Growth hacking

Growth Hacking Unleashed: Transforming Business Growth in the Modern Era

Growth hacking: two words that have redefined the way businesses grow, adapt, and succeed in the digital landscape. 

This isn't about buzzwords or complex theories; it's about fueling the engine of enterprise with data-driven strategies and inventive marketing. As digital marketers, it's time we dive into how this transformative approach, revolutionizing every nook and cranny of business growth, is not just reshaping our roles but redesigning the entire game of competitive advantage. 

Let's navigate the ins and outs of this methodology, understand its profound implications, and demystify how to wield this powerful tool to propel your business into new realms of success. 

Growth hacking is more than a strategy—it's a new marketing paradigm for the modern era.

What is growth hacking?

Growth hacking is a smart approach to growing your business. It's about finding the fastest, most effective ways to attract and keep customers. The secret sauce of growth hacking involves creativity, analytical thinking, and a dash of social metrics.

Let's break it down with a simple example. Imagine you run a small online bookstore. Traditional marketing would suggest advertising your books, running promotional campaigns, or partnering with authors for book signings. These are great strategies but they might not always deliver the rapid growth you're looking for.

Enter growth hacking. 

Instead of traditional methods, you decide to create a feature on your website that allows customers to preview a chapter of a book for free. This 'hook' encourages people to visit your site, and once they are hooked on a chapter, they're more likely to buy the full book. You could also add a feature that allows customers to share their favorite books or recommendations on social media, driving more traffic to your website, and hence, more potential customers.

The idea is to use inventive, cost-effective strategies to grow your business quickly and sustainably. Growth hacking isn't a one-size-fits-all, but rather a process of testing, analyzing, and optimizing strategies to achieve the best results. It's all about understanding your customers, meeting them where they are, and delivering value that keeps them coming back.

A step-by-step approach to creating a growth hacking strategy

• Define Your Goal: What does growth look like for your business? More users? More revenue? Higher customer retention? Pin down a specific, measurable, and achievable goal.
• Understand Your Audience: Identify who your target customers are. What are their needs, pain points, and desires? Use surveys, interviews, and data analysis to get a deeper understanding. Do as many conversations with them as possible to get deep insights into their behaviors. This will help you craft the right messaging when launching your campaigns. 
• Analyze Your Sales Funnel: Look at every step a customer takes from the moment they discover your product to the point they make a purchase. Where do potential customers drop off? What can be improved?
• Generate Ideas: Based on your goal, audience, and sales funnel analysis, brainstorm ideas for growth. These can be new marketing techniques, product features, or customer incentives. Aim for tactics that are innovative and low-cost but have a high potential impact.
• Prioritize Your Ideas: Not all ideas are created equal. Rank them based on potential impact, ease of implementation, and cost. Use a framework like the ICE Score (Impact, Confidence, and Ease) to help prioritize.
• Test Your Ideas: Implement one idea at a time and measure its performance. This could involve A/B testing, where you try two versions of a feature or a webpage to see which performs better.

Source

• Analyze Results: After testing an idea, analyze the results. Did it bring you closer to your goal? Use quantitative data (like conversion rates or user numbers) and qualitative data (like user feedback).
• Optimize and Iterate: Based on your analysis, refine your idea and test it again, or move on to the next one. Growth hacking is a cyclical process of testing, learning, and optimizing.
• Scale Successful Tactics: Once you've found a tactic that works well, it's time to scale. This might mean reaching out to more customers, investing more in a successful feature, or implementing the tactic across different areas of your business.

5 Tips for successful growth hacking 

Growth hacking is all about smart, innovative strategies to drive rapid and sustainable growth. By following these tips and leveraging technologies you can put your business on the fast track to success.

• Utilize Technology: Leverage technology like a VoIP business phone system to improve communication, optimize operations, and deliver better customer service. This can be particularly helpful for businesses with remote teams or international clients.
• Leverage Referral Mechanisms: Word of mouth remains one of the most effective growth tools. Encourage referrals by incentivizing current users to bring in new ones.
• Build Virality: Design your product or service to have inherent virality. This could be through shareable content, social media integrations, or unique features that users naturally want to talk about.
• Prioritize Retention: Acquiring a new customer is often more costly than retaining an existing one. Focus on building features or providing content that keeps users engaged over the long term.

Examples of companies that utilized growth hacking to transform their business 

Each of these companies found clever, low-cost ways to attract and retain more users, proving the power of growth hacking.

