of marketing, measuring and tracking the campaign’s success is a
crucial part of the overall strategy’s success. Furthermore, growth hacking does not frown
upon making many reiterations of the products in order to satisfy the customers, but rather
encourages it, some of the traditional marketing success metrics become more important
to pay attention to (Holiday 2013, 62.)

Namely, if it would be possible to follow how a product’s development cycle, a growth

hacker would want to know how each of the changes impact feedback from the custom-
ers, potential and present. If the product has more than one version, each successive ver-
sion should be developed by gathering and listening to the feedback from current users in
order to create a more perfect product (e.g. social media platforms and their improving
features over time) (Holiday 2013, 13).

Metrics that growth hackers relentlessly pursue are those that ensure not only positive
growth for the product and business, but also those that can show customer satisfaction
with the service at the same time. Such metrics include conversion funnel, daily net
changes, core daily actives and cohort activity heat maps (Egan 7 January 2013.)

3.7.1 Daily net change

Daily net change refers to the daily churn of your customer/user base, and specifically
how it has grown or shrunk. By creating a simple graph with a few distinct categories, you
can easily track statistics of components, such as new user acquisition, re-engagement
and retention, and see how they impact your current growth rate.

Net change can be calculated by combining the components to create a simple break-
down of statistics (Egan 7 January 2013):

- Amount of new users joined today (new users)

- Amount of existing users that used the service today for the first time in the last 28
days (reactivated users)
- Amount of existing users that last used the service exactly 28 days ago (churned us-
ers)
- Net change=new + reactivated – churned

14
Figure 3. Example of a daily net change chart (Source: http://jwegan.com/growth-
hacking/4-growth-hacker-metrics/)

3.7.2 Core daily actives

Growth hackers try to isolate and focus on a very specific and succinct group of infor-
mation to make a tailored decision on how to proceed with hacking the growth. As such,
some traditional marketing metrics are replaced by more specialized and specific ones
like Core Daily Actives (CDA) taking over Daily Active User (DAU) metric. What this
means is that while DAU metric is still a very useful tool for a growth hacker, one gets
much more precise info by following CDA which, unlike DAU, has a concept of both quali-
ty users and retention. While DAU can often have jumps and variations based on various
potential ongoing campaigns that focus on user acquisition, it is difficult to estimate
whether those customers stick around. Hence, CDA counts the users that have used your
service X number of times in the last month. CDA thus focuses on the bottom line, growth
of repeat users (Egan 7 January 2013).

3.7.3 Cohort activity heat map

This comprehensive tool offers one of the most insightful ways to follow your user reten-
tion over time, and longer periods of time at that. That is to track how successful you are
at retaining current and acquiring new customers over a period of time (Egan 7 January
2013.)

- The unit of the x-axis is days and each column corresponds to the group of users that
joined on day X (each group is called a cohort)
- The width of a column on the x-axis represents the size of the cohort (i.e. the wider the
column, the more users joined on that day)

15
- The unit of the y-axis is also days and each row represents Y days after the cohort
joined the service. The bottom row of the graph represents day 0, the very first day the
user joined the service, and the top row represents day 59.
- The color of each rectangle represents activity level. It is calculated by determining the
percentage of users that joined day X and used the service on day Y. The scale rang-
es from red for a high percentage to blue for a low percentage.

Figure 4. Example of a cohort activity heat map (Source: http://jwegan.com/growth-

hacking/4-growth-hacker-metrics/)

3.7.4 Conversion funnel

Final metric that I will cover in this chapter is the conversion funnel which refers to the
process of acquiring, retaining or engaging customers/users. Simply, it is splitting up a
process into its constituent steps and tracking how many customers/users complete each
step. While the conversion funnel is frequently used, it is seldom used as often as would
be ideal to ensure maximum efficiency. Preferably, conversion funnel should be followed
daily as even minor changes in percentages can grossly compound over time.

As illustrated by John Egan (Egan 7 January 2013), an example of the steps within a con-
version funnel could look something like this:

1. How many users saw the invite prompt?

2. What percent of users clicked on the invite prompt?
3. How many invites were sent per user that clicked on the prompt?
4. What percent of invites were viewed?
16
 5. What percent of invitees clicked on the link in the invite?
6. What percent of invitees that clicked on the link, joined the service?
7. How many new users joined the service as a result of the invite.

3.8 Other marketing metrics crucial for growth hacking

Aforementioned metrics are some of the most frequently used by growth hackers. Howev-
er, other metrics used by traditional marketers are equally important when trying to create
a comprehensive image of the growth spectrum. Growth is traditionally monitored through
metrics such as sales revenue charts, ROI (return on investment) metrics, CCA (cost of
customer acquisition), and many more, so called, KPI (key performance indicators) (Ellis
19 October 2016).

Following these metrics and frequently testing their performance in the real world is es-
sential for success in marketing, which is also especially true for growth hacking. Analys-
ing KPI’s is a growth hacker’s primary tool when creating any new growth strategy. Ac-
cess to efficient tools for these analyses are also essential for an accurate insight into
these metrics.

