Startups need a little encouragement when developing marketing plans to advance their businesses. However, how can a company concentrate on developing growth strategies with a tight budget or resources? Growth hackers or marketers can help with this.
Entrepreneurs look for different growth hacking strategies since they want to expand swiftly by acquiring millions of clients that boost their sales. A successful strategy for companies is proven growth hacking ideas. However, only some firms can effectively use these marketing growth techniques.
Growth hacking: What is it?
Growth hacking is an experiment-driven method for figuring out the best ways to expand a company. Marketing, development, design, engineering, data, and analytics are all used in the process.
The term “growth hacking” refers to the practice of achieving growth using unconventional means rather than through the use of traditional methods. Here are some reasons why you need growth hacking strategies:
1. Allows for quicker monetization
Traditional marketing and promotion techniques take a while to produce results. Growing your brand more quickly than with conventional means is achievable when you start using growth hacking. More money will trickle in if you create buzz and swiftly add new members.
2. Encourages adopting a growth mindset
You are more likely to focus on your company’s growth if you choose growth hacking. As opposed to your prior passive strategy, it will assist you in being more active in expanding your organization.
3. Makes you become the market leader
You can establish yourself as a household name in your field. When you generate demand for an item or service that doesn’t already exist, it is significantly simpler to dominate the market. In the absence of rival businesses, growth can occur more quickly.
4. Helps you become familiar with novel business strategies and product ideas
Gaining a deeper understanding of your market and clients through growth hacking. There are so many experiments that you discover new business models. You may then put these strategies into action to help you make money.
5. Improves the development of items
The capacity to create better products is one of growth hacking’s most obvious advantages. You receive more recommendations when your product is outstanding.
6. Makes your business advantageous and economical
Growth hacking entered the marketing landscape when businesses wanted to grow without spending much money on traditional advertising, public relations, and other expensive tactics. The idea is to select more innovative, low-cost tactics to boost return on investment and aid in business expansion.
7. Aids in the discovery of effective marketing techniques
To find a strategy that works, you need to experiment. Because they are constantly changing, there is typically not a set of tactics you can rely on. It all comes down to determining which marketing strategies are effective for hitting a sales target and sticking with them until they stop producing results.
8. Builds a framework for growth
Growth hacking requires plenty of experimentation; thus, the best strategy is to create a framework for your growth-hacking marketing strategy.
Growth Hacking Strategies
1. Apply science-based principles
– Start by generating ideas
– Prepare hypotheses based on these concepts.
– Use them, and concentrate on the conclusion
A good process is one that you can scale, predict, and repeat with ease for the expansion of your firm. You need to use the scientific approach as a foundation to streamline your internal procedures.
2. Have a target in mind
Setting quantifiable objectives comes after developing the process. Even if your company’s revenue growth is your goal, you will only be able to work toward it if you further break it down.
For instance, producing excellent leads might help you reach your main objective of boosting revenue. So you advance toward accomplishing your larger goal by working toward a lesser one.
3. Brainstorm and develop hypotheses
For experiments to be successful, brainstorming is essential. The concepts can be added to a Google sheet or document and developed into research-based hypotheses.
Here’s how to go about it:
Idea: To increase conversions, include lead magnets in your blog posts. According to research, lead magnets could improve our low conversion rate.
Theorem: Using lead magnets will cause our conversion rate to rise by x%.
4. Set ideas in order of importance
After developing hypotheses based on your first ideas, you might still have many new ideas. Prioritize the experiments and concentrate on those that will have the biggest impact.
5. Execute experiments
To carry out experiments, you must pay attention to every detail. Every aspect of your experiments must be considered. If you want to acquire better results from your experiment, start by only testing one variable at a time.
Before beginning the experiment, determine a mechanism to evaluate the outcomes and choose a time frame. Once you’re finished, use the findings to motivate future experiments you’ll conduct.
6. Analyze your experiment results
You must evaluate the outcomes of your experiment before putting them into practice. Discover the results’ meaning, how you might use them, and what to do next. Reflect on how you could have conducted your experimentation in a better way.
7. Analyze Your Rivals’ Strategies
There will be rivals in every industry. As a new business owner, you ought to monitor your rivals. Finding your business competition is the first step in running a successful business. Examine their marketing strategy and other advantages to make your company stand out.
Additionally, by analyzing the potential of your rivals, you can present a better strategy to your target audience. Your rivals do the same business as you and offer comparable or identical goods.
With the increased internet use, you can now compete with businesses from various regions, nations, and even the entire world. Even though the situation has grown larger. To compete with the others, you must put serious thought into it and offer something special. Additionally, you need to know their strategies and business practices before offering your customers an enticing offer. Therefore, by being aware of what your competitors are doing, you may create a cost-effective marketing plan for your company.
8. Establish a Community for Your Brand on Social Media
Social media has become a popular channel for reaching a sizable audience with a brand’s voice. Through these channels, you may introduce your brand, engage with your audience directly, solicit their opinion, speak with influential people in your field, learn about your rivals, and more. As a result, it allows you to create a group of like-minded individuals.