• Dropbox: They offered extra free storage space to users who referred their friends. If you invited a friend and they signed up, both of you got more space. Result? More users quickly joined Dropbox.

• Airbnb: Instead of asking people to list their homes only on their website, they allowed users to cross-post their listings to Craigslist with a simple click. This tapped into Craigslist's huge audience and drove massive traffic and listings to Airbnb.
• Hotmail: At the end of every email sent by a Hotmail user, they added a line that said, "PS I love you. Get your free email at Hotmail." This simple tactic turned their users into promoters and led to a rapid increase in sign-ups.

• Slack: They focused on making a product that teams loved. Happy users often became brand evangelists, telling other businesses about Slack. Word-of-mouth drove their growth, making them a leading communication tool.

Final thoughts

As we navigate the ever-evolving digital landscape, it's clear that traditional tactics alone won't cut it. The success stories of companies like Dropbox, Airbnb, and Instagram demonstrate that innovative growth strategies can lead to monumental shifts in business trajectories. 

As we wrap up, don't just marvel at these stories—take inspiration. Start looking at your own business model, audience interactions, and potential partnerships. There's always room for growth; sometimes, it just requires a fresh perspective and the courage to think outside the box. What's your growth hack going to be? 

Author bio:

Trevor is a SaaS growth consultant and managing partner of Ring4. He leads the product development and drives innovation for building the best light-weight business phone solution in the cloud.

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by Nick Loggie

Growth Hacking: What Is It & How Does It Work?

Here is why many startups and emerging businesses are enthusiastic about this idea

Hacking is not an everyday word in the business community because it connotes invasion and theft. But when used with growth, does it have a unique meaning, or it's just a fanciful way to describe marketing?

Follow me keenly in this article as I demystify this concept and reveal the ideology behind it. Besides defining it, this article will x-ray the differences between growth hacking and marketing. Also, if you're a startup, you will learn how this approach works and its benefit for your enterprise.

I'm sure you would want first to know what this idea means, so let's start from there.

Growth Hacking: What Is It?

In a straightforward term, growth hacking refers to strategies and methods focused on rapidly expanding a business. Coined by Sean Ellis in his 2010 blog post, this concept, requiring multi-disciplinary skills, is now famous among low-budget startups.

Sean Ellis submitted that anyone who has their "true north" as growth is a growth hacker. Andrew Chen later popularized this idea, describing it as a hybrid of marketing that seeks to answer one question. That question, according to Chen, is "How do I attract more customers to my product?"

From a simple idea conceived by Sean in 2010, this idea has become a movement. The goal has been to assist business starters with low experience and little money to scale up.

Is Growth Hacking The Same As Marketing?

There are marketing elements in growth hacking, but the latter offers more. For instance, while marketing primarily focuses on activating a product and creating awareness, growth hacking considers customer retention. A growth hacker is not just an employee paid to promote a brand; h/she is part of the product. The table below differentiates these two similar but different roles.

S/N	Growth Hacking	Marketing
1	Constantly seeking new opportunities for growth	Pre-occupied with creating awareness for an existing brand or product
2	Operates by small experiments to see what is working	Concentrates most times on long-term, big projects
3	Requires extra technical skills like automation, tooling, and programming	Is OK with general marketing skills
4	Functions and reasons based on statistics	It is not necessarily data-driven
5	Obsessed with retaining customers, especially the active ones	Not mandated to keep customers
6	Requires more commitment and involvement than marketing	It does not require as much involvement as growth hacking
7	Targets startups with no substantial experience and finance	Best suited for big or emerging companies

The table above clearly shows that both concepts are not the same. The areas where they overlap include

• Awareness
• Acquisition and
• Activation

Both concepts cannot exist without the above, but one goes further.

Does Your Business Need Growth Hacking?

It seems plausible to admit that every enterprise needs expansion, hence, growth hacking. Big corporations like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Udemy, Dropbox, and Pinterest adopt this approach. Just like seobrotherslv and others exist for everything SEO and marketing, there are dedicated growth hackers in many big corporations.

Therefore, if your company is struggling and desirous of upscaling, you may want to get on board. Instilling this concept in all team members is better since hacking can spring from anywhere.