3.8.1 Return on investment - ROI

In essence, ROI measures the ability of campaigns to generate revenue. ROI can be in-
terpreted in a few different ways, but for the purposes of a KPI for growth hacking, it refers
to both the monetary and time investments spent in order to achieve a certain amount of
growth (could also be presented in monetary value) (Entrepreneur 2017). Furthermore,
John Lovett (Lovett 2011, 237) argues the necessity of tracking the ROI in social media
specifically, and the ROI for the following categories as sub groups are important to track
as well as part of a more in depth insight:
− RO -Interaction: Activities carried out by social media team, clients and potential
customers on social media that lead to the conversion event
− RO -Engagement: Engagement level measures the extent of social media users’
content consumption
− RO -Satisfaction: Measures the degree to which the social media services are
meeting the customer expectations
− RO -Advocacy: Monetary transactions conducted on social media channels as a
result of paid or free brand advocates’ efforts

17
This metric is important to track not only because of the need to know if the campaign is
worthwhile in terms of monetary and time investments, but also because a product/service
can most often have only one or 2 campaigns active at the same time. In other words,
time is money, and both growth hackers and marketers must make sure that the time slots
are used as efficiently as possible (Ellis 19 October 2016).

3.8.2 Cost of customer acquisition - CCA

Holiday (2013, 7) argues that growth hacking is all about acquiring new customers on a
budget, and that budget is often minimal. Hence, tracking acquisition costs for each cus-
tomer is a crucial metric.

CCA is defined simply as an amount of money needed to invest into a campaign in order
to acquire a customer or generate a sale. However, growth hackers are not content to just
generate a sale, more so, growth hackers strive to acquire returning customers who are
going to be activated to spread the word about the product/service and attract new cus-
tomers from their circle of influence (Ellis 19 October 2016).

Therefore, CCA numbers for growth hackers differ slightly than those of traditional mar-
keters in the sense of depth. Namely, growth hackers often strive for a much more analyt-
ics/numbers approach to CCA and hence create charts and tables on a regular basis to
keep up with the change and anticipate the same.

The value of CCA is often two pronged in most companies, reflecting the perspective in-
terests of both investors and internal employees (marketing coordinator or CEO). Inves-
tors use CCA to analyse the potential of the company before making an investment and
try to predict their ROI. Namely, investors are interested in simply how much money could
be extracted from potential customers at the cost of extracting it (Hubspot 2017).

Juxtapose investors, a marketing coordinator and indeed a growth hacker care about the
specifics of the extraction costs from the customers and how they could further optimize
the business to further reduce those costs, thus increasing the overall profit margin of the
company (Holiday 2013, 33).

Lastly, actual calculation of CCA could be simply something like this: a company invests
1000 euros in their marketing campaign for a year, and they acquire 500 customers that
year. This means CCA for that year were 2 euros per customer. There are of course ex-
ceptions in the form of marketing stunts or long term future expectations from certain in-

18
vestments. Both of which respectively either create a high risk/reward situation as a stunt,
hoping to create a viral attraction to the product/service, or in the case of long term in-
vestments, hope to create a campaign that will have attract more customers with time and
with less money needed down the line (Hubspot 2017).

As most companies in the world create new and update old CCA charts, there is a great
diversity and a great many deal of options to choose from in regard to which tools are
used to track the CCA metrics. Additionally, according to Ted Ammon (Hubspot 2017)
CCA is considered the last step in a funnel of the customer acquisition scheme. A cus-
tomer is first a visitor when encountering the content for the first time. Visitor is then con-
verted into a lead if they follow-up with subsequent visits, thus having the potential of be-
coming a valuable customer. An example of an effective and informative chart is seen
bellow:

CVA

CLA

CCA
Figure 5. CCA Funnel illustrated

Example of a calculation: a 1000-euro investment leads to 500 people being exposed to

your product/service, this is the cost of visitor acquisition (CVA) of 2 euros per persona.
Assume 10% of those people decide to sign up for a free version of your product/service
(this could be a website, app, or even a blog with free content that only requires an e-mail
and name to sign up), therefore 2 euros divided by 10% boils down to a 20-euro cost of
lead acquisition (CLA), these might be future customers and could turn to paying custom-
ers in time. Finally, if we assume that 10% of leads convert into paying customers, using
the same math we end up with a 200 euro CCA. This number may look big or small de-
pending on the size of the company doing the survey, but the important this is that the

19
leadership knows their numbers thus having the power to make changes and improve-
ments (Hubspot 2017).

3.8.3 Sales revenue charts

Revenue charts offer companies a visual representation of the corporate gains and losses
and showcases progress over a fiscal period of time. Charts like this are important to be
updated and monitored regularly as they display the core of any business, its profitability.
Additionally, chart usually shows whether or not the company is moving in the right direc-
tion and attracting customers. An effective and informative chart is a clear indicator of
growth (Entrepreneur 2017). Likewise, it is much more precise to have a chart represent-
ing a longer period rather than a snapshot of income for a smaller window of time
(YCharts 2017).

Example of a sales revenue chart is presented below:

Yearly Income
85000
80000
75000
70000
65000
60000
55000
50000
45000
40000
35000
Year 1 Year 2 Year 3 Year 4

Yearly Income

Figure 6. Example of a sales revenue chart

A simple calculation for calculating the percentage of revenue growth can be defined as
follows:

Subtract the previous yearly revenue from the most recent yearly revenue, then divide the
result with the previous yearly revenue, and finally multiply that number by 100 to get the
percentage of revenue growth.

In mathematic formula: 150k – 100k = 50k ; 50k / 100k = 0,5 ; 0,5 X 100 = 50%. Revenue
growth is hypothetically 50% (Ycharts 2017).

20
This tool is very useful and it is easy to update, manage and maintain even for the most
novice of users. However, as mentioned, it is a very crucial metric and it is advisable to
the case company to use this metric frequently if they do not do so already.