Without question, it is better to shout in a crowd than alone. Therefore, you can advertise your company by setting up groups or forums on various social media before releasing your goods. You can update engaging content, generate buzz, plan contests, run advertisements, start and join similar groups, and do other things to do this.
9. Get accustomed to email marketing
A successful user acquisition, engagement, and retention strategy for your company is email marketing. By sending appealing emails to your prospective audience, you may generate buzz about your goods or services even before they go on sale.
You must first compile an email list of the people in your target market to whom you wish to introduce your company. Then consider your audience’s nature, age, location, preferences, needs, and other factors when planning something. By doing this, you may comprehend your users’ tastes and effectively deliver your content to them.
You should send emails at least once every week before launch because it allows you to interact with them directly.Before your launch, it will generate potential customers for your company. To efficiently create an email list and send it to users, you may also use Mailchimp’s email marketing tool.
10. Utilize Nearby Markets
White space opportunity and neighboring marketing are frequently misunderstood terms. Similar to inventing a new market for your current product, white space potential. On the other side, adjacent marketing uses your expertise and capacity to increase sales in your current channel. You consider the point where Product, Customer, and Application converge when you analyze the current market for your company.
A software company creates a variety of WordPress plugins and add-ons. They have a loyal customer base. Now they can develop other related components, such as a WordPress theme, to serve their customers better and expand their market. With less risk, it will offer future sales growth within their expertise and capacity.
11. Give beta testers discounts
Giving away promotional items has long been a successful marketing strategy in the corporate sector. Before releasing your product to the market, you should test it for compatibility.
As a result, you can provide the beta tester with a tempting offer. You can persuade individuals to utilize your goods or services in this way and get honest feedback from them. Later, you can use these critiques to raise the caliber of your services before launching them broadly. The likelihood of consumer discontent will be reduced, and sales will be increased.
Additionally, it can be complicated to convince folks to utilize your stuff, particularly if they are already enamored with another. It would help if you thus considered their needs and then came up with something creative and attractive that they won’t be able to resist.
12. Make a hype or go with the flow
There is a good probability that many people standing before you have been doing business and serving the public for many years. It is, therefore, only possible to attract some of their clientele to you after some time.
Your target audience needs to be intrigued first. The same applies if you bring something that has never been done before. In that instance, you generate interest in your goods or services among the general public. It is a relatively simple yet effective strategy for business promotion.
It would help if you came up with something unique to capture your audience’s interest, and it should be both inventive and able to entice your target audience.
13. Use Q&A websites like Reddit, Quora, etc.
Nowadays, it’s usual practice to advertise your company on social media and engage with customers about your goods or services. Without question, it’s a successful method of approaching the general populace.
However, companies’ overuse of social media marketing leaves a negative impression on customers’ minds. In the sea of overwhelming marketing, they frequently become perplexed and unable to make decisions.
Sites like Quora and Reddit can assist you in this situation by helping you creatively present your company. You can look up questions about your industry and participate in the discussion. Ascertain that your goods can meet their desire. Additionally, give a general explanation of how your products will satisfy their wants.
On the other hand, Reddit will allow you to grow your network in the neighborhood of your choice. It’s a significant opportunity to interact with your audience and launch your company internationally.
14. Use referral marketing as a tool
Typically, we adore hearing feedback from our loved ones. You can use this mindset to up your marketing efforts, so you must persuade them to utilize your goods and rave about them to others.
You can achieve this by providing them with benefits like coupons or other discounts. Large corporations like Dropbox, Airbnb, and Uber use referral marketing for advertising their services. Because it is reliable and acts like a chain reaction, it can significantly increase your website’s traffic.
15. Work with influencers who have a large following
Influencer marketing may boost brand authenticity and foster user trust. Because of this, major international companies like Colgate-Palmolive and Adidas have been utilizing this marketing strategy and collaborating with several social influencers for many years. 86% of marketers employed this tactic to expand their businesses, and 94% of them thought it was successful, according to Linqia research.
Followers from your intended market will advertise your company to those customers either offline or online. Marketers from all sectors collaborate with influencers to increase their social media activity on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and other social networks.
You can enlist the help of regional celebrities to spread the word about your business locally. There are so many different strategies to grow your business significantly.
Examples of Live Growth Hacking that will Astound You
One of the best instances of a growth hack in the modern digital ecosystem is, without a doubt, the most widely used social networking site. Facebook has almost 2 billion users and has ingrained itself into our daily lives. It has now changed its name to Meta.
What were some decisions made by the “Growth Team” at Facebook that helped it achieve 500 million users? Is a Quora question that reveals two effective scaling strategies used by the social media giant.
To share content with people in their circle, they first urged users to link their friends and family to Facebook. Second, Facebook sent their friends and family members emails inviting them to open an account on the social media platform.
Because they were curious about who had tagged or mentioned them on Facebook, many people were drawn to this growth hack. They were interested in what other people on Facebook were saying about them. Additionally, they were curious about the benefits of signing up.
Hubspot
Offering a free tool is a creative development tactic that has been effective for Hubspot. The website grader tool from Hubspot is one of the free resources the company is known for offering to its users. The tool aids users in optimizing their websites by helping them assess them for SEO, mobile friendliness, and speed. Additionally, the requirement for registration to receive your site report contributes to the expansion of Hubspot’s email database.