The benefits of growth hacking are numerous for struggling companies, some of which include

• It applies to any goal, company, person, or country
• Besides being cost-effective, it can significantly increase your ROI
• It can birth novel business ideas or products
• You can detect multiple opportunities for expansion from it
• It motivates producers to develop customer-centric products
• Improves current marketing strategies
• Aids objective analysis of business

Growth Hacking: How Does It Work?

Getting started with growth hacking demands that you put certain things in place. One of them is having a product loved by many people. Growth hacking is not applicable without anything to sell or services to render. It is also essential that your current business has a feedback mechanism from which you can extract actionable data.

Finally, you must have the skillsets required for growth hacking to progress. Parts of these skills include data analysis, graphic design, digital marketing, and other technical skills. You can quickly acquire these skillsets in under a year through online means.

Once this preparatory framework is on the ground, you can proceed to check the boxes below.

1. Find Out Why Your Business Isn't Growing

You would first want to find out impediments to current upscaling efforts. Findings from this can help you quickly come up with workable ideas. And to nail down the exact factor holding back businesses' explosion, expert hackers employ the Pirate Funnel.

David McClure was the brainchild of this model, and it breaks down companies' growth into six. These six steps, called Pirate Funnel, include Awareness, Acquisition, Activation, Revenue, Retention, and Referral. It has a canvas model you can print, fill out, and discover the bottleneck to your upscaling. You can rely on your analytics tools to fill out the printed form.

You can quickly identify your business's weak points from your answer to the questions. You can know what stage or step out of the six you are not performing well and narrow down why. Let's say your weakest point is the Activation Stage. You can check reviews from customers and feedback from employers to know why.

2. Conceive Your Small Growth Experiment

Growth hacking works through small experiments, and this is where you concentrate on the metric that matters. At this stage, you conceive a tactic or channel and try it in small quantity to see its effectiveness. If it fails, you can discard it and try another without losing many funds.

3. Analyze and Implement Your Solutions

Whatever tactic you choose must be analyzed before you apply it on a large scale. The analysis is crucial when two or more solutions appear probable. Once you rank your ideas based on their effectiveness, you implement the first most successful, albeit on a small scale.

4. Repeat the Circle

Once you address a bottleneck, you can expect another one to surface. Repeating this process can gradually eliminate your setbacks and upscale your business.

Takeaway

Growth hacking applies to all manners of business or enterprise. If you have the right skill sets and are hungry for expansion, nothing stops you from kickstarting immediately.

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by Nick Loggie

6 Proven Growth Hack Strategies for Small Business to Try in 2022

One of the crucial parts of small businesses is marketing their products effectively. Entrepreneurs face lots and lots of difficulties to overcome marketing challenges. 

This step-by-step guide breaks down the marketing process and shows how it can be executed to create rapid growth. If you’re a bootstrapping entrepreneur, this article will give you a better idea to launch product after product with enthusiasm ­– and get results.

What is Growth Hacking?

Growth hacking is a popular term used in marketing. It is a set of strategies and tactics that use channels like marketing, sales, and product development as ways to gain visibility and grow a business. Growth hacks aren't about technology — they're about data, human psychology, money, and getting new users for your product. Experts in the field often say these growth hacking techniques can be thought of as digital marketing on steroids.

Growth hackers work on optimizing all aspects of a business: from the onboarding process to user retention, cross-sells, and conversion rates, as well as lead generation and so on.

The growth hacker's goal is to build a self-perpetuating engine of growth. So growth hacking technique is the definition of using the right tools, the right place, and the right time to intensify your site's performance.

Why is Growth Hacking important?

Growth hacking is one of the most important concepts for startups and mobile apps because growth hacking helps to make your company grow faster. 

A growth hack is a marketing tactic that can be executed by a small business without spending a lot of money. It involves using minimal cost for maximum results. Growth hacking helps a business grow in new ways, especially when the economy does not help businesses. Many companies are struggling to cope with the economy now more than ever before.

6 Best Growth hacking Techniques

Let's find out what growth hacking is, how you can apply growth hacking to your startup and mobile app, and how to make your startup or app grow faster. Use this guide to learn about different growth hacking strategies and tactics proven to help businesses achieve exponential growth!

1. Use Social media wisely

Social media is one of the best growth hacking techniques to help you market your product and attract new customers. It gives you a platform to promote your products, engage with your customers and build trust. If you handle social media pages such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or another site that connects with people, then it can improve the number of visits and sales for your business.

