Unless you have good processes in place for measuring the effectiveness of your marketing efforts, you could very well be spending your marketing dollars ineffectively.

Good analysis and measurement are critical to any marketing effort. With good information about the performance of your marketing efforts, you can throw away the efforts that aren’t generating success and focus your marketing investment on those tactics that produce solid results.

If you want to grow your business, then marketing essential. But as you ramp up your efforts, successful marketer Anita Newton says you’ll need think to not only like a marketer, but as a data scientist as well. Your marketing needs to include “structured experimentation,” which will help you understand what marketing techniques help grow your business and transform it into a customer acquisition machine. This is something that marketing professionals call “growth hacking.”

Growth hacking is a fairly new marketing tactic that was born out of necessity, as new tech startups had great ideas but not a lot of money to spend on marketing. It’s a technique that uses creativity, analytical thinking, and social metrics to help businesses sell products and gain exposure.

Before you can start your growth hacking efforts, these important business tasks need to be in place:    

• You have identified a product or service that truly solves a customer need.
• You have documented your business objectives.
• You have developed a well‑thought‑out content marketing plan. 

Now you’re ready to start testing in various marketing channels to see which ones produce solid results.  There are two important features of growth hacking: 

1.  Structured experimentation.  Here’s where you start thinking like a data scientist.  To conduct structured experimentation, you’ll need to follow these steps:
2. Integrating viral loops to get customers to keep coming back to your product via your website or social channel.  Think about how you use the internet and social media.  If you use Twitter, you may have noticed that you get a notification via text or email when someone mentions you in one of their tweets.  This peaks your curiosity and causes you to log into Twitter to investigate.  Sending notifications is an important tactic for ensuring users will return to Twitter, and it helps build loyalty among its users.    

As you can see, growth hacking isn’t hard, but it does take time. Rather than requiring a big budget, it requires sweat, consistency and perseverance—which are exactly the qualities of an entrepreneur.  Use this strategy, and your efforts will be rewarded as you see your business prosper.