The company’s founder and CTO, Dharmesh Shah, credited the website grader tool with helping it grow to 15,000 clients and a $1.6 billion market value in 2015.
Tesla
Since its inception, Tesla has produced more than 600,000 automobiles. For a manufacturer of premium cars, those are some incredibly high numbers. How did they get such amazing outcomes with a cost-free marketing strategy?
Tesla does not advertise in the same manner as other automakers, such as with television advertisements and outdoor billboards.Rather, they utilized their customers as salespeople. They used the following strategies:
- Scarcity
- Exclusivity
- Individual approach
- Referral initiatives
Selling a way of life rather than a commodity.
We can learn a lot from Tesla’s creative and affordable marketing approach. The customer experience became the focal point of Tesla’s marketing approach. They used their customers as their best (free) marketers. Again, it successfully promotes a way of life rather than a product.
Uber
Uber has a brilliant technique for breaking into new markets; they customize their strategies for each new location they go to. They used a location-based strategy that considered nightlife, events, weather, and the availability of taxi services. This aided them in meeting market demand, particularly in cities like Chicago and San Francisco, where it can be difficult to hail a cab late at night.
Additionally, they concentrated their entire marketing strategy on bringing about numerous modifications to conventional/local taxi services, such as simplifying payment, lowering prices, and enhancing client happiness.
When they realized that customers tend to utilize their services frequently after their first ride, they started giving new customers $20 to use for their initial travels. They believed that their client’s lifetime value would greatly exceed that sum. By lowering many of the barriers new Uber users faced, this incentive increased the likelihood of becoming devoted customers.
They virtually exclusively used word-of-mouth advertising to highlight the convenience of their service over traditional taxi services. Additionally, Uber uses public relations superbly by using their court disputes as unpaid publicity to boost customer advocacy and loyalty. Uber has shown that unconventional business strategies and bad press can benefit a company’s expansion.
Netflix
Without mentioning Netflix, the growth hacking example would be incomplete. One of the most ground-breaking growth hacking instances is Netflix, which started as a DVD rental service in 1997. The freedom to view whatever customers wanted, whenever they wanted, was and continues to be Netflix’s USP and a crucial factor in the firm’s success.
The company used various tactics, such as dividing into two businesses—one selling DVDs and the other offering internet streaming—and utilizing the proceeds from one to fuel the expansion of the other.
Other growth hacking techniques Netflix uses include:
- Purchasing and streaming well-known TV shows to get subscribers to watch them
- Building a big social media following to interact with fans of entertainment.
- Employing the best talent to create incredible content that will compel viewers to subscribe
It’s important to note that there are already more than 117 million active Netflix subscribers worldwide.
FAQs
What distinguishes digital marketing from growth hacking?
A specific branch of digital marketing called “growth hacking” uses a different approach and methodology. In digital marketing, leads and sales are generated via internet platforms.
Growth hacking uses many of the same digital channels to expand a firm, but it emphasizes data-driven experimentation, iteration, and an agile mindset.
As an illustration, some growth hacking activities can involve testing Facebook advertisements, speaking with customers for a blog post, and enhancing homepage copy. They all focus on rapid growth while being in the marketing industry.
Can content marketing use growth hacking?
There are five content-focused growth strategies, for instance:
- To enhance interaction and organic reach, create Facebook ads that “trickle down.”
- Incorporate videos into your posts to improve “dwell time” and your rankings.
- You can extend your films’ usefulness by turning them into standalone content for other channels.
- Reach those most likely to make purchases by creating Facebook audiences based on intent.
- Expand the LinkedIn profile of your CEO and take advantage of people’s yearning for human connection.
Growth hacking: Is it bad?
You need to believe boosting engagement with your product and expanding your customer base are forces for bad. What’s wrong, for instance, with showing two different website visitors a different headline to determine which one resonates most with your audience? Better explaining what you do ultimately benefits both your company and website visitors.
Growth hacking is an evolution in response to the tools and resources available to marketers. It depends on how it’s used, whether it’s a force for good or evil, like many other things.
What are the roles and responsibilities of a growth hacker?
A growth hacker’s typical responsibilities and tasks consist of the following:
- Create and use front-end web code when necessary to launch interactive tools and applications that support the marketing team’s objectives.
- Work together to pinpoint potential growth areas with marketing teammates who specialize in particular channels (blogging, email, social media, etc.).
- Evaluate and improve customer acquisition strategies (such as affiliate marketing, direct mail, out-of-home, and online advertising).
- Carry out and present market and competitive research.
- Offer innovative new projects, such as developing free tools and applications that draw users and generate leads or experimenting with novel methods for capturing market demand
- Convert concepts into doable steps that produce beneficial business outcomes.
- Conduct analyses, make suggestions, and oversee the execution of improvement initiatives.
- Stay current with UI/UX and digital marketing trends and developments.
- Recognize market trends and insights.
What is the selection criteria for a growth hacking marketing company?
- Methodology: Do they provide the services you need?
- Have they had success working with organizations like mine?
- Do they make you feel good when you talk to them?
