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Scalability is a constant concern in businesses – to achieve entrepreneurs must market their products correctly. Although there are many barriers and obstacles in the way, scalability is facilitated through growth hacking techniques. These are proven elements for success, however many entrepreneurs seem to not be able to execute these marketing growth hacks in the best way.
What is growth hacking?
Growth hacking is a popular word, but what does it mean? In 2010, Sean Ellis invented a term called Growth Hacking for Marketing. This approach combines analytical skills with creativity for maximum return within a relatively short period.
The growth hacking method emphasizes rapid growth and can be scientifically applied to market your product. The growth hacking approach is different from other marketing methods that require much research and planning before implementation.
Growth hacking is much more than a business or a marketing strategy – it’s considered a philosophy that can be adopted by any company, whether big or small. It’s the term used to describe experiments and processes aimed at building and scaling a company’s customer base and revenue.
The ideal growth hacker is someone who prioritizes growth over all other metrics and often uses cost-effective marketing to achieve those results.
Growth Hacking Framework
According to the Hacking Growth Book by Sean Ellis and Morgan Brown, the growth hacking process relies on 4 different steps.
Data Analysis
The first step consists in analyzing relevant data that can measure and explore every touch-point your customers might have with your brand. This strategy is focused on data-driven decision-making.Idea Generation
Idea generating or brainstorming is useful to raise important questions and consider what strategies already in place are contributing to the results generated. After creating a depository of ideas to be tested, choose the ones in line with your current company goals.Prioritize Experiments
From the depository of ideas created, decide which strategies should be implemented in the first place, considering your current company goals. Prioritize demand and establish the experiment’s time and costs.Put Experiments into Practice
After approving or disapproving the test hypothesis, evaluate the resources necessary for the execution of your test.
Growth Hacking Strategies Every Startup Should Follow
The list of growth hacking strategies is endless. Below are 9 examples of growth marketing strategies to expand your potential.
1. Differentiate yourself on Social Media platforms
The term differentiation here doesn’t apply to your content marketing strategy and what you publish (that should already be happening) but rather which platforms you choose to be present.
If you’re in a competitive industry you might not be able to dominate the biggest social media platforms alongside your competitors. When starting consider building a loyal audience on smaller social media platforms where you can find your target audience.
2. Track your leads
It is important to know where your leads convert and where they abandon the customer journey. If you’re not sure in which pages your leads are most likely to convert, test different conversion points through exit intent popups, for example. These tools are available in the free version of Hubspot Marketing Hub.
3. Try A/B testing
A/B testing can be applied to different areas of your business and it is useful to understand which content versions perform better. If something isn’t working, you won’t know why until you experiment with it against a variation.
Making different versions of the same ad helps target different audiences, and even have better-performing ads than others. To monitor a/b tests, consider different metrics to track the different versions created.
4. Do SERP analysis
To rank in SERPs for certain search terms, it is useful to know what you will be competing with by doing ranking research. With this analysis aim to know what’s already in the top ten results for those queries. Besides giving you insights for optimizing your posts, it will also give you ideas for creating even more.
5. Repurpose your content marketing
Repurposing your content immediately doubles your content marketing efforts. To do this there are several actions you can take, depending on the type of content your brand puts out there. Consider what piece of content has the potential to be transformational. These can be blog posts repurposed into podcast episodes, video content, and even summed up in infographics.
6. Make it easy to share
Content is meant for sharing – social media and web content should be interchangeable. To do this you can embed social media posts, like user-generated content, in your website and make it easy for people to share your web content on their social platforms.
Although social platforms are a great tool for businesses, they should not be your main focus – this is, do not distract yourself from your product or service. These should also be easy for customers to share with friends.
7. Customize landing pages
Each customers react in a different way to different stimulus. When creating landing pages aim to consider the distribution channel used to capture leads.
For example, a landing page should be optimized for organic search if you aim to target customers through Google Search. On the other hand, you should create another landing page optimized for mobile screens if you’re using a Facebook post as a lead capture.
8. Be interactive
Interactive content such as infographics, quizzes, calculators, polls, animated video or feedback requests are great ways to interact with your users. Interacting with customers is the best way to keep them engaged with your brand but also to acquire information on how to improve and grow your product.
9. Create brand advocates
Marketing campaigns like “Refer a Friend” generate exponential growth by turning every user into a free brand advocate. People who refer a brand to friends are much more credible than ads and for that reason, conversions are much higher. This kind of marketing campaign results in an increased brand reputation and, if done well, a much bigger customer base. It’s a fairly simple strategy to implement that returns great results and that is why it’s so powerful.
Key Takeaways
Growth can be intimidating at first, as scaling a product or service from scratch might seem like a daunting task. However, with the right approach and the right resources, scalability is easily achievable with the right growth hacking strategy, based on creativity and innovation.
Photo by UX Indonesia on Unsplash