If you want to succeed with growth hacking, use popular social media accounts. With millions of users and probably thousands of great conversations taking place every minute, this is a highly effective arena for communicating with customers and networking. If you choose the right channels, it's almost effortless to pick up new clients or connect with current ones.

2. Use customer retargeting

We all know that marketing is getting more and more targeted. Using customer retargeting is one of the best growth hacking tactics to achieve increased sales and get a higher ROI. A lot of big companies are using it, but it's hard to identify the source since tracking tools such as Google Analytics are widely used by them. 

Using the customer retargeting technique will increase your conversion rate. When you are losing one or two sales, or by increasing your app cost and starting to get a little bit upset about it, don't worry! You can easily use customer retargeting to increase your conversion rate.

3. A/B test your website

A/B testing seems intimidating to many people. But you might be surprised how simple it is, and how beneficial it can be.

A/B tests are generally used to determine which version of a given Web page will drive more visitors to your website. It is also used to see how visitors respond to a new design, layout, or advertisement before it is deployed on your website. Although A/B testing is useful for improving conversion rates, A/B tests can also be used to better understand visitors' intent and to improve the overall effectiveness of your advertisements. When you place an A/B test on a web page, the page displays two versions of the same page simultaneously, and you can use the version with better results as the primary page.

A/B testing can be performed not only for the website, but also you can perform for different channels or campaigns, to see the result. 

4. Using the right tool 

It is always better to run your small business in an organized way, to achieve better results. Whether your business is large or small, when you have software that can help your company operate well. 

The software will help you to keep your work organized, and helps to focus more on your business by reducing paper works. Some of the best tools are POS software, accounting software, small business budgeting software, Mailchimp if you are focused on email marketing, Hotshot for social media, Canva for free designing, and more.

Having the right business plan, marketing strategy, suitable tools, and financial planning will help your business to a large extent. Utilizing the significance of financial planning and marketing strategy will make your business reach high with reduced investment. 

Make sure to choose the right tool to increase your productivity and decrease your expenses. For example, when you use accounting software, you reduce the cost of the employee's salary.

5. Search for the right influencers

It's getting difficult to reach the right audience for advertising your product or service. The influencer marketing platform helps businesses to locate the right people who have a sizeable number of followers and can act as a link between you and your targeted audience. This technology has been gaining popularity since it cost-effectively delivers the message of your brand to millions of people.

Building marketing automation for your startup is one of the most cost-effective yet powerful growth hacking strategies. Working with Influencers can help you reach out to your target audience.

6. Get feedback

Using the feedback option is another growth hacking technique. It will help you to reach your customers wisely. Because most people will try to get your product or service only with the reviews. Request feedback from your customers like, 

• We want to hear from you! 
• What did you think of our customer service? 
• What was good, and what could be better?

Customers' feedback is used to improve the quality of your browsing and shopping experience as well as future promotions.

Author Bio

Narbhavi is the Digital marketing specialist at Zetran Technologies. She is the content writer of the company. She works for software products myplan, mybooks, mystaff, and SNAPOS.  

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by Nick Loggie

5 Tips to Grow Your Business

Taking your small business to the next level is going to take a lot of hard work. You have to prepare a winning game plan that allows you to achieve growth without taking anything away from the quality of your current operations. To put your focus on development while staying on top of your day-to-day activities, you need to utilize resources smartly. Here are some of the most important things that you need to do to grow your business.

1. Expand Your Workforce Strategically

More work is probably going to take more hands on deck. Trying to add too many responsibilities to your existing workforce’s responsibilities may result in imbalanced workloads. Nevertheless, you may be reticent to add more personnel to your existing infrastructure when plans are still speculative. As you build your team, add people one or two at a time instead of taking on ten more employees at once.

Find good candidates that have the right type of experience and skill sets for the roles that you need to fill. Even if you're still in the early phases of your development, avoid making your selections based on existing relationships with friends or colleagues. Instead, your hiring decisions should be informed wholly by your confidence in applicants’ qualifications.

2. Involve Your Staff in Your Plans

Get input from your key team members about your plans. The people who are handling the basic nuts and bolts of what’s currently working well for your business are likely to have excellent insight about the logistics of expanding your existing customer base or branching out geographically. They’ll also likely be able to bring some valuable perspective towards refining your sales process. Practical strategies and tools to improve customers’ experiences can help bring in the revenue that you’ll need in order to grow steadily.

3. Incentivize Your Team

A business owner is bound to be excited and motivated about growing a company. A workforce may not necessarily share that same enthusiasm. If employees are going to have more work but won’t reap any economic or professional benefit from development, they probably won’t be happy about it.

