Could growth hacking be the low-cost key to business success?

Growth hacking could be perceived as the realm of high-flying startups, but for cash-strapped small businesses, growing fast at a low cost should be a no-brainer.

Put simply, growth hacking uses innovative strategies to attract the maximum number of customers, while spending as little as possible. The concept was coined by Silicon Valley entrepreneur Sean Ellis in 2010. Ellis later went on to found GrowthHackers, a community of 200,000 members.

Hackers push the boundaries and experiment extensively in the search of an approach that yields the best results. For smaller businesses, the main focus is on marketing tools, such as search engine optimisation (SEO), social media and email marketing, but for giants like Facebook, Airbnb, Uber and Dropbox, the approach can touch every area of the business. David Arnoux, co-founder at growth hacking training business Growth Tribe, says a left-field marketing approach can help small businesses achieve success against larger firms: “It is not a [set] bag of tricks. What you need is a philosophy and a process of rapid experimentation ... When you are a very small company with limited resources – a David versus Goliath – you have to use unconventional methods or tactics to meet your needs.”

Growth Tribe launched its growth hacking academy in September 2015 and has since worked with more than 1,700 people. There are 100-150 attendees a month, made up of young professionals, corporate clients, and adult professionals who take the two-day or six-week crash course in growth hacking.

On the rising appeal of the approach Arnoux adds: “For sure there are more and more companies who are now becoming successful with rapid experimentation and with agile marketing. There are more and more examples of companies who run dozens of experiments per week. The difficulty for most companies is [to embrace] the growth mindset way of working and unlearn bad habits.”

Dutch online auction house Catawiki, was named top of Deloitte’s list of EMEA’s fastest growing companies in 2015. The company achieved 45,080% growth in revenue in the previous four years and attracts 14 million users a month. Chief marketing officer Harmen Visscher says the site has 35,000 lots each week and has grown from a team of 80 people in 2015, to more than 500.

For Catawiki, listening to their customers has been key to their success. The company has prioritised A/B testing across its payment options, email marketing and the product itself since they launched. This involves offering one version of your website, email or advertising to half of your audience and a different version to the other half to see which delivers better returns. You can then commit resources to the most effective.

“The growth hacking mentality should be in the DNA of each company,” adds Visscher. “It is essential for growth for everyone, even when it is not a startup.”A cost effective approach

The possibilities for growth hacking are endless and largely cost effective (or even free). Before it was worth billions, Facebook made use of hacking tactics when it first launched as a platform for students in 2004. Some universities in the US already had their own social networks and were reluctant to embrace the new kid on the block. So Mark Zuckerberg and his co-founders targeted other universities in the immediate vicinity, putting pressure on the students using only their local networks to join Facebook’s universal platform. Similarly, Hotmail used its existing customers to drum up demand in the early days, by adding a line at the end of every email promoting its free service. This was at a time when the public still had to pay for email services.

For today’s small business owner, Growth Tribe recommends trying tools such as Clearbit, which builds profiles on website visitors; Hotjar, which tracks where customers are clicking on a page; Import.io, a web scraper that can be used to find sales leads; and Ghostery, which identifies what analytics tools are running on a website. Growth Tribe uses Rebrandly to target past talk attendees with ads in the weeks that follow.

Consultant Shadi Paterson, who teaches growth techniques through his company The 8760, says all that is required is some common sense.

“The benefit of growth hacking is it’s low cost, it is just time intensive,” he says . He believes building a business profile organically on Facebook and Twitter is a dated approach and entrepreneurs should look to piggyback on the influence of other people. This could be as simple as joining a chamber of commerce. “You instantly open up your network and massively increase your exposure,” he adds.

Arnoux agrees that time can be of the essence. Behind some of the biggest hacks, are 100-200 experiments, many of which have failed. The prospect of undertaking that volume of experimentation is a daunting task. But Arnoux says it helps to focus on one metric at a time.

“A little bit of growth on lots of experiments will give you better growth than one ginormous hack that is meant to solve everything,” he says. “Prioritise by [assessing] how big an impact [that metric] will have and how easy [the experiment] is to run. Whittle it down to three or four experiments and commit to testing them in a two-week period.”

Growth hacking may be one of those trendy imports from Silicon Valley, but its principles are founded in age-old business practices. “You have to find where your customers are and just talk to them, the recipe has not changed,” Paterson says. “Growth hacking is [just] another way of [doing that].”

Sign up to become a member of the Guardian Small Business Network here for more advice, insight and best practice direct to your inbox.