3.9 Search engine optimization (SEO)

SEO is often misinterpreted by the marketing society as a tool that constitutes free traffic.
While the end result is free traffic, that is not exactly what SEO is about. SEO uses key-
words and website hits to optimize a site’s search engine ranking result in relevant search
actions. This type of a search result is called organic or natural search result, juxtapose
paid advertisements which often put a paid campaign’s website to the top of the relevant
search without too much need for keyword optimization (Kissmetrics 12 September 2010.)

Namely, according to Kissmetrics blog (Kissmetrics 12 September 2010), SEO is about

helping the right customers find the right product/service. This is done through keyword
association in a logical manner during website building and creating the content. It is
managed in a way that will allow users who are searching for a specific product/service in
a search engine have the most relevant options as a result.

Companies report that effective SEO in some cases brings more customers than their
social media campaigns. According to a 2012 study, SEO leads have a 14.6% close rate,
while outbound sourced leads have a 1.7% close rate. SEO leads are eight times more
likely to close into customers than outbound leads. Leads from inbound links (referrals)
are five times more likely to become
customers than outbound leads (Hubspot 2017).

Figure 7. SEO effectiveness to close (Source:

https://cdn2.hubspot.net/hub/53/blog/docs/ebooks/the_2012_state_of_inbound_marketing
.pdf)
21
Lastly, the most effective way of SEO is by using a Long-Tail method (Anderson 2006, 21)
in which the author explains the importance of using lots of low-traffic keywords juxtapose
a few of high-traffic keywords in the process of SEO and how it can affect the overall visi-
tor rate. Namely, example of Amazon selling a DVD with a famous title, they will optimize
for the lower-traffic keyword which is the “title” of the DVD rather than the high-traffic key-
word which is “DVD” itself, as it will attract the right customer to the right product

3.10 Social media for marketing and growth hacking

Social media is a form of electronic communication conducted through websites that en-
courage and offer tools to users to create online communities for interaction, content shar-
ing, building relationships, personal messaging etc. (Kelley, Jugenheimer & Sheehan
2012, 161.)

The primary goal of social media networking websites is to encourage action by existing
and potential future users on social media, in order to stimulate own content creation and
interaction with the content provided by the websites themselves. Highly interesting con-
tent is generated and shared by both brands and users on social media channels (Kelley,
Jugenheimer & Sheehan 2012, 161). Individuals taking part in these social media web-
sites often have specific interests and purpose for doing so. These interests include con-
tent sharing, people interaction, and similar. When the sharing or interaction of content
occurs, a user’s circle of influence is notified, this often translates into publicity and word
of mouth (WOM) gain for the social media website or third party. According to Dahl (2015,
173), WOM was previously mostly restricted to physical interactive content shared user to
user. However, the impact of social media websites has brought more prominence to
WOM impact.

According to most recent research and categorization of social media for business pur-
poses, there are 8 types of social media that can benefit a business (Hootsuite 2017).

22
Figure 8. Social media types (Source: https://blog.hootsuite.com/types-of-social-media/)

It is important to note that the core of all social media remains the same, interaction be-
tween users (Hootsuite 2 May 2017). As social media platforms and websites increase
their functionality to offer more services, the core capabilities of each platform is still very
important to keep in mind. Therefore, when evaluating social media platforms for business
purposes, companies should use different platforms according to their marketing needs.

The writer will present some social media platforms and websites that could be beneficial
to the product of this thesis in the subchapters below.

3.10.1 Facebook

Facebook is one of the most widely used social media platforms in the world with a net-
work of over 1 billion users. Users use Facebook as a platform to create and share con-
tent, network, chat, and make lifestyle choices, etc. Facebook is a social media platform
whose mission is to give people the power to share and make the world more open and

23
connected (Facebook 2017). Facebook is also used as a business platform by many
companies in order to find like-minded customers and promote their products/services, in
some cases even sell directly on the platform.

According to a study of Finnish social media usage conducted by Buzzador (Bennet 11

September 2014), 82% of Finnish online population uses Facebook at least once a day
which demonstrates the exposure of all content presented on Facebook. Furthermore,
42% of marketers report that Facebook is critical or important to their business as re-
searched in a recent study (Hubspot 8 March 2012).

Figure 9. Importance of social media service for businesses (Source:

https://cdn2.hubspot.net/hub/53/blog/docs/ebooks/the_2012_state_of_inbound_marketing
.pdf)

3.10.2 Instagram

Instagram is another widely used social media channel, specifically for sharing pictures.
According to Instagram’s CEO (Kevin Systrom 2017), Instagram is a fun and quirky way to
share your life with friends through a series of pictures. Instagram imagines a world more
connected through photos. Instagram offers a transparent user generated content with
options to chat and cross-connect to similar platforms. A notice for business that use In-
stagram, unlike Facebook, on Instagram it is not possible to hide or censor content. Thus,
all interaction with the other users is more organic and transparent.

24
Lastly, the functionality for Instagram and Twitter both, the use of hashtags when sharing
content has become a staple for every user. Hashtags is likely the most popular means of
categorizing content on social media. It makes a user’s own content discoverable and
allows them to find relevant content from other people and businesses. The hashtag also
allows a user to connect with and engage other social media users based on a common
theme or interest. Knowing how to use hashtags is fundamental to success on social me-
dia (Hootsuite 2017).

There are a number of tools and website services offering tutorials and tips on how the
users could make the most out of hashtags. A great example of such a site is
tophashtags.com which offers instant insight into most popular hashtags, essentially a
bootstrapping tool to becoming noticed on Instagram (Top Hashtags 2017).