Involving and incentivizing your team throughout every step in expansion makes them active participants. Find ways to structure both individual and team-based incentives into reaching key milestones.

4. Build Your Business’ Credit

When you set out to increase your operating budget, you need to do a thorough assessment of your business’ current financial health. Your credit score is a good barometer of your current ability to meet outstanding obligations. Moreover, you’ll want to have a great score so that you’ll have access to the funds or lines of credit that you need to finance additional overhead costs.

In order to raise your business’ credit score, you have to make timely payments on all of your recurring bills. Accounts that are in collection could weigh your score down considerably. Even if creditors aren’t actively pursuing you, consider the possible damage that a delinquent account could be doing to your current score. Devise a plan to address negative marks on your report without hindering your ability to pay for your business’ ongoing needs.  

5. Choose Financing Options Wisely

When you’re seeking out more operating capital, you have to be very calculated about the obligations that you take on. Overextending yourself with a financing agreement can have a disastrous impact on your ability to meet your existing obligations.

First, be sure that you are choosing the right type of lending or financing option. You may do well with an additional line of credit rather than a loan for operating capital. Second, choose your collateral carefully. Lastly, review offers from multiple lenders to assure that you’re getting a competitive interest rate.

Good personnel management and detail-oriented financial oversight can make your business more successful. Expanding your operations always involves some measure of risk, but a well-executed development plan can be extremely rewarding.

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by Nick Loggie

Growth Hacking: Timeless Formula for Small Business and Start-Ups

What do Airbnb, Dropbox, and Uber have in common? Aside from being successful companies, they all use growth hacking strategies to acquire more users. Growth hacking is a term for a technique that uses creativity, analytical thinking, and exploitation of loopholes to achieve exponential user growth.

Small businesses and start-ups often have difficulty achieving growth due to limited resources. However, with the right growth hacking strategies in place, even the smallest businesses can experience significant growth.

Many different growth hacking strategies can be successful, and it's important to find the ones that will work best for your business. This blog post will discuss some of the most popular growth hacking techniques and offer tips on implementing them.

So, whether you're looking to increase your website traffic, acquire more customers, or boost your sales, keep reading for some useful tips.

Utilize social media platforms to access a wider audience.

One of the best ways to get your business in front of new users is through social media. In fact, you can use this medium to get more targeted traffic that's aligned with your business goals.

For instance, if you're starting a pet store and want more visitors from a specific area, creating Facebook pages for each city in the region would be beneficial. Then, use Facebook ads to promote these pages. You can even incentivize people to like your page by offering coupons or discounts for following you on social media.

Craft valuable content that people will want to share. If they see their friends liking or sharing it, they'll be more likely to check you out. Plus, if your posts are highly relevant to your target audience, they'll have a better chance of getting shared.

Don't forget about Instagram. It's important that businesses also allocate some of their time towards marketing on this platform. Also, it's better to create a business account instead of a personal profile, so you have more flexibility.

Also, I've found successful in creating infographics and a written blog post or article and then sharing them across social media platforms.

Implement an SEO strategy

Search engine optimization is an applicable tool if you're looking for website traffic. Bigger brands often dominate Google search results, but SEO can help you stand out. Once your website is optimized, use social media to link back to it. This will help improve your search engine rankings, which will result in more targeted traffic. Don't forget to periodically do an SEO audit of your website to ensure you haven't committed any major errors.

Remember, this can take up a lot of time, so you'll have to be patient. For instance, if you implement SEO strategies for your website, it could take several months before you can witness any significant results. Expect that it won't achieve a positive return of investment overnight.

It's vital that businesses understand how to calculate their SEO cost and SEO gain. This will help them determine whether or not the investment is worth it. There are many tools available to help calculate the cost of traffic and engagement, as well as calculate your return on investment.

Turn your website into a lead magnet.

Think about it. Your site is one of your business's most valuable assets. It's the place where customers can learn more about you and what you have to offer. If you have valuable articles or content related to your business, promote them as landing pages. This will allow you to capture new leads who are interested in your products or services.

Don't forget to include call-to-action buttons on these pages, so prospects know what they should do next. For instance, you can promote your lead magnet through social media and email marketing software, so audiences have the option of sharing it with their friends or subscribing to your list.

