Traditional marketing is getting a facelift. Every strategy and every dollar spent should point toward one goal: Growth! Being slow is not an option. growth hackers that do not move fast will not be able to significantly impact businesses. At a rate of five experiments per month, that would mean you’d have only one or two outcomes that would positively grow your business once every two months.
Before we start, make sure your growth hack engine is in place.
To get the most out of these growth hack techniques, a basic growth hacking engine should be present. For every experiment that you run and devise in your growth hacking journey, make sure to execute these following steps first:
Hypothesize: Before you start any new experiments, layout all-important growth metrics, and funnel data first. Create a hypothesis and pinpoint which growth metric will be impacted.
Measure: Needless to say, you HAVE to measure all your growth efforts. At a basic level, you measure the immediate metric that is impacted (e.g. click rates on a website A/B test), but the best measurements go through the funnel to look at causal effects on sign up rates, activation rates, paid conversion rates, and so on.
Analyze: To be able to determine whether your growth hack experiments have succeeded or not, you need to analyze their performance and pitch them against a controlled set (e.g. A/B testing), or compare against historical data. The former alternative is better, as the latter might be affected by seasonal and external factors — but still, go with what you have.
Leverage: A big part of growth hacking is knowing how to leverage successful growth experiments and turn them into sustainable, scalable efforts that keep on driving exponential growth. After analyzing the measured data of your experiments, identify which opportunities will give you the most bang for your buck, and double down your efforts on that particular experiment.
After all these pre-requisites and homework, one may be able to apply the ideas on their business. Here are some of the growth hacking ideas that you can try this week for quick results!
Create Customer persona
The best way to understand your customers is to create buyer personas, also called customer avatars. These will collect information about their:
- Age, gender, and education
- Key information sources
- Goals, values, challenges, and pain points
When you have this information, it helps you understand how your product or services solves their problems. Then you can tailor your growth hacking marketing strategies accordingly.
Blogs!
Blog like your product depends on it (because it actually does). Customers can’t love you if they can’t find you. If you haven’t already started a blog, fire one up and start writing today. Blogging is one of the least expensive, simplest ways to connect and stand in front of your audience and influencers. No matter what industry you are working in, there is a lot of expertise that you need to have to work there. Whenever you have a blog, you can showcase your knowledge and skills on your blog which shows people that you know what you are doing and builds your authority in the industry. Having authority in your industry translates to dollars since people are willing to pay more money to work with experts. Once you hook your readers, they’ll want to hear from you on a regular basis. The more content they read about your brand, the more likely they are to trust you, choose you, and recommend you to their friends. If you disappear, so will your readers.
Be a self-promoter
Confidence is contagious. So is a lack of confidence. Ask for guest posting opportunities and backlinks. And be gracious with linking back and cross-promotion to other like-minded people. It’s intimidating to pitch your content to the people and brands you look up to, but remember that you are the foremost expert on your products and services.you will never go unnoticed by the target doing this!
Be Everywhere
Its free publicity for your brand. Market your product on every social website. Create as many posts as possible, Ask your friend to share it. Create relations with other influencers and once you’ve made it big in the world of “digital somebodies,” don’t neglect to pay it forward with others who are just getting their start. Throw them some backlinks and guest posting opportunities.
Create an e-mail stockpile
E-mail marketing is the most effective form of online marketing. Despite what many have been saying for the past few years, email marketing continues to be the most profitable form of marketing by quite some distance. It’s one-to-one communication Unlike other popular marketing channels, email is a way you can design your promotions as a one-to-one conversation. This can and should be the aim for all marketing promotions, however nowhere is it more effective than in a message that drops right into a prospect’s inbox. It can be completely automated. Setting up email campaigns on the likes of Mailchimp and Hubspot enables you to create automated marketing sequences. This means your emails will automatically be sent to your prospects wherever they are in your marketing funnel and your buyer journey. Lastly, it keeps you connected. Unlike an ad amongst the 6,000 ads we see every day, an email sent to your inbox is a lot more memorable and personal. If you’re a good copywriter then your emails will just look like they’re from a friend checking in. Most importantly, you’re kept in the mind of your prospects when you email them regularly.
Leverage Referral Marketing
Referrals from friends, family, or industry influencers relatively convert a lead much faster than other means. The CPA of referral customers is less, allowing you to cut down your costs too. Such customers have better retention rates that result in a 16% higher LTV. Additionally, sales experts with referral programs also earn four to six times higher. Uber started out as a ride-sharing business. They used referral marketing to increase their brand awareness and user reach. The idea was simple: Users get $5 credit for every time other users use their referral code. The idea was so successful that it has been replicated by every ride-sharing app ever since.
Growth has always been a challenge for many businesses. The real issue is that your market and target audience aren’t exposed to creative marketing campaigns on a regular basis. In such a competitive environment, you can only grow your business by adopting these aforementioned growth hacking strategies. Your growth hacking efforts should put you in front of leads that are looking for a product or service that will address their pain points, and you can easily capture these pain points and deliverables on a whiteboard calendar. While there is no harm in trying out new things (in fact, this is the number one advice from all experts), businesses must focus on deploying tried-and-tested growth strategies. There is no single hack that resolves all pain points. Henceforth, don’t hesitate to practice with new growth hacking strategies.