3.10.3 Twitter

Twitter is a service for users who want to instantly share their thoughts in form of state-
ments for up to 140 characters, links for videos, music, promotions and similar, with their
circle of influence (Twitter 2017). Unlike other similar social media platforms, the writer’s
own opinion is that Twitter has more of a supporting role in the social media spectrum,
and businesses use it to as more of a supporting channel. More specifically to make an-
nouncements and promotions rather than a primary source of customer acquisition.

Another Hubspot study shows that Twitter is more effective at allowing businesses to con-
nect and interact with targeted customer audience rather than with other businesses as
presented in the figure below.

Figure 10. Customer acquisition by social media channels (Source:

https://cdn2.hubspot.net/hub/53/blog/docs/ebooks/the_2012_state_of_inbound_marketing
.pdf)

25
3.10.4 LinkedIn

According to LinkedIn’s website, LinkedIn connects the world's professionals to make

them more productive and successful. LinkedIn is the world's largest professional network
on the Internet. LinkedIn is the most popular in B2B interaction and connects business to
potential partners. Currently, the LinkedIn’s own study suggests that there are over 500
million users registered on LinkedIn with 2 new members are joining this network every
second. According to LinkedIn, there are 3 million corporate accounts on LinkedIn and
over 40 million users are students (LinkedIn 2017).

LinkedIn is considered much more effective at connecting businesses to other business

than their counterpart, Facebook. However, the opposite is true for Facebook and end
customers. The figure below illustrates the channel effectiveness by industry.

Figure 11. Channel effectiveness by industry (Source:

https://cdn2.hubspot.net/hub/53/blog/docs/ebooks/the_2012_state_of_inbound_marketing
.pdf)

3.10.5 Blogs

A blog is a website that is regularly updated with posts or publications themed by the au-
thors of those blogs. The purpose of a blog can be for personal sharing, it can be a corpo-

26
rate blog publishing news and updates to their followers, in both cases blogs have a
community following (Gunelius 3 February 2017).

Still today, many companies use blogs to update their customers on the newest prod-
ucts/services in offer or development, gather customer feedback, and in general interact
with their audience. Blogging remains one of the most powerful online marketing tools
(Hubspot 2017).

Figure 12. Channel importance to users (Source:

https://cdn2.hubspot.net/hub/53/blog/docs/ebooks/the_2012_state_of_inbound_marketing
.pdf)

3.10.6 YouTube

YouTube is the most popular video sharing service available online today. For companies,
YouTube is used as a platform to showcase their competitiveness in a video form, and
YouTube videos are often referred or linked through other social media channels. Fur-
thermore, YouTube is the second largest search engine available online, hence many
users use YouTube to find their desired content directly as explained in a recent Forbes
article (Agrawal 3 January 2016).

Marketers are becoming more proficient at creating engaging online video content, ser-
vices like YouTube offer them a seamless transition from creating to sharing content. Ac-
cording to Agrawal (3 January 2016), using YouTube as a video marketing channel with
quality content, companies are viewed as professional experts in their fields. Furthermore,
companies using YouTube as a marketing channel appear credible and more engaging
with their customers, as it is a trendy and low-power distance way of communicating with
customers.

27
Lastly, as a tip from the writer, YouTube is often used by companies in a more direct ad-
vertising manner in the form of paid advertisements. These paid advertisements pop-up
before a selected video starts and plays a short add for an effectively captive audience.
Certainly, a useful tool in pushing for visibility.
.

28
4 Recommendations for application of marketing and growth hacking
The primary goal of this thesis is to clearly demonstrate the value of growth hacking for
the case company. As such, the business development manual, which is the product of
this thesis work, will focus on delivering advice that is clear and applicable to the real-
world business strategy of the case company, Emi-Rent Properties. The objective of the
business development manual is to create a comprehensive set of steps in creating a
growth hacking campaign applicable to the case company’s marketing in both domestic
and international efforts. Namely, the domestic application strategy as well as the interna-
tional strategy will draw inspiration from successful examples of companies which used
growth hacking in their own growth efforts.

The potential hurdles and challenges in creating the business development manual are
reflected in the type of business that the case company operates in. As a somewhat non-
traditional industry to have growth hacking strategy applied to it, real-estate industry does
in fact offer ways to accommodate this type of growth and it will be explored in this chap-
ter. Furthermore, as growth hacking is a very specific type of marketing in the sense that
the same methods may not be applicable more than once and to more than one company,
the advice represented herein may need to be adjusted in the company’s own evaluation
of the business development manual.

This chapter of the thesis work will comprise of information gathered from real-life exam-
ples of growth hacking application in some of the largest companies in the world today.
Methodology in gathering the information is comprised from books, blogs, videos and
presentations of various growth hacking professionals and large companies’ CSR reports
which include the marketing strategies used to achieve certain goals.

Finally, the business development manual, which is the product of this thesis work, will be
presented in the form of a mind map, following the advice based on theory and empirical
parts contained in this thesis.

4.1 Improving the domestic marketing

Emi-Rent Properties have an established and respected business in Belgrade, Serbia.

However, as their business grows and looks to other markets, there is a need to improve
and streamline their marketing efforts in a more analytical and modernized way. Namely,
as an integral part of growth hacking, any successful growth hackers need to be able to
create and track data (Holiday 2013). The first course of action it should aim to do is to
create a KPI data bank and start using some online tools that will help with learning more

29
about their business and what attracts their customers, or in this case their tenants’ cus-
tomers.

Currently, the case company does very little to no marketing, and leaves it to their tenants
to attract the clientele. As a crucial first step in growth hacking their business to the next
level, it is important to learn about their tenants’ customers and create some excitement
about their spaces (Kissmetrics 13 December 2016.)

