Have you been wondering, “what is growth hacking?”
What is it really about? Or, how can you leverage growth hacking for your business?
You are not alone if you’ve been going over these questions. For business owners and even marketers, the concept of growth hacking can be confusing. Growth hacking is a relatively new focus within marketing, and it refers to a series of rapid experimentations and changes that you execute in your marketing strategies to grow your business faster.
Overview of Growth Hacking
Growth hacking involves a lot of changes in both your marketing and operations, meaning that it is not limited to just the marketing department. It cuts across sales, product development, customer support, engineering, people management, and practically every aspect of your business.
Growth hacking involves a combination of different processes and skills.
Growth hacking is one of the reasons you see a startup rise incredibly fast just within a few years of operations. It is more than just a buzzword. When implementing growth hacking, you only have one focus - your growth metrics. You are driven by everything that improves your growth metrics. You can call it growth marketing, marketing growth strategy, business growth strategy, or corporate growth strategy. The main focus is fast growth.
Growing your business gradually with a few growth strategies is relatively easy compared to rapid growth, which is what growth hacking is all about.
Based on our experience helping many small and mid-size businesses grow their businesses and revenue size within a very short time, here are 7 simple growth hacks to help you achieve that rapid growth you’ve always wanted.
Ensure You Develop a Product or Service That Solves Customer Problems
Before driving for growth, the first and most important thing you want to check is the quality of your service or product offering. Believe it or not, if your product is terrible, the news spreads faster than you can imagine. That’s bad PR, especially for a business that’s just starting. If your product is good, you really may not need to do too much marketing to get the word out. Those who have used your service or product will testify to others, and like traditional marketing, they’ll come looking for you.
Scaling your business with growth hacking is very effective when you have a product that has passed the test of time. Consider the big names out there; while they may have fantastic advertising, if the product doesn't meet expectations or provide any real value, it will fall flat. In fact, the more you advertise a poorly designed product, and provide unsatisfactory services to your clients, the more harm you're doing to your business.
To help you win at product development, consider seeking the opinion of your users, get feedback, and test out your products before putting them out there.
Focus More on Customers that Bring You More Revenue
If you review your customer base, you’ll likely see that the ones who bring you more business are probably quieter and constitute a lesser percentage of your clientele base. The larger percentage, on the other hand, are typically the ones that have you burning more resources every day.
In order to make judicious use of your resources, it’s important you focus more on these sets of customers. Find out what defines them; their industry, niche, location, customers, and every other important data. Use this information to target more of such customers. The more of them you have, the better your business and faster your growth.
Proactively Address Customer Churn
One thing that can kill your growth very fast is customer churn. But once in a while, or even every now and then, you may have one or two customers that are displeased with the service they received or are just too difficult to please. Make sure you address the situation before they leave and spread the word.
Consider incentivizing purchases. For instance, you can encourage your customer with a money-back guarantee if they have issues with their purchases. This way, they are less likely to leave or cause a stir.
You Can’t Target Everyone With Growth Hacks
While growth hacking typically involves different strategies involving all stakeholders, including the customer support agent that receives and resolves customer complaints, it is not ideal to target the entire market. Aim for a defined market segment that finds your product most impactful.
Growth hacks are most effective when you have a specific audience that you are reaching out to. Otherwise, you may end up wasting your resources and feeling frustrated.
Double Up on Acquisition
Growth hacking actually becomes tangible the moment you onboard a new customer. And this is the main essence of growth hacking - to grow your customer base. What can you do to bring in more customers? Just like Dropbox, which grew from a small business to a multibillion-dollar business by encouraging each user to invite more users and get free benefits, you, too, can incentivize the use of your product or service to other customers.
As they continue referring you to their friends, family, or colleagues, make sure to sustain the experience and keep putting your best foot forward as you start each new relationship. Review your inbound marketing campaign. What have you been doing that hasn’t been giving the right results? Try something else. Switch things up in your paid advertising strategies. Look at your previous stats. What can you do differently to reach more people?
Consider Blogging to Build Your Brand Authority and Publicity
There’s a way to get customers to come looking for you instead of reaching out to them. This is known as inbound marketing. Inbound marketing encompasses things like blogging, the use of infographics, newsletters, white papers, eBooks, press releases, and email marketing to educate your audience. The best way to build brand authority is by sharing insightful materials on your website, social media handles, and through your email communications.
SEO and content marketing come into play here. Over time, you will garner a steady following of people who are interested in what you have to say because they find your posts relevant. The day they decide to make a purchase, you likely might be top of mind for them. According to current local SEO stats, about half of the searches on Google are people looking for local sellers to buy from. You can spread your net wider by optimizing your web content for the keywords that users are constantly searching for.
Implement Marketing Automation
Marketing automation is like the magic you need in the mix. At some point, you’ll need to accelerate your process, make them quicker and more responsive to prospects. In the end, you have more time to invest in other more productive aspects of your business, and you’ll make it.
This is besides making your customer acquisition process more fluid and faster. To learn more about marketing automation and how you can use it to grow your business, check out our blog post on the same topic here.
If you're not sure how to start developing or implementing growth hacks for your business, feel free to reach out to us at The Mission. We specialize in helping small and mid-sized businesses get their marketing growth strategies right. Feel free to reach out to us today.
At Mission, we use our profound market insights and expert guidance to help you improve your marketing results and business productivity. Also, as a leading partner in the PEO, HR, payroll, and benefits outsourcing marketplace, we provide result-oriented services for small and medium-sized organizations and government contractors.