Marketing & PR vs. Growth Hacking

Is there a difference?

A lot of people go bleh when they hear the term ‘growth hacking’. Maybe it’s the ‘Hacking’ part. I honestly don’t know.

A lot of my clients and prospects I’ve pitched to have asked me about the difference between marketing and growth hacking.

The answer is simple. The mindset.

When you're marketing, you’re either going to be doing paid or organic, or maybe both. You have a budget. You have options. And you have the patience to wait until you see the fruits of your labor.

When you're growth hacking, you’re aiming for fast growth on a bootstrap budget. You don’t have much options, and you certainly don’t have much time to be patience. Hence the ‘hacking’ part.

Some argue that growth hacking is just hyped up PR. To a degree, yes. Seeing what a lot of PR firms do with a couple of phone calls, I’d say the two do have some similarities in their results.

But PR is not affordable to most of the brands out there. And boy do they cost a lot. I can confirm since I’ve worked with a couple of mid-sized PR firms.

For example, if a certain person wants to get a quote published in a Forbes article, all they have to do is contact a PR firm, and after a (very brief) phone call, they'll make it happen. And you’ll get a low five-figure invoice at the end of the month.

But most people who want to be on a Forbes article don’t have that luxury. They have to get down in the trenches, either watching HARO requests like a hawk, or reaching out to Forbes writers on Twitter - publicly, might I add, since most of them have private DMs switched off.

And they might get a quote in some random article.

With growth hacking, we don’t care about Forbes. That comes a little later. Instead, we focus on mom-and-pops publications who are hungry for content, and write a couple of dozen articles for them in exchange for an article about our person. Do that enough times, and pretty soon, you’ll have people reaching out to you for quotes.

This is just a single scenario out of thousands where the little guy gets to get on par with the big boys, play the same field, and reap the same benefits.

Ultimately, growth hacking is about growing your brand or company at a (much) faster rate using little to no budget using unconventional and out-of-the-box tactics.

-Jay.