How Psychology Plays an Integral Role in Growth Hacking

 

Companies and marketing firms often use traditional channels that are staples to fuel business growth. Traditional media can be expensive and can consume a huge chunk off of even the biggest marketing budgets. Alternatively, growth hacking can be a much more efficient way to boost business and marketing metrics. 

It is a specific way of combining and applying marketing, psychology, and technology to achieve business growth. Also, you will not need as much capital to grow faster. It will save you money in terms of advertising costs and sometimes even perform better than traditional marketing channels.

Let’s look at some of the crucial psychological aspects of growth hacking and how it works. We will start by discussing a basic requisite for this to work.

 

The Standard Growth Hacker Requisite

The first step of growth hacking is to ensure that you have developed a relevant and solid product that people will buy if marketed well. It doesn’t matter how good you’re at marketing. If your product doesn’t perform in the first go, attracts negative reviews or complaints, you’re not going to do well. 

So, ensure you have a working product that’s an answer to a problem or desire of the potential consumer. Even if it’s not perfect, that’s okay. You can improve your product over time. Ensure you always fine-tune your product. 

Growth hackers have specifically designed approaches that analyze product design and marketing strategies. Sometimes they use them to introduce or enhance the product’s position in the market in unusual ways. 

For instance, they may narrow the audience to specific groups differently from traditional marketing strategies by giving away products or services for free. In such cases, the initial goal is not profit but to own the market. 

This way, you figure out who looks up to your brand and who does not. When you figure out who those people are, all you got to figure out is what kind of messaging will appeal to them and make room for future growth and value. 

Now that we’ve discussed the most basic growth hacking requisite, Let’s move on to the psychological principles a growth hacking agency would practice to help flourish businesses. 

Trick or Treat

Pricing advice and strategies have a lot to do with consumer psychology and buying behavior. It’s common to see people jumping on to a $10 product with a stricken $30 just next to it on the price tag. Essentially, businesses attempt a sale with a psychological trick that’s meant to play on consumer instinct. Despite the awareness, consumers still fall for it, and this method creates a lot of movement of products, especially in supermarkets. Experts use psychology in different ways with pricing.

For instance, when you go to a movie theater and order popcorn, you will most likely find at least three different quantities mentioned on the menu board. Let’s say the small one goes for $3, the medium that’s double the size for $6, and the large for $7. 

It’s not rare to see people order the $7 large, thinking it’s the best deal as they’re getting way more than an extra dollar’s worth. It’s a basic purchasing instinct. Go for more value when you have the money.

The Power of Copy

We all know that custom landing pages are built separately to help businesses boost their conversions. But what’s different on these pages?

Marketing experts or growth hackers use psychology within website copy and images to drive paid traffic and click-through rates. A lot of thought and effort is required to finalize two or three-word call-to-actions on custom landing pages built for search or display ads.

Firstly, they optimize the landing page copy, maybe even use some direct response vocabulary. They also use survey data and run A/B tests to determine which variation is likely to deliver the best results. 

The Power of Free

Many companies sometimes launch a flagship product or brand and make their initial offerings attractive with significant discounts or even free.

For instance, Uber gave away free rides at South by Southwest in 2013. The launch event where they announced the offer saw the presence of a lot of influential people as well. These combined helped Uber put itself on the map. In fact, this strategy proved to be more economical than paying for advertising at the time.

Cymatics had done somewhat the same to build its user base towards the million-plus category with giveaways. They grew really fast. Out of all, the biggest story that emphasizes the power of free is what Reliance’s Jio did in India with their mobile network offerings. For almost a year, customers enjoyed free mobile and internet services that helped Jio eat up most of the Telecom market share.

Psychic Progression

Another very important psychological hack that marketers use is the idea of progression. Ever noticed how gamers keep wanting to move up levels till they win consistently. It’s human instinct to keep making progress. Some are obsessed with the idea of it.

Growth hackers fine-tune product and service intros in ways that can help consumers achieve their goals. They seek the help of content and media to convey the messages on how to leverage the respective products and services for consumers to level up and achieve more in life. This technique is widely used in the education, health, and business coaching industries.

 

Takeaway

That’s it. Growth hacking is when you combine and apply marketing, psychology, and technology in specifically designed ways unique to their nature. 

An important factor you should note here is that you must always try to keep up the logic behind your psychological approach. If people can’t figure out what they are being offered or trust issues arise, your hack might fail. While you try to play against emotions, you must always do so with reasonable logic. 

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