You've just launched your start-up. You have a product you believe in, a motivated team and a budget that, let's be honest, doesn't quite match Coca-Cola's yet. There are two roads open to you: traditional advertising, which is solid and tried and tested, or growth hacking, which is agile and often spectacular. Which should you choose? The answer is more nuanced than you might think.
What traditional advertising really offers you
Traditional advertising includes television commercials, press inserts, urban billboards, radio and classic display campaigns. It has built empires. It has established brands in the collective unconscious for decades.
It's based on a simple principle: you pay to reach a large, often passive, audience. You control the message, the format and the distribution. You benefit from the credibility associated with established media.
But here's what nobody is telling you clearly enough: this model was designed for organisations with substantial budgets and a long time horizon. According to a Nielsen study published in 2023, the average cost of a national television campaign in France exceeds €50,000 for a measurable impact. For a start-up in its early stages, this is often out of reach.
Traditional advertising gives you visibility. But it doesn't guarantee you rapid growth. And rapid growth is precisely what your start-up is looking for.
Growth hacking: what exactly are we talking about?
The term was popularised by Sean Ellis in 2010. It originally referred to an approach in which every marketing decision is geared towards a single objective: measurable, scalable growth. Growth hacking is not a list of tips and tricks. It's a state of mind.
In practice, the growth hacking combines data analysis, rapid experimentation, continuous optimisation and results-driven creativity. It's based on short feedback loops: you test, you measure, you adjust, you repeat.
Dropbox used growth hacking to grow from 100,000 to 4 million users in 15 months thanks to a simple referral programme. Airbnb exploited Craigslist's user base to propel its growth without a massive advertising budget. These examples are not exceptions. They illustrate a logic.
Growth hacking requires less money and more intelligence. It requires analytical rigour, curiosity and a tolerance for failure. Because most experiments fail. And that's precisely where its value lies.
The real criteria for making your choice
You don't have to choose definitively between the two. But you do need to understand when each of these approaches really serves you.
The stage of your start-up is the first criterion. If you are in the product validation phase, traditional advertising is premature. You don't yet know your ideal customer well enough to spend a lot of money on a message that could be wrong. Growth hacking allows you to learn quickly and cheaply.
Your business model is the second criterion. A B2C consumer product with a short buying cycle can benefit from targeted digital campaigns, which fall somewhere between the two approaches. A complex B2B product with a long sales cycle will often have more to gain from a content marketing and SEO strategy, two levers directly linked to growth hacking.
Your analytical skills is the third. Growth hacking without reliable data is an illusion. If you don't already have robust measurement tools (Google Analytics, Mixpanel, Amplitude), you run the risk of drawing the wrong conclusions from your experiences. In this case, a well-supervised advertising campaign may be safer.
Growth hacking and advertising: false opposites
Here's something we often forget: digital advertising is itself a form of growth hacking when it's driven by data. A well-optimised Meta Ads or Google Ads campaign, tested on several audiences, with A/B test creatives, is fully in line with the logic of growth hacking.
The real opposition is not between growth hacking and advertising. It's between an empirical approach based on data and an intuitive approach based on budgets. You can do traditional advertising with a growth hacking mindset, and you can do growth hacking without spending a single euro on paid media.
What research in experimental marketing confirms, particularly the work of Professors Koen Pauwels and Dominique Hanssens on the effectiveness of marketing mixes, is that start-ups that combine rapid experimentation and progressive media investment achieve better long-term results than those that choose one or the other exclusively.
What you should actually do
If your startup has been in business for less than two years and has a marketing budget of less than €5,000 a month, focus first on growth hacking. Build your organic growth loops. Understand exactly who your most engaged users are. Identify why they come back and why they recommend your product.
Once you have this understanding, traditional or semi-traditional advertising becomes a powerful accelerator. You're no longer paying to find your audience. You pay to amplify it.
Customer acquisition strategy, conversion funnel, retention rate, viral loops These are the concepts around which you should structure your thinking before opening your advertising chequebook.
The question is not which, but in what order
You don't have to give up traditional advertising. You have to earn it. In other words, you first need to build up in-depth knowledge of your market, your users and your value proposition, before investing massively in channels that amplify a message.
Growth hacking gives you the foundations. Advertising gives you volume. Used in the right order, they don't conflict. They complement each other.
Your start-up doesn't need to choose sides. It just needs to choose the right moment.