Firstly, in creating a fresh marketing presence, companies should use as much knowledge
as possible that is already available about the clientele online and from benchmarking
competitors and create customer profiles based on shopping habits, ages, interests, ac-
tivity hotspots and similar (Kelley, Jugenheimer & Sheehan 2012, 11.) By obtaining this
information, companies can plan which steps should be undertaken next, such as improv-
ing the product/service and/or accommodating more supporting services if need be, creat-
ing themed content to draw new and existing customers, and ultimately building the public
image of the brand. As a by-product, corporate effort in coherent marketing communica-
tion is often rewarded by WoM (word-of-mouth), be it positive or negative and offers a
good supplement to the overall marketing effort (Dahl 2015, 55).

Juxtapose similar businesses in Finland such as CityCon who do all of the above and
more on a regular basis, the case company is practically unrecognizable by the everyday
customer of their shopping spaces (CityCon Finland 2017.) As a part of starting a growth
hacking effort, it is advisable to take note of similar successful businesses and establish
the growth from there (Holiday 2013, 47.)

Secondly, as an extension to the previous point, the case company should strive to create
a ubiquitous brand image and value proposition to allow for an international expansion
that is well structured and in line with the corporate policy, as an integral part of traditional
marketing (Kelley, Jugenheimer & Sheehan 2012, 72.) Now, it is important to note that
growth hacking is almost never centred around a brand, but around the product/service
which is the start and end of every successful growth hackers’ ambition (Holiday 2013.)
However, it is evident that as a part of the service in the case of working with a real-estate
business, brand image is a part of the service and offers its prime customer (in this case
tenants), a clear added value proposition – help in reaching their target customer.

Lastly, as a part of the big picture, companies should strive to create a website and estab-
lish a social media presence (Chaffey & Smith 15 May 2015), which is especially true for
the case company. In today’s business culture, it almost goes without saying to assume
that a company has a website, however, this is not the case for the case company.
30
Hence, it is advisable, that as a crucial step in creating a domestic presence online and in
preparing growth hacks, to have something to perform growth hacking upon. The website
should be professionally made and optimized with the best SEO applicable to that type of
business, and set up to be easily trackable and scalable as the business grows (Chaffey &
Smith 15 May 2015).

As far as the website creation goes, it is easier and safer to outsource the website crea-
tion to either a company or a freelancer who do that on a regular basis and hire them to
do website maintenance (Berger 17 December 2013). However, if the case company
would choose so, there are many website creation services available online such as
WordPress or Wix.com and both offer guidelines so that even beginners can be success-
ful in creating a functional website. Growth hacking the functionalities of the website
should be done by using smart and calculated keyword planting, calls to action for dynam-
ic events and offering a newsletter subscriber option (this could include discounts or spe-
cial giveaways for first X number of subscribers).

4.2 Creating an international marketing strategy

Building on creating a website and establishing a social media presence, the case com-
pany needs to do viable market research of the target foreign market and prepare a strat-
egy that not only fits the target audience but also communicates the corporate message
as closely as possible to that of the domestic market as argued in marketing communica-
tion by Chaffey & Smith (15 May 2015). In this case, the case company is planning on
entering the Finnish market through direct acquisition and personal investment by estab-
lishing a subsidiary in the country.

First step in preparing a marketing strategy should be to do a SWOT analysis and bench-
mark the competitors in the real estate sector of Finland (Chaffey & Smith 15 May 2015).
Learning the strengths and weaknesses of the market will show the case company on
what they should focus when trying to growth hack the business to rise above the compet-
itors. The most effective way for a new player to enter a market such as real estate and
especially in a country like Finland, is to do it suddenly and aggressively. This is really
where growth hacking shines. By creating an efficient and interactive website (packed with
keywords other growth hacks) to showcase the services and future plans (such as events
and calls to action), the case company will have an edge over the competitors and the
attention of the customers. Next step is to create a social media presence and start on a
prominent level of interaction, and stay on that high level throughout the lifetime of the
business.

31
Secondly, it is imperative to create a social media community that will hopefully thrive with
time, and which will be involved in dynamic event creation and overall decision making of
similar events (Chaffey & Smith 15 May 2015). Namely, if a company has the attention of
their customers and can ask them what they like, naturally, this would be the most organic
way in meeting the customer demand. Hence, customer interaction can be achieved with
nothing more than a strong social media presence. Facebook should be the focus of so-
cial media planning and other medias should be connected to it and stem from it. In term,
Facebook should be integrated and dependant on the company website and content
should be shared on both platforms in order to maximise SEO efficiency when users
search for related content.

Creating a community should be done by the means of inorganic growth. Organically, it

would take time to attract enough attention and create enough content to draw more cus-
tomers in and create a buzz. Juxtapose organic growth, inorganic can be done quickly
and aggressively just as advised for entering such a market. Inorganic growth can be
achieved by hiring influencers on different social media platforms and have them advertise
the business and draw quick attention, which should be followed up by creating a dynamic
event calendar to establish some physical interaction as well. Influencers can be found
online on websites such as Fameflow which is an Instagram influencer finder service that
connects businesses to like-minded influencers, which in term connect to business to their
target audience. Finding a few influencers over all the relevant social media will create a
growth hack that will propel the case company’s real estate in the market as a relevant
competitor.

Lastly, it is important to track, analyse, data mine and research all the relevant metrics
relentlessly and often in order to have an understanding of which growth hacks work and
which do not (Holiday 2013, 72). The greatest growth hack for the case company is the
actual interaction in a creative and innovative way with their customers, especially as their
competitors seldom do it to a degree anywhere near to what should be the focus of the
case company.

