Effective Tips for Growth Hacking

While growth hacking has become a popular term since it was coined in 2010 by Sean Ellis, it’s surprising that relatively few people fully understand what it means or what to look for when hiring someone to grow your new business. To get your business to the place where you want it to be, you’ll need to know more about growth hacking.

What is Growth Hacking?

Put simply, it is a marketing effort that’s sole focus is growth. It’s not marketing in a traditional sense where you hire a marketer or marketing team to manage your advertising efforts. The more traditional sense of marketing comes later after you have established your company in the industry. When businesses get started the only focus is on growth alone, so you need someone skilled in growth hacking to put your company on the map.

This means the effort at growth hacking is a temporary one as it is designed to jump start your business and get it on track. Once your company is fully established, the emphasis shifts to more traditional marketing efforts. This means if you hired someone for growth hacking purposes, they will usually move on to other projects once you have reached your initial goals.

The tactics used by the growth hacker are based on a limited budget, highly creative, and focused entirely on growing the customer base. The methods used are analytical in nature but based on marketing tactics that have been used for centuries. Growth hacking can be described as a distillation of traditional marketing methods that all focus on expanding growth for the company.

Basic Growth Hacking Tips

It’s important to keep the main goal in focus which is all marketing efforts are designed to grow your company in terms of its customer base. Any other marketing effort in the early stages distracts from the main goal. So, to the exclusion of everything else, you will want to grow your customer base as quickly as possible right away. Here are a few tips that will help you get started in the right direction.

Don’t Sell a Product,

Find a Product that Sells: This old piece of advice when it comes to marketing goods still applies today and is especially important in jump-starting your business. A big part of getting off the ground is having a product with a natural appeal that needs no description or other support apart from just making people aware of its existence. So, you should search for or develop a product that is in demand right now and will naturally appeal to customers.

Cover the Basics:

In making it easier to sell your products, you will need to get in front of potential customers so they do not miss you. This means utilizing effective SEO so that your website shows up on search results, creating a strong presence of social media sites like Facebook, and making videos for YouTube that get attention and start to take on a life of their own. These are the basic tools of growth hacking as they are all designed to sell more products and grow your customer base.

Make Everything Easy:

Do not try to make the fanciest or most eye-catching website. Instead, focus more on making everything easy for the customer to search, discover, and ultimately buy. Sales conversion is a crucial element to growth hacking, so you don’t want any interruptions once they are ready to buy. So, make the checkout and buying process easy to find and simple to undergo so that the sales start rolling in.

Creating a Sales Funnel:

This is another established marketing tactic, but one that is designed to get people to purchase quickly. Remember that the average customer says, “No” at least five times before they say “Yes” and makes the purchase. The sales funnel should be designed to answer their questions and redirect them back to the product for purchase until they buy or leave. So, when you build your website, be sure to create a proper sales funnel so that you can maximize your sales conversion.

Build on Feedback:

One of the tenants of proper growth hacking is adjusting your marketing campaign based on feedback from customers. Although you might get a wide range of responses, it’s important that you improve your product or marketing approach based on why buyers are saying. This means that you will need to listen to all feedback, but only act on ideas or suggestions that will have a positive impact.

Think High Impact/Low Cost:

Remember, you are working with a limited budget, so you should think creatively about how to gain a massive amount of attention while spending only a little money. Publicity stunts, free advertising that gets noticed, or creating a viral video are just a few ways to get a great deal of attention while spending very little money.

Keep It Legal:

There will be the temptation to use dirty or “black hat” tactics in promoting your items. Unfortunately, the small gain that you will experience soon turns into a nightmare as you get reported which shuts your site off the internet. Plus, your competitors will often be prepared for such tactics and know how to respond. So, keep it clean and legal, but be as creative as you can.

Growth Hacking 101

All the tips work together quite well in helping your business to grow quickly right out of the gates. It is best if you take a little time to create a plan that includes your target goals for sales, budget, and time frame that is ambitious, but still realistic. Remember, not everything you try is going to work, so you will need backup plans as well. Plus, what you do needs to be legal so that the growth continues to be positive and working in your favor.

Finally, be persistent. If something does not work, try again until you find a tactic or strategy that breaks through. This means that you should put failure into its proper perspective and not let it stop you from proper growth hacking that will succeed.

Marketing and Networking University Staff Article:

Micah Alan

Photo:

Luca Bravo