To measure key growth drivers, growth hackers often rely on the 6-step AAARRR funnel, aka Pirate Funnel. This framework was designed to help startups identify where they should optimize their marketing and sales efforts.
AAARRR acronym stands for Awareness, Acquisition, Activation, Revenue, Retention, and Referral (don’t mix it up with a typical sales funnel!).
Sometimes, you might come across a reduced 5-step funnel model, where the Awareness stage is omitted. Still, I will include it in my AAARRR funnel description, as business growth always starts with people becoming aware of your product or service.
Build your growth hacking strategy following these steps to see how well your business is doing and what you can optimize at each stage.
Let’s talk about AAARRR steps in detail:
Basically, you start with a brand-building aspect.
The first thing to track and consider for your growth hacking is how people become aware of your brand. The goal of this stage is to think of new ways of introducing your company and attracting more customers.
Consider how many people visit your website and how much time they spend on specific web pages. Whenever you get a new user, try to learn how they found out about you. For example, you can do it in your welcome email by including a multiple-choice question. Was it email, social media, or SEO?
Here, the goal is to determine how people become your leads.
You need to understand how well your ads, SEO, and other marketing channels are performing. Track impressions, website traffic, visit-to-lead conversion rate, and how long it takes on average for a person to click through.
What channel brings the highest volume of users? What is the quality of these leads?
Think more about your content, as content marketing is still one of the most powerful tools to acquire new customers. Brainstorm fresh ideas of how to deliver content or invite an influencer to help you spread the word of exclusiveness about the product or service your company offers.
Have difficulty coming up with new ideas? Neil Patel, one of the most famous growth hackers, recommends starting with offering free content or other lead magnets:
These can also be free checklists, ebooks, guides, PDFs, video courses — the only limit is your imagination. HubSpot, for example, created a free website grader back in 2009 that led to increased brand awareness, traffic, and thousands of users (btw, you can still get it for free).
Also called “Happy First Visit,” this stage presupposes you track the number of people who stick around after first visiting your website. This can be the number of people who signed up for your email list, use your app, or read your blog.