4.3 Growth hacking tools for managing online marketing

As growth hacking and marketing in general are all about information accessibility and
availability, it is imperative for companies to use the right tools to analyse the data that
they will be collecting (Holiday 2013, 41). Data analysis will help the company understand
which methods are working and which are not, thus crystalizing the successful growth
hacks from unsuccessful ones.

32
Tools presented herein are well established in the business culture presently and offer
easy to use, precise, and succinct ways of tracking the most important metrics for your
business, both short term and long term. Furthermore, it is important to note that these
tools are used by some of the most successful companies that exist today, and are a huge
token of their success.

With that knowledge, it would be advisable for the case company to do some research
and prepare to use some platforms such as Facebook, Dropbox, Twitter, Instagram,
Google and many more IT giants and companies of the like. Their business practices be-
ing somewhat public and open for dissection, which gives smaller companies such as the
case company and start-ups an opportunity to benchmark success.

4.3.1 Google analytics

Google analytics is one of the most widely used freemium internet tools with easy-to-use
features for both small and large companies. Google analytics is essentially a service that
tracks and reports website traffic. This is one of the best and most inclusive recommended
tool to track the previously mentioned growth hacking KPI’s of growth success. By analys-
ing the metrics from google analytics, the case company can track the landing page re-
sults (showcasing exposure to the website), conversion rate, bounce rate, sales leads,
revenue generation and similar.

Screenshot presented below shows the basic functionalities that google analytics offers to
users. It is an interactive and facile tool to use as a first-time user, but it also offers many
in-depth research options for advanced users, making the service excellent to follow
through with the growth of your business. Important for growth hacking, a company can
follow and analyse the metrics such as CCA and lead generation of their website, but also
some more in depth metrics such as user/customer demographics, behaviours and all
with the ability to benchmark against other similar or otherwise exemplary businesses.

33
Figure 13. Google analytics UI screenshot

4.3.2 Google AdWords, alerts and SEO

Knowing the importance of SEO, the case company needs appropriate tools to ensure the
highest effectiveness of their SEO. Google AdWords is an online marketing service that is
also a perfect carrier for growth hacks in the form of keywords and in some cases boot-
strapping off larger websites which would carry the advertisement of your website as de-
termined by the google algorithms (Google AdWords 2017). The service offers keyword
planning for marketing campaigns that the case company should meticulously plan when
creating the growth hacks. Keywords may include any word that is associated with that
type of business, and with a paid advertisement from Google AdWords, might be all that a
potential customer needs to search online in order to get an exposure to the case compa-
ny’s website or other campaign gimmick.

Supplementary to Google AdWords, Google alerts is a simple tool that can be used to
alert the growth hacker of when a certain mention is made. This mention can be set by the

34
user and could be a term or a business reference, which, upon being mentioned in rele-
vant online arenas, prompts the user of the location and the context of the mention. This is
useful for the case company to follow as it could also give them pointers on which specific
words or references they should pay attention in their SEO efforts.

4.3.3 Social media presence and optimization

According to Chaffey & Smith (Slideshare 15 May 2015), social media presence is an om-
nipresent method of both reaching potential and existing customers, but also a great way
of communicating a company’s brand and value proposition to the society at large. One of
the most crucial factors in any successful social media communication is consistency and
ubiquity in sharing across all platforms. Most popular and influential social media plat-
forms that also have some business integration as part of the service include Facebook,
LinkedIn, Instagram and Twitter.

Facebook, much like Google AdWords, offers user managed advertising with built-in
tracking and metrics of success (Facebook 2017). As part of a growth hacking strategy,
the case company could use Facebook as the flagship of the social media presence, and
integrate their value proposition and any marketing campaign messages with other social
media. This is to achieve a coherent image of the company across all social media plat-
forms, and to make sure that the reach of the company is equally balanced to customers
who use more than one social media to follow the company.

There are online tools that can help companies achieve equal cross-platforming in social
media such as Hootsuite. Hootsuite is a website that offers professional social media
cross-platforming with built-in metrics for tracking progress (Hootsuite 2017). There is im-
mense value to be gained for the case company in using a tool like this. Namely, apart
from saving time, Hootsuite can help with cross-posting by being connected to all your
social media feeds from one source, and most importantly, track the business metrics
such as ROI, conversion rates and bounce rates. Lastly, Hootsuite can help with securing
a brand image by providing the user with advice on how often and what to post in order to
maximise professionality while at the same time offering hacking and other external threat
protections (Hootsuite 2017).

4.4 Benchmarking the success of growth hacking

Growth hacking helped create some of the largest IT giants in the world today, and infor-
mation on how they did it is available online and well presented to the business world to
dissect and take lessons from (Holiday 2013, 4). Understandably, none of the companies
that will be benchmarked herein work in the same industry as the case company, howev-

35
er, that is the essence of growth hacking – innovating outside the box and should apply
just the same as with the successes of the aforementioned companies.

Namely, the giant of social media picture sharing, Instagram, did not start off with almost
any functionalities that are present in their services today. Instead, the service started off
being known as Burbn, a location based social media hybrid that among other services
offered customers to check-in to locations and take pictures with various filters. As the
developers realised that the app may be too complicated and that the users were mostly
interested in the functionality of the app that allows them to take pictures with filters, they
made some changes. They decided to cut the app down to the most popular features and
do a complete rebrand into the giant that is now Instagram. This was not done by accident
however. The developers have created a system that can track how popular are each of
the features of the app, and thus growth hacked their business to focus only on the most
popular aspects of the app and built on it. Meticulous and relentless pursuit of analysing
the business and learning about their customers, thus building a customer profile which
allowed them to create a focused growth hacking campaign which brought them millions
of new users (Fortune 2017).