Below are some examples of lead magnets that you can use:

• Free e-book or whitepaper on a related subject
• Checklist or worksheet
• Infographic or data visualization
• Video tutorial on how to do something

Focus on the "onboarding" experience.

Once you acquire new leads, you'll want to nurture them so they become customers. According to Techcrunch, 58% of familiar brands are less relevant when compared with their competitors.

What does this mean? You need to create a great first impression for your business and offer your audience a unique experience that will set you ahead of others in the industry.

You can do this by creating a special welcome page that explains to visitors what you offer and why they should continue following your website or social media accounts. For example, if you're launching a new product, update your subscribers on the release date, its features, and pricing information.

One of the best practices to get new users to stick with your product is by making the registration process quick and painless without requiring too many details up front.

Use guerrilla marketing tactics to stand out from the competition.

Once you've established a strong brand presence, use guerrilla marketing tactics that will help you stand out from the competition. You can thank 37signals for this clever name.

Basically, guerrilla marketing is all about using low-cost methods to promote your business - like word-of-mouth advertising through referrals and discounts. It often involves taking risks, which can make it a more effective strategy than traditional methods. 

Be creative with the way you promote special offers or discounts to make them more noticeable. For example, you can create an ad that directs people to a coupon code for 25% off, which they can redeem by mentioning your product or brand name.

Build relationships with customers and clients, and provide excellent customer service.

No one knows your business better than you do. But, even with your intimate knowledge of what you do and how you do it, customers are always at the heart of your success.

By establishing strong relationships with your clients, you create a base of loyal customers who will help promote your business through word-of-mouth marketing. Win-win!

Here are four ways to ensure your customers feel appreciated and supported: 

• Connect with them on a personal level 
• Go above and beyond to complete their needs 
• Keep them updated on what's going on in your business 
• Thank them for their loyalty and support.

These six growth hacking strategies we outlined today should give you some ideas on how you can achieve this goal with little effort or experience necessary. In fact, there are so many things you can do to achieve growth hacking success in your business.

With that being said, it all starts with a strong commitment from you. The fact is, whether you're growing your business or scaling up your existing one, growth hacking techniques have the power to take your profits and revenue through the roof.

So, it's time to get started. Ready?

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by Nick Loggie

6 Growth Hacking Strategies For Small Businesses

What does it take for a small business to succeed?

Traditional marketing methods require a big budget, extra hours, and a dedicated person— or even an entire department— to focus solely on growing the company. Think billboards and TV ads. Frankly speaking, most small businesses might not have the time and resources for that. But that doesn’t mean that small business owners have no chance for growth, especially in today’s highly digital business environment. 

Growth hacking helps budding businesses grow rapidly and stay afloat. Growth hacking methods are often inexpensive and innovative, thanks to its roots in startup culture.  In this article, we’ll talk about six strategies for small businesses to turbocharge their growth and ultimately be successful. But first, let’s discuss what growth hacking is.

Growth hacking definition

Not to be dismissed as “just another buzzword” in digital marketing, growth hacking has actually been around for more than a decade. In 2010, entrepreneur and startup advisor Sean Ellis coined the phrase “growth hacker” as a new job description. He is the CEO of Growth Hackers, and a pioneer of using low-cost, creative strategies to gain and keep customers. 

Startups need to grow quickly or perish. That is why growth hacking is essential to small businesses. If you do not know how to start your business growth and have no idea what plans to have for your small business leadership, there are professional business coaches who are eager to help you to reach your goals and make your visions into reality. The concept of strong leadership development is of huge importance for growth. Growth hacking is sometimes called growth marketing. But many digital marketing experts contend that traditional “hackers” and “marketers” are not necessarily the best growth marketers— or growth hackers, whichever you prefer. In truth, a growth hacker needs to do a bit of research and development, social media monitoring, engineering, innovation, and analytical thinking.

Growth hacking tips for startups

So, how does growth hacking work? Generally, growth marketing activities can be divided into content marketing and product marketing techniques. While content marketing includes guest blogs, social media content, podcasts, and email marketing, product marketing involves strategies like referral rewards and affiliate marketing. Of course, holistic growth marketing is the way to go. Specific growth marketing tips are listed below:

1. Web development

First and foremost, because growth marketing happens online, web development should be part of your growth plan. You want to make sure that your website runs smoothly and has an appealing user experience and user interface, for one. 

