These days, traditional marketing isn't as effective anymore. Today strategists are leaning on growth hacking because it is a cheaper and more effective way of getting your products visibility and customers.
What is a "growth hacker" ?
Growth hackers were the secret weapons behind the launches of some of the biggest or hottest companies on the planet. Facebook, Twitter, Uber, Square, Airbnb, Dropbox. These brands came out of nowhere and acquired, collectively, billions of users. Growth hacking was the scientific and scalable marketing approach behind it.
The marketing game has changed forever
For example, when Facebook decided they would have a growth team instead of a marketing team, and then went on to acquire a billion users inside just a few years, that was a seminal shift for a generation of startups. They saw that they could not only save a lot of money--not hiring some CMO-type or some $10,000 a month PR firm to mediocre results--but that they could actually track their efforts and initiatives, that was huge. Growth hacking appeals to the right brain-leaning engineer set. It's less creative (in the artistic sense) but it makes up for it by being flexible and scalable and efficient.
In conclusion,
Make sure that you implement growth hacking methods if you want to stay ahead of the curve today.