The lesson to be taken from Instagram is that a business can and should be always evolv-
ing to meet the demand of the customer. The case company should keep this in mind
when expanding their business and should perhaps consider adding new features that
would make them stand apart from the competition and offer their customers an exciting
novelty for the industry.

4.5 Suggesting the expansion of the business functionality

The case company should consider trying to bring innovativeness to the industry to sup-
plement their business and not directly as a marketing effort but as something that could
become their niche juxtapose their competitors. Specifically, as a product part of this the-
sis, it is suggested to the case company to create a service that would provide a quality of
life improvement to both its tenants and the end customers of the real estate space.

Namely, the suggested service would be a website option and a mobile phone app for
Android and iOS devices that would offer a functionality of easy booking of space on the
fly. More in depth, the case company should growth hack a connection from the end cus-
tomer to their tenants for booking the space, products or services with this app that could
and should be developed as a part of internationalization of the business and specifically
applied to the Finnish market.

36
The value proposition from a growth hack like this can bring many new potential custom-
ers undoubtedly, but more so, it has the potential to create a viral niche to the business
that will ultimately have a chance of propelling the case company above its competitors.
Furthermore, this app should have the functionality of being able to track traffic, stickiness,
bounce rates and other aforementioned metrics, thus giving the case company a ubiqui-
tous tool for tracking the progress of their growth hacks in addition to other benefits.

37
5 Discussion and further recommendations
Based on the study thus far derived from relevant academic material on growth hacking
and related marketing books, popular blogs, educational videos and other online material,
writer is in a healthy condition to make the growth hacking manual for the case company.

Growth hacking offers a fresh new take on the traditional ideology of marketing and more
so, a cost-effective way of realizing a fresh marketing strategy specifically applicable to
smaller businesses such as the case company. Based on the theory of growth hacking
and the empirical evidence of its application and counterparts, it is a pragmatic statement
to say that it would be a very viable and appropriate growth strategy for the case company
to use in both domestic and international expansion efforts.

As far as the current, non-existent, marketing presence of the case company goes, there
is a long way for the business to traverse in order to be competitive in terms of marketing
strength. Thus, the case company should start by digitalizing their services and creating a
more easily accessible portfolio of services prior to engaging in growth hacking or any
other type of marketing campaigns. Furthermore, the theoretical results of this thesis show
that it is not a requirement to possess any knowledge or experience of IT in order to delve
into a growth hacking effort and hence it should not be too challenging even for a novice
employee of the case company to take first steps toward being able to do growth hacking.

As evidenced by the successes of some of the highest profile growth hacked businesses
such as IT giants of social media and Instagram the ideology and methodology of growth
hacking’s “change to adapt” practice should serve as an important lesson for the case
company looking forward to growing and expanding the business. Likewise, it is strongly
suggested for the case company to do their own research into businesses that they might
have some more similarities with and try to find inspiration in their success or failure in
growth hacking.

5.1 Development scope

The writer would advise the case company to start by focusing on creating a domestic
image and testing their marketing strategy development in a familiar environment before
looking to foreign markets. Additionally, it would be recommended to hire a marketing ad-
visor either as an outsourced professional or as an in-house employee.

In order to have a solid platform for growth hacking, several conditions should be met,
such as:

38
 - Having a website and social media marketing presence online
- Integrating the marketing communication through one channel
- Creating a ubiquitous corporate message across all media
- Streamlining the marketing communication

A marketing strategy set up in this way should allow for an effective growth hacking foun-
dation to be possible. Furthermore, the whole marketing effort should be structured in a
way that is easily scalable and more importantly, fully trackable and measurable. Hence,
the writer would advise the case company to use some of the tools previously mentioned
in this thesis work, which would help track the various metrics of interest specific to the
needs of the company and in line with the industry they are in.

39
References
Agrawal, AJ. 3 Reasons Why You Should Be Marketing On YouTube And Periscope.
URL: https://www.forbes.com/sites/ajagrawal/2016/01/03/3-reasons-why-you-should-
be-marketing-on-youtube-and-periscope/#6bb956893173. Accessed on 3 Mach 2017.

Anderson, C 2006. The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More.
Hyperion.

Bennet, Shea. Just 5% use Twitter in Finland (Facebook: 82%, Instagram: 15%)
[STUDY]. URL: http://www.adweek.com/digital/finland-social-networks/. Accessed 24
April 2017.

Berger, J. 2013. Contagious: Why Things Catch On. Simon & Schuster.

Berger, J. 17 December 2013. Viral 2.0. Jonah Berger blog. URL:

http://jonahberger.com/viral-2-0/. Accessed: 12 January 2017.

Chaffey, Dave & Smith, PR. Emarketing Excellence - Dave Chaffey & PR Smith.
Slideshare. URL: https://www.slideshare.net/tinhanhvy/emarketing-excellence-dave-
chaffey-pr-smith. Accessed 13 March 2017.

CityCon Oy, Finland 2017. General company information. URL:

http://www.citycon.com/about-us. Accessed 12 March 2017.

Egan, J. 7 January 2013. 4 Metrics every growth hacker should be watching. John
Egan blog. URL: http://jwegan.com/growth-hacking/4-growth-hacker-metrics/. Ac-
cessed: 3 March 2017.

Ellis, S. 19 October 2016. Growth Hacker. 3 Stages of Growth Hacking Success.

