"Growth Hacking" relates to identifying highly efficient ways of growing business.

Where efficient, to me, tends to by $0 methods, as these scale forever.

If you can create a $0 based system to grow your revenues, you can plow huge chunks of cash for even faster profit increases.

I tend to use this approach to validate ideas + just to bring in new waves of customers/clients.

My approach is Meetup trolling.

Attend Meetups where people will be who can use your product/service/information/courseware + where you have zero competition.

For example, one of my companies provides high traffic hosting for WordPress sites.

Easy places to pickup new clients/customers include any Meetup.com group event where people network... because... likely many have WordPress sites + most hosting tends toward slow + glitchy.

Likely no one else will be pitching WordPress hosting, so I'd have no competition.

This example is using offline tech to push to online service.

You can use the exact same approach to promote lawn mowing, only you call it... Executive Landscaping...

Or coaching or computer repair.

Marketing is marketing. Whether your product is online or offline.

The same methodologies apply, as Sean Ellis has said before growth hacking comes only when you have put thought into the whole customer experience.

I have been running marketing and strategic campaigns for almost a decade and I gotta tell you that growth hacking in offline, real world situations for service businesses or even product retail offerings comes only from aligning these 3 things:
1. Simplicity at its best
2. 100% fluff-free problem solving product
3. and ease of use
Complete thoughtfulness on the entire problem solving, choosing, and sharing experience.

With the help of my team at www.Unthink.me - I have been able to help many companies, especially those in service based businesses - such as travel agents, realtors, cleaning / janitorial cleaning companies, etc who struggle with growth and scalability due to time and budget limitations. These companies depend on a service, on point scheduling and well-positioned branding and offering so that their clients aren't the reason for ZERO growth.
What needs to happen for service based businesses for example, what I have done in the past, is align those 3 factors then break them into more categories adding value innovation to each and every single one of them for as little cost as possible.
In the case of Honest Maids for example, www.HonestMaids.co, I was able to stake a market, figure out the branding that was needed, position the company within the entrepreneurial and enterprise community to reach their homes. The pricing, the value proposition, everything was simplified and on-site the team, the experience, the products they are all different - this drove their clients to give referrals, call backs, sign up for contracts, add more properties, airbnb endorsement, amazon endorsements, partnerships with a few universities... etc. etc. - now the company is in various states and we're now helping/trying to franchise it.

The problem with growht hacking is that it grew so fast, the idea was innovative. But when we started the mentality wasn't to promote "free marketing" but unfortunately it has become synonymous with free. In reality, growth hacking is simply finding creative solutions and process to enable the greatest possible experience while putting a strong focus on encouraging social validation and sharing - sometimes growth hacking is very expensive and sometimes it's not. But it's typically not free. If you have any more direct questions regarding this, feel free to message me.
Humberto Valle, MBA, CEO
humberto@unthink.me
www.Unthink.me

Growth Hacking is even better when you are able to combine online with offline activities.

An example of an offline/online activity was following:

Objective: Target CEO and Marketing Manager in a creative way to work with us as a Growth Agency. ,

How we did it:

1. We scraped all the 'upcoming' startups from website http://startups.be. Leaving us with all the information we needed of the companies we wanted to target our leads.

In this case, it was their address, name of startup.

2. Found the name of CEO and Marketing Manager on Linkedin (you can automate this to save time).

3. Send them an offline letter, well actually it was an invoice telling them they had just received a large amount of money on their account.

We made sure to add a number that in case this information was wrong, they should report it.

4. 94% people called in to report the mistake and got to our voicemail asking them to choose between 2 numbers.

One option was asked: if you have questions about how we can make you this kind of money on the invoice, press 1.

If you have no idea what's happening, press 2.

5. People had a surprising talk with us and within a week, we had all the founders and Marketing Managers having an awesome talk with us and about our services.

Feel free to ask about more of these tactics :)