Growth hacking is an umbrella term for strategies focused solely on growth. It is usually used in early-stage startups who need massive growth in a short time on small budgets but now it’s been adopted by large companies as well. Growth hacking is more about getting customers than keeping them. It’s a short term strategy.
The goal of growth hacking strategies is generally to acquire as many users or customers as possible while spending as little as possible. The term “growth hacking” was coined by Sean Ellis, founder and CEO of GrowthHackers, in 2010. Since then, it has evolved into a term for all the strategies that are used to focus on intense growth with a restrained budget.
Growth hacking strategies
You can find many references on the Internet and books on growth hacking that explain different ways to approach it. In this post we have selected 5 examples that, with a little effort and dedication, you can apply in your business to start getting results.
1. Gifts and contests
They work very well to raise your brand’s awareness and maintain customer loyalty. Moreover, it improves customers’ perceptions of your brand. A happy customer becomes a promoter of your brand and allows you to enjoy more referrals and leads.
A clear example in Spain is AlfabetaJuega. It is an established videogame magazine, it became popular thanks to its weekly contests: to start you had to share a link to one of its articles or comment on another one. Little by little it was gaining popularity and now it is one of the most important video game blogs in the Spanish-speaking world.
Using this method, even if you do it by e-mail, you can reward all the participants even those who did not get a prize with a discount or equivalent. Everyone has a reason to buy, everyone has a prize, no one leaves completely frustrated and you can get lots of leads.
The most popular platform to run competitions is Gleam.io. Probably you have come across some of their draws even without knowing.
2. Influencer Marketing
When it comes to brand building, there is a reason why brands pay influencers to endorse their products. Collaborating with well-known influencers is a powerful way to reach out to a wider audience. Using influencers’ authority and reach is a great marketing growth hack for fresh startups who cannot afford to compete with established brands in terms of marketing budgets.
Businesses can use influencers’ following as a potential customer base. Influencer marketing if done right can help any business to raise awareness and achieve massive reach.
But be careful, you have to select the right influencer that fits as much as possible with your brand image and values otherwise the impact might be negative and you may lose your audience. Besides, If you are a service provider it may be more difficult to implement this strategy but not impossible.
3. Referral Marketing
This strategy consists of rewarding people who help you, helping them to help you. This strategy rewards them for helping you grow. If you have had to give many awards is that you have grown a lot.
Dropbox, which rewards existing users for inviting new ones with additional storage is one of the successful examples of growth hacking. Thanks to this strategy Dropbox’s growth was meteoric in its early days. However, at that time it was not yet called “growth hacking”.
4. Guest posting
Guest posting services help to build a connection. Write a guest post for any blog that deals with the same topic as your page. This strategy makes it easier to get high-quality organic leads through the content by providing a link to your website which ultimately, helps in boosting up your SERP rankings.
In addition, you position yourself as an authority in your field and make relationships with people around you. But, on the other hand, you bear the risk of losing the property of your post and not being linked.
Guest blogging is a great marketing growth hack that bloggers tend to use for the purpose of gaining organic website traffic and reaching out to different audiences by improving their search engine rankings.
5. Lighbox pop ups
A pop-up, an e-mail reminding you that your company exists, ads on the side, etc. These annoying things while you are surfing surprisingly perform very well in terms of collecting emails and capturing leads. These pop-ups can be toggled to appear to the visitor after a certain proportion of the page has been scrolled through, or after a certain time has passed after page load.
An example of this is the University of Alberta, in Canada, that put a pop-up on their page that opened after 10 seconds and said: “You seem interested in UAlberta news. Would you like to subscribe to the Daily News mail? The number of subscribers skyrocketed.
Although at first glance it could seem intrusive to visitors and cause them to bounce and leave the site rather than engage, they work very well.
Growth hacking has become very popular lately because everyone might use it to scale a business. Don’t get left behind. If you need help to implement this growth hacking strategies in your business, contact us.