Beyond maintaining website essentials, however, you can maximize the power of your site by doing split tests. Through A/B testing, you can compare several versions of your webpage, e.g., your homepage or landing page. Each version’s performance will be tracked so that you can see which has the best conversion rate for your visitors.

2. Retargeting

Did you know that it takes the average customer 9 visits to a site before making a purchase? That’s according to a 2014 study by Rakuten Marketing. It is important to ensure that previous visitors to your website come back to buy your products. Luckily, Google and Facebook retargeting allows you to show targeted ads to users who have already been to your site. That way, your customers are more likely to return or at least remember you when they’re ready to bring out their purse.

3. Blogging

Putting up a business blog has a multitude of benefits. First, you gain readers’ trust as you establish yourself as an industry expert. Second, you generate more traffic and reach out to more visitors who can become your future customers. Clearly, small business blogging can aid your marketing plan. 

If users find your blog insightful, they will surely share them on social media and generate more exposure for your business. Plus, you can let readers sign up to your blog and build your email list.

4. User-generated content

Have you ever thought of using a customer’s comment on social media or a blog post as a testimonial? Why not? Not only is the comment free of charge, it is also most likely to be trusted by other users over your promotional materials. Posting user-generated content (UGC) on your website and social media is an excellent way for you to earn customer engagement, and to convince them to try your products and services.

UGC is social proof and it employs roughly the same magic as traditional word-of-mouth marketing. One, it leverages the trust we put in the people close to us. Two, it appeals to our inherent desire to fit in and our fear of missing out. Simply displaying the names of logos of your clients could attract many potential customers. If you add quotes and photos from your happy customers, that’s even better. Bonus tip: When sharing social proof in articles or social media posts, don’t forget to add a clear call to action.

5. Creative lead generation

Placing pop-ups strategically can help you convert visitors, or at least build your email list. If it’s a customer’s first time to visit your website, ask them to sign up for your blog or newsletter. When a customer is about to leave, offer a discount coupon code for their future purchase.  Offer a free book when a user enters their email address. Gamify your onboarding process and give rewards to new subscribers. 

This list of creative lead generation tactics can go on and on. The point is to keep a list of your prospects and customers, and to keep  them all engaged.

6. Giveaways

Who doesn’t love a freebie? Customers surely do. Give them free trials, be generous with discounts, offer free shipping for a first purchase, or distribute entry-level products for free. This allows customers to try your products and then keep coming back for more. 

Earlier, we said that growth hacking should be low-cost, but that doesn’t mean not spending at all. When giving away freemium products, think of the customer’s lifetime value. You’ll only need to shoulder shipping once, but if that client is satisfied, you’ll have a repeat customer who can refer you to a bunch of other people.

Key points: Marketing for small business growth

Overall, there is no singular path to growth hacking success. You’ll need to combine these strategies to skyrocket growth hack: great website, retargeting, business blogging, social proof, email list-building, and freemiums.

Did we miss an awesome growth hacking tactic?

Share your thoughts in the comments.

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by Nick Loggie

Best Growth Hacking Strategies to Skyrocket Your User Base for Business

There are about 100 billion Google searches every month. This is just one figure to show that consumers like to fetch deeper insight into a business’s products and services. 

If you don’t have the right strategies, your site can get lost in the 1.5 billion websites in the world! 

Harnessing this avenue and implementing growth hacking strategies will reap benefits for your business. Moreover, the right techniques will skyrocket your user base without costing you too much. 

But why is that? 

Growth hacking is a resourceful digital marketing tactic that helps retain prospects and increase sales. However, a marketer can find it hard to strategize effectively without the right skills. 

This article will take you through some of the most efficient growth hacking strategies to generate huge ROI. 

A Peek into Growth Hacking 

Source: jivochat

In its essence, growth hacking combines data and product marketing. 

Marketers using this strategy will follow up on the entire sales funnel and consumer journey. Furthermore, growth hacking creates ways to increase product sales, enhance growth or exposure and retain customers. 

Sean Ellis was the first to talk about growth hacking back in 2017. He wrote a book to help companies use a process in which they can propel their breakout. 

One such company is AirBnB that used a craigslist marketing technique. 

The company offered accommodation providers to use their listings on craigslist. Consequently, offering access to a huge market base with verified information. It was not only cost-effective but also an efficient marketing strategy!

To use growth hacking strategies in your business, you need to understand the funnel stages:  

• Acquisition 
• Activation 
• Retention 
• Referral 
• Revenue 

Did you know that more than 79% of leads never become prospects? Because of those numbers, you need to implement the best growth hacking techniques in all the funnel stages!

