Understanding Growth Hacking - Recap of MAcademy #2 by Dapper

How to make your company grow? Many companies would like to find the silver bullet to answer that question, and during the second training session of MAcademy, “The Future of Growth Hacking,” provided by our partner Dapper, students learned about crucial tools to help companies generate and capture demand. 

The (route to the) future of our careers

Before the actual training started we had an interactive discussion about what students wanted to do after finishing their studies: working at a corporate? Helping a start-up? Traveling? Start your own business? After the discussion, Tycho Luijten (co-founder of Dapper) talked about his entrepreneurial journey before he founded Dapper. During his IBCoM Bachelor program he founded multiple companies, some more successful than others. After finishing his Bachelor program, Tycho did a board year at MAEUR after which he started his Marketing Management Master. A while later, when Tycho was working as a freelance Marketer he met Yvo, with whom he undertook multiple entrepreneurial endeavors. After trying out multiple projects, they founded Dapper - The Growth Agency. This company helps other companies understand the market, consumers and subsequently how to use the right tools to help the company grow. Talking about growth, Dapper has 24 employees currently, but is growing fast. 

The Evolution of Marketing: 

After Tycho’s introduction we dived into the evolution of Marketing, especially in the Post-Internet era (after 1990). There have been 4 major developments in this era: the presence of search marketing, social media platforms, mobile phones and the fact that online behavior became trackable. Within these 4 categories there are also other transitions going on. For example, search behavior is changing due to the rise of TikTok and ChatGPT. Social media platforms allow marketers to hyper target audiences. This is where growth hacking comes in. It is specifically focused on constantly testing what people click and convert on and using these insights to make data-driven decisions, in terms of targeting and positioning. Ultimately enabling marketers to make better decisions in which steps in the funnel they have to focus on and gives them tools to know what really resonates with the target audience. 

Growth Hacking is a part of Growth Marketing, which is the process of rapid experimentation to identify the most efficient ways to grow a business and optimize the entire customer lifecycle. It was long thought that growth marketing was a full funnel, that it was possible to analyze every step in that funnel and that people could be pushed through every step . It turns out, that is actually not the case, and therefore Tycho presented us a new - more simplified - framework: Demand Gen & Capture. To start off, The Demand Gen part is used to get consumers to actively think about your brand once they actually need your product. This could be through LinkedIn posts, TikToks or Newsletters. Second, Demand Capture is meant to capture the consumers that now need your product. The best tools for this are Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Advertising. In essence, it is crucial to keep investigating how your prospect searches.

A Case about Blind dating: 

We rounded off the academy with a case in smaller groups of 4-6 people. The objective of the case was to come up with a marketing approach to get your first user base for a blind dating app with the Demand Generation & Capture framework. This led to interesting discussions about: who will actually be our consumers? Will they be young or old? And how can those people be reached? 

In conclusion, not only did this second MAcademy give us a lot of interesting insights into the world of growth hacking and marketing, but also gave us the opportunity to actually practice with the frameworks presented during the workshop. 

Stay Tuned for the next MAcademy which will be announced on our socials soon!