Growth Hacking Strategies You Need Right Now

In a world so fast paced where hundreds of startups emerge every now and then, it gets tricky to get your name out there and gather loyal customer base. Especially if you are a startup, it gets really hard to compete with the well established giants in the market. Customer acquisition in a short amount of time is what is called “growth hacking”. Together with creative thinking and growth hacking strategies can a company grow by attracting customers, cultivating relationships and effective marketing.

Effective marketing becomes an absolute necessity for the company. A great product without a good marketing strategy has a high likelihood of poor performance. These growth hacking strategies serve as effective guidelines for attaining rapid growth with limited resources. Growth hacking brings in a perfect combination of creativity, critical thinking and unique applications to bring out the best in the company and its products and services.

Although growth hacking strategy may differ from company to company and need to be tailored according to time and need, there are still some basic aspects that, more or less, apply almost to all of them.

1. Attracting Potential Customers: There are several strategies that can be leveraged in order to attract potential customers to your business. Content creation and blogging are a great way to get their attention. The content should be created from their point of view by keeping in mind the audience’s feelings, thoughts, pains and attitude. A good content would adhere to their interests and how it can be used to influence them or would provide a solution to their issues. You can also guest blog to increase brand awareness and get additional visitors. Infographics also make for a great visual technique and can be shared on social media, infographics sites, emails etc. Another great way to build reputation would be forum marketing in which you can provide solutions via comments, answers and other forum activities.
2. Engaging Visitors and Lead Conversion: It is important to understand that not every person visiting your website for the first is a buyer. But having the right content surely makes for a great way to engage those visitors. Interactive content can play a major role in this by providing the relevant information to the leads based on their interests. For example, Outgrow provides great customizable calculators for interactive content which can effectively be leveraged for lead generation. Besides this, email marketing is a well established way for customer reachouts and gather subscribers. A well executed lead engagement email campaign goes a long way in attracting prospects. You can even offer exclusive tips, promotion codes and customize the content based on the customers you are targeting.
3. Acquiring Customers and Maintaining Them: It is important to experiment with various strategies in order to constantly improve them for customer acquisition. It is crucial to collect data on the customers and segment them in the broader aspect and offer them something that appeals to the majority of them. Furthermore, goals must be clearly defined and metrics should be used to measure the effectiveness and success of the experiment. Variations should be used by creating various versions of your hypothesis. The variations can differ based on design, color, content expresion, placement of a button etc. to determine the more effective one and build on that. The results of these experiments should be properly studied to make out statistical differences between the conversion rates and make a decision to proceed with the better performing one.
4. Setting Up a Referral Program and Offers: Almost every company today offers a referral program and it works splendidly. It helps by giving credits to the existing customer while promoting the brand with almost no effort. Adding to it the loyalty points for every time the customer buys from you, you can encourage them to return in the future as well. Offering something free is the oldest, quickest and easiest way to increase the fan base in the most lucrative way. You can also provide seasonal or festive offers to target the customers and higher conversion.
5. Platform Hacking: It is a great way to tap into the growing user base of another platform or business in exchange for mutual profit. Working with other relevant platforms, business, products or services increases the visibility and brand awareness amongst the active customers of that platform thus cutting down the necessity to target them separately with less effort. A great example of this is YouTube. In 2005, YouTube looked to “platform hack” MySpace to gain more views by allowing MySpace to embed their videos without having to pay for the service. YouTube took on the costs of hosting in exchange for increased brand recognition and ended up winning out from MySpace’s 25 million unique users and advertisers. Today, YouTube gets traffic from almost all social media platforms, getting over a billion users and has become the largest and most successful startups of all time.