StartCon. Seminar Presentation. Sydney, Australia.

Facebook 2017. Facebook business info. URL:

https://www.facebook.com/pg/facebook/about/?ref=page_internal. Accessed 12 March
2017.

Fortune 2017. How Kevin Systrom got started. URL:

http://fortune.com/2014/10/10/how-kevin-systrom-got-started/. Accessed 3 January
2017.

Google AdWords 2017. About Google AdWords. URL:

https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/6349091?hl=en. Accessed 3 March 2017.

40
Gunelius, Susan. What is a Blog? URL: https://www.lifewire.com/what-is-a-blog-
3476707. Accessed on 12 April 2017.

Heath, D. & Heath, C. 2007. Made to Stick. Random House. New York

Holiday, R. 2013. Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing,
and Advertising. Penguin Group LLC.

Hootsuite 2017. 8 Types of Social Media and How Each Can Benefit Your Business.
URL: https://blog.hootsuite.com/types-of-social-media/. Accessed 2 May 2017.

Hootsuite 2017. The Do’s and Don’ts of How to Use Hashtags. URL:
https://blog.hootsuite.com/how-to-use-hashtags/. Accessed 2 May 2017.

Hubspot 2017. How To Calculate Your Ecommerce Cost of Customer Acquisition.

URL: https://blog.hubspot.com/ecommerce/calculating-ecommerce-cost-of-customer-
acquisition. Accessed 3 May 2017.

Hubspot 2017. State of Inbound Marketing 2012. URL:

https://cdn2.hubspot.net/hub/53/blog/docs/ebooks/the_2012_state_of_inbound_marke
ting.pdf. Accessed 3 May 2017.

Kelley, L., D., Jugenheimer, D. W. & Sheehan, K. B. 2015. Advertising Media Plan-
ning: A Brand Management Approach. Routledge.

Kissmetrics blogs. 2016. A growth hacking blogging community. URL:

https://blog.kissmetrics.com/learn-growth-hacking/. Accessed 8 March 2016.

Kissmetrics blogs. 2010. A blog about analytics, marketing and testing. URL:
https://blog.kissmetrics.com/seo-guide/. Accessed 10 March 2016.

Kissmetrics blogs. 2016. A blog about analytics, marketing and testing. URL:
https://blog.kissmetrics.com/understand-your-customers/. Accessed 10 March 2016.

LinkedIn 2017. About LinkedIn. URL: https://press.linkedin.com/about-linkedin. Ac-

cessed 27 April 2017.

Lovett J. 2011. Social Media Metrics Secrets. Wiley.

Rachleff A. 16 July 2016. What is product-market fit, really? Wealthfront blog. URL:
https://blog.wealthfront.com/?s=andy+rachleff. Accessed: 4 February 2017.

41
Sildeshare presentations. 2016. Sildesharing community. URL:
http://www.slideshare.net/ryanholiday/19-growth-hacker-quotes/8-
Growth_hacking_is_more_of. Accessed 8 March 2016.

Systrom, Kevin 2017. Instagram CEO. URL: https://www.instagram.com/about/faq/.

Accessed 9 May 2017.

Top Hashtags 2017. Top 100 HashTags on Instagram. URL: https://top-

hashtags.com/instagram/. Accessed 9 May 2017.

Twitter 2017. New user FAQs. URL: https://support.twitter.com/articles/13920#. Ac-

cessed 1 May 2017.

Ycharts 2017. Revenue Growth. URL:

https://ycharts.com/glossary/terms/revenue_growth. Accessed 23 March 2017.

Zephoria Digital Marketing 2017. The Top 20 Valuable Facebook Statistics. URL:
https://zephoria.com/top-15-valuable-facebook-statistics/. Accessed 9 May 2017.

42
6 Appendices

Appendix 1: Business manual useful external links for real estate com-
panies to follow

Compa- Website Address Social Link

ny/Agency Media
Chan
nel

The Econ- http://www.economist.com/ Face- https://www.facebook.com/TheE

omist book conomist/
(8m+
likes)

Twit- https://twitter.com/TheEconomist
ter
(20m+
fol-
low-
ers)
Insta- https://www.instagram.com/thee
gram conomist/
(1m
fol-
low-
ers)
Linke https://www.linkedin.com/groups/
dIn 3056216/profile
(100k
mem-
bers)
Bloomberg https://www.bloomberg.com/eur Face- https://www.facebook.com/bloo
ope book mbergbusiness/
(2.5m
likes)

Twit- https://twitter.com/bloomberg
ter
(493k
fol-
low-
ers)
Insta- https://www.instagram.com/bloo
gram mberg/?hl=en
(84k
fol-
low-
ers)

43
Kodisto, https://kodisto.fi/ Face- https://www.facebook.com/kodist
finnish real book oasuntovuokraus/
estate (1k
search likes)
engine
Newsec http://www.newsec.fi/yhteystied
Finland ot/

Hu- https://www.huoneistokeskus.fi/
oneistokes
kus

Furent http://www.furent.fi/home/

Finnish https://www.kkv.fi/en/facts-and-
Competi- advice/buying-and-
tion and selling/buying-an-
Consumer apartment/the-real-estate-
Autority agent/
Expat Fin- http://www.expat-
land finland.com/housing/

Business http://nordic.businessinsider.co Face- https://www.facebook.com/Busin

Insider m/sai?r=US&IR=T book essInsiderNordic
Nordic (10.5k
fol-
lower)
Twit- https://twitter.com/BINordic
ter
(1.5k
fol-
lower)

44
Appendix 2: Business manual mind map

45