What is hacking growth? Growth hacking has become quite a catchphrase in advertising circles, yet many actually don’t have the foggiest idea what development hacking is or why it works.
If you fall in that category, worry no more as we demystify Growth Hacking and tell you 7 ways in which you can use growth hacking to expand your reach and boost your conversions.
What Is Growth Hacking?
Growth Hacking in simple terms, refers to looking for fast and inexpensive ways to quickly convert leads and generate sales. Entrepreneur Sean Ellis launched the term and idea roughly a decade ago.
High speed and low costs remain the key ingredients. Growth hacking still primarily benefits companies hoping to generate rapid and robust expansion at a modest price.
Growth hackers look for opportunities ranging from SEO to social media to email campaigning. Although marketing is the key focus, the practice often involves other parts of the business funnel, such as product development and optimization.
Benefits Of Growth Hacking
While growth hacking continues to evolve, its benefits are quite obvious and clear.
Reduced budget
Growth hacking, compared to traditional marketing initiatives is extremely cost effective.. The whole point of growth hacking is to devise creative, minimal-cost solutions.
Streamlined resources
Growth hacking can be done using minimal resources as it involves the growth hacker building and testing their strategies leanly, without bleeding resources elsewhere.
Perfected ROI analytics
Since the core objective of growth hacking is singular, it makes attribution and analysis very simple. Launched and driven purely by data, growth hacking is designed to deliver faster and more accurate numbers than those generated by more traditional initiatives.
Heightened awareness
Because growth hacking relies heavily on creativity, standing out and being unique, and experimentation, conventional rules don’t apply which gives its practitioners a unique advantage and view.
Unprecedented potential
When a growth hacking strategy hits its target, it can hit very big. Growth is always exponential ranging from 10 to 50 times in size, within an accelerated time frame.
10 Growth Hacking Examples
The following are examples of companies that opted for growth hacking and the benefits they got out of small, simple but extremely unique growth hacks.
Growth hack: Offered a free photography service to take professional photos of their users’ homes, so listings would look more attractive and trustworthy.
Growth hack: Launched a friend-referral bonus that offered users additional storage if they enlisted new members.
Growth hack: Designed embed codes that made sharing videos simple.
Growth hack: Created a referral program that paid users up to $20 for every new member they brought in.
Growth hack: Attached a link to all sent emails offering free email to the receiver.
Growth hack: Gave away its Marketing Grader tool for free to anyone who signed up.
Growth hack: Used the tech sector to test-market services before expanding them for broader use.
Growth hack: Allowed users to beta test before the formal launch, making them brand missionaries before the service even hit the market.
Growth hack: Pushed contributors to use their real profiles rather than posting anonymously, building a motivated network of reviewers and affiliates.
Growth hack: Used early test results to rebrand their mission, prompting users to immediately select other accounts to follow—a proven way to keep customers coming back.
7 Best Growth Hack Techniques
If you’re ready to try growth hacking tactics and strategies now, here are 7 best growth hacking techniques you can try. Use these techniques to drive traffic, build growth and boost conversions, in all areas of your business.
Freebies
People have, still do and will forever want something for nothing. This is a great opportunity to capitalize on by offering a well-promoted giveaway. it could be anything from a downloadable cheat-sheet to a sample product depending on the business.
Constant A/B Testing
Growth hacking relies heavily on experimentation which is why constant A/B testing should be the core of any growth hacking strategy or tactic. Start with the most conversion heavy or conversion oriented areas of your website. These include the following:
Landing pages
Homepage
Ends of blog posts
Sales/Product pages
Contact page
Focus on changing one page at a time so that you can keep track of the impact from the changes you make.
Partnerships
Partnerships and collaborations are the unsung heroes of growth hacking. often confused with PR, they play a key role in getting you the most relevant and intent-oriented traffic out there at almost 0 cost!
The key here is to find a business in a related field. You are not looking for a competitor but a business whose followers/customers could benefit from your offering. If you have an audience of 30,000 and another business in a related field has 50,000 followers you could work together to reach 80,000 followers.
Reach out to prospective partners via emails and calls and come prepared with ways that could add value to their followers. Prepare a plan according to the “WIIFM (What’s In It For Me) Approach” and make sure they instantly see the benefit of partnering up with you.
Interactive Content
As we head into a more digitized world, hyper-personalization will soon become a reality. Until then, focus on being as close as you can by offering unique and interactive content. From infographics and quizzes to calculators and animated videos, people love interacting with content online that gives them unique information. Try out this type of content for enhancing the customer experience.
Optimize Customer Experience
Speaking of customer experience, it is the cement that holds all your marketing initiatives together. Behavioral Psychology suggests that if you want to make a behavior or an action repetitive, make it easy. This means that when developing growth hacks, make sure to explore the most hassle-free methods of bringing customers into the fold and keeping them there.
Consider making pages that easily prompt registration and membership, and featuring sign-up forms that are quick to complete. At the same time, devise an onboarding process that’s not only simple, but offers rewards and compelling reasons for the users to keep coming back. Gamification is key!
SEO
If at this point your SEO game is still not strong, you have already lost out to the competition. Make the search engines work on your behalf constantly by making sure you keep optimizing your content strategy. This means you frequently post and keep your content updated.
Engage with followers
Occasionally invite your audience to a live Q/A session. This not only helps in creating interesting content but also creates a rapport with the followers. Engagement is important as it helps in understanding the audience that is following you.
Bonus Technique – Remarketing
To increase conversion rates, focus on remarketing to the people who have already interacted with your brand in some way by using targeted ads. This not only helps boost conversion but also helps in developing brand awareness in the minds of your intended target audience.
Conclusion
Growth hacking is not easy and is definitely not everyone’s cup of tea. It requires skill, experience, creativity and ingenuity.
Do a bit of homework by coming up with a list of the best growth hacks for your business. Use the list above to give you a jump start.
Once you have a few strategies figured out, implement them fast. Just. Act. Try at least three of these growth hacking tips and let us know how they worked out for your business.
For expert advice regarding Growth Hacking, book a free consultation call with The Digital Cauldron.
