If you’ve ever worked at a startup, you may have heard of growth hacking, a new approach to marketing that enables many new businesses to expand their user base, increase brand awareness, and uncover new opportunities at a lower cost than typical marketing alternatives. This practice uses the marketer‰’s creativity, curiosity and data acumen to bypass traditional marketing. Growth hacking is a mindset instead of a practice:

It is a set of disciplines learned through doing and out of necessity. Growth hackers have a common attitude, internal investigation process, and mentality unique among technologists and marketers. This mindset of data, creativity, and curiosity allows a growth hacker to accomplish the feat of growing a user base into the millions.

Growth hacking grew out of necessity from starting a company with virtually no marketing budget. With a next to nothing budget, marketing ad spend, nor the luxury of time — it is still possible to scale your business forward with a dash of creativity, curiosity and a focus on data, and you’ll soon open the doors of opportunitIRS to step up your business and/or recruitment efforts without spending a fortune.

1. Viral Marketing

The most widely known growth hacking initiatives are those that have gone viral. Growth hackers use built-in product features to encourage people to share a product, a piece of content, or a link with new users.

It is a set of disciplines learned through doing and out of necessity. Growth hackers have a common attitude, internal investigation process, and mentality unique among technologists and marketers. This mindset of data, creativity, and curiosity allows a growth hacker to accomplish the feat of growing a user base into the millions.

To do this, one thing you can try is applying an old but proven technique: the refer-a-friend program. Making it easy for people to invite their friends and family via Facebook, Twitter or email can bring a spike of quality people joining the community, including the elusive millennials. It is reaffirming, but not surprising: people are more likely to join a community if invited by people they already know. And if you empower people to use social media to tell their friends and followers about your community, you‰’ll get quality results sooner.

2. Email Marketing

Another low cost but effective growth scaling method lies in the creative use of the ubiquitous monthly newsletters, or EDM. We added “Refer a Friend” at the bottom of the emails, making it convenient for people to tweet or post a Facebook update about the community.

This approach demonstrates the importance of having a solid email marketing program not only in your research practice but also in all aspects of your marketing. A high quality, weekly or monthly newsletter churned out on a regular basis allows the business to engage people in the community, share some of the insights we‰’re getting, and promote our growth hacking efforts as we venture deeper into this business. Consistency is key: if people know that your newsletter is packed with valuable information, they are less likely to unsubscribe and they are more likely to amplify your messages.

3. Content Marketing

Through blog posts, infographics, and social media platforms, growth hackers use content to generate leads. By providing content that is useful, relevant and interesting to a target audience, brands build their reputation and increase awareness of their products and services. This technique is what many marketers refer to as content marketing.

If you’re managing an online community, content marketing can also play a role. For instance, we regularly share and seed useful content articles on a number of social channels, including but not limited to our own website blog. But it goes beyond that, a well-produced video, infographics, ebooks in PDF format and even a simple but relevant ad creative can go the distance where content marketing is concerned, and the ultimate fruits of your labor — ROI.

Also, a more general technique is to have blog posts and sponsored articles appear on popular websites that your target group frequent in order to increase awareness of a community. We have found that this is a subtle way of promoting a community while also providing value and validation to current members of our site.

It’s easy to simply come up with content and release it out to the world wide web, but what if it doesn‰’t achieve expected results? Growth hackers bring all these techniques together by consistently doing A/B testing and analytics to enhance landing pages, blogs, online ads and other messaging in order to convert people into qualified leads and customers in the most cost-effective manner.