The Best Growth Hacking Strategies To Implement In 2021

In this digitized world, even the healthcare industry is using marketing techniques to retain patients. 

Getting visitors and retaining them can be a challenge amidst the minimized attention span of readers. Therefore, you need an effective growth hacking strategy that can work well for your business. 

Strategies As Per The Growth Hacking Funnel 

Source: kevintpayne 

Acquisition 

It would be best to pave your way into a bigger niche for the first stage to attract more customers. In short, you need your business to go viral to enhance your acquisition technique. 

Your marketers can spread awareness about your brand amongst similar products. Moreover, it helps in reaching out to ideal customers by leveraging an already existing consumer base. 

In Action: The referral hack used by Dropbox gained a whopping user increase in just 15 months! 

Activation 

In this stage, you need to focus on converting those consumers by shaping the user flow. Moreover, it would be best if you turned them into active users or buyers. 

The first interaction your website visitors have should be fruitful and engaging. Only then can you convert them. So, after acquiring your leads, you need to nurture them to become prospects. 

You can add live chat features and eliminate form-filling requirements that will help in your campaign. 

Retention 

Using the “free-stuff” selling technique will help retain your leads. So, being kind to them will ensure an effective growth strategy. 

It will help you gain the attention of prospects and leave them wanting more. You will offer a free or trial version of your product and restrict a few of your unique features. Furthermore, it will intrigue them, and they will end up subscribing. 

Therefore, you need to offer a sneak-peak into your products and services. 

In Action: Using this technique, Autopilot skyrocketed its consumer base by 21%. 

Referral 

You can introduce referral programs and turn your customers into brand advocates. Referrals not only offer exposure for your business but also increase your consumer’s trust. 

With this technique, you can encourage users to get something in return for referring your services. Moreover, with this growth hack, you are sure to achieve more users, subscribers and prospects. 

In Action: Dropbox gained a 60% subscription increase with their referral programs. 

Revenue

For the last growth hacking stage, you can make offerings that the prospects cannot refuse. Your goal would be to increase your revenue as much as possible. So, with adherence to the right strategies for the earlier metrics, this will be easy. 

It would be best if you increase your revenue using the 3:1 ratio of LTV to CAC (lifetime value of a customer to cost of acquiring that customer).

This way, you can optimize your growth and drive customer satisfaction. Moreover, collecting feedback, offering customer care services, and marketing to the right users drive revenue generation. 

A Look into The General Growth Hacking Strategies

Source: pinterest 

Along with targeting each metric of the growth hacking funnel, you can also use the following techniques: 

• Harnessing social media platforms that are not in use by your competitors 
• Subject your products and services to rigorous A/B testing 
• Change the layout of your website/landing page and perfect SEO
• Attending and organize community events to entice consumers 
• Always keep an eye out for the trends and implement them 
• Use challenges or quizzes as a hacking strategy 
• Infuse your brand persona in everything you do
• Utilizing guest posting as a marketing technique 
• Partnership with other companies 
• Harnessing email marketing as a hacking strategy 

All of these strategies will help enhance consistency and provide a proper insight into your business. Moreover, the audiences will become intrigued, and it will skyrocket your user base! 

Some Tools To Enhance Your Growth Hacking Strategies

You can utilize numerous tools to enhance your growth hacking strategies. However, the following tools will ensure consumer retention and satisfaction: 

• Zapier 
• Qualaroo
• GrowthBar
• Outbrain 
• Marketo 

Harnessing these tools and implementing their services in your hacking strategies will help you acquire more leads. 

Summing Up

Did you know that 92% of first-time website visitors do not buy? With the hacking strategies and techniques mentioned in this article, you can skyrocket the user base for your business. 

While utilizing marketing hacks, it would be best to target each layer of the funnel. Furthermore, you can maximize the visits to your brand’s website by harnessing the services provided by the best marketing tools. 

Focusing on enhancing your marketing techniques and eliminating unnecessary jargon from your website will generate huge ROI! So, if you want your business to skyrocket, take control of your growth marketing strategies!

Author Bio 

Alexandra Whitt working as a brand and marketing specialist at MedicoReach. She has been working in b2b industry from the past two years. She empowers the marketers by sharing valuable information across different verticals such as healthcare, technology, marketing etc.

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by Nick Loggie