What do new businesses need more than just about anything else? Growth. But these same companies often lack the resources (such as large marketing and sales teams) to grow in conventional ways. The slow and steady approach may be great for established enterprises, but for new operations to thrive, they must often use more forceful methods.
Growth hacking is an aggressive approach to growth that involves experimenting with various methods to find those that produce the fastest return. Rather than waiting for weeks or months for random marketing campaigns to pay off, growth hackers execute fast and specific initiatives that quickly show whether they will yield the desired results. Considering the limited resources of startups, growth hacking strategies are often creative, innovative, and inexpensive.
In the sections below, we discuss the steps in the growth hacking process, list various growth hacking strategies, talk about best practices and tools for growth hacking, and consider what happens after growth hacking.
The Growth Hacking Process
The basic steps of growth hacking are as follows. Note that they are based on the scientific method. That’s because growth hacking should rely on the results of real experiments, not guesses or intuition. The following video touches on some of the steps described below.
1. Perform an Audit
Figure out what’s already working by examining where most of your leads are coming from now or how you are already reaching other milestones, such as sales numbers. You might also look for key indicators such as which social media platforms get the most engagement and which website pages get the most views. These are starting points that you can build on. You may need to adopt additional tools, such as the analysis function on social media applications, to find out this information.
2. Set Goals
From where you are now, determine where you would like to be and in what time frame. For example, if you are receiving 20 orders per day, perhaps you would like to receive 100 orders per day within one month. Goals can also be to increase leads or revenue. Choose the target that best represents success for your company.
3. Create Hypotheses
Brainstorm about what actions might lead to going from 20 to 100 orders per day within one month. For instance, you might hypothesize that running a contest on Instagram or creating a compelling call to action on a popular web page might quickly push sales up.
4. Plan Experiments
Create experiments to test your hypotheses. For instance, run a brief preliminary contest on Instagram and see what happens. Add a call to action on your most popular web page and take note of the results.
5. Track Results
Record the results of your experiments to determine which ones to continue, which to discontinue, and which to try in a different way.
6. Use the Best Approaches
Build on the methods that work best and find new ways to experiment. For example, could you shorten or lengthen the time frame with the contest mentioned above to get different results? Could you tweak the call to action on your most popular web page to see which one visitors respond to more?
7. Repeat
These steps shouldn’t be a one-and-done process. Instead, continue to track which methods work best, where the most leads are coming from, and how you can continue to use the best ones to collect leads, generate sales, and grow your business.
Growth Hacking Strategies
Numerous strategies can be used for growth hacking, including some that are probably familiar to you and others that you might not have considered.
- A/B testing. With this method, you test to determine which of two ad versions, email, or landing page produces more leads or conversions. The difference could be minor, such as using the term “case study” rather than “success story” in describing a downloadable document.
- Beta testing. Beta testing involves having current customers try out new features you consider adding to your products or services. It’s a win-win because they get a first look at cool new offerings, and you get feedback on improving them. Follow up by promoting the new features this process helps you discover.
- Cobranding. With this method, you team up with a business that has offerings similar to yours to promote both companies. Both benefit from getting twice the exposure they usually would because each company uses its networks.
- Comments. With this SEO workaround, you seek out pages that rank highly for your search terms and comment on those pages, drawing attention to your company. You can also link back to your site — but be careful because some platforms, such as LinkedIn, discourage this kind of promotion.
- Content repurposing. Once you create a piece of content, especially a longer piece, use it to generate other pieces. For example, you can pull quotes that stand out in an article to post on Twitter or post snippets of a webinar on YouTube. You can even use the same content twice, such as a blog post that you also post as an article on LinkedIn.
- Customer outreach. Call your five best customers and take 15 minutes to ask them a few questions about their experience with your company. Find out what made them choose you, why they returned, and what you can do better. Then focus on those areas in your content and service delivery.
- Free stuff. Everyone loves free stuff. Take advantage of that fact by offering a bit of your product or service at no charge. For example, you can offer a free subscription for a period of time, provide a free session with an expert, or give a free sample. The idea is that prospects will return, wanting more and being willing to pay for it.
- Influencers and evangelists. Find the people who are already talking about your offerings on social media and ask them to do it more. For example, when you create a new post, notify them and ask them to share it with their networks. Consider creating a special elite space, such as a Slack channel, for them to gather.
- Lead generation content. Create content that represents the next steps in a customer journey and gate it so you can collect leads. For example, you could develop a product “tips and tricks” document that only applies to people seriously considering purchasing.
- Lead tracking. One of the most powerful growth hacking strategies you can employ is simply knowing where all your leads are coming from. It may be a little tricky to set it up at first, but once you know which sources are top performers, you can focus on making them even stronger.
- Pain points. Addressing pain points may be Marketing 101, but you can be even more deliberate about it by creating quality content that delves into each issue and presents real, robust, usable solutions for it, including your offering. With enough content, you can create an area on your website for visitors to find resources for each one.
- Personas. Marketing works best when you know exactly who you are addressing and their concerns. Personas are fictitious characters that represent specific segments of your target market. Once you have them established, you can create specific content for each one.
- SEO. Search engine optimization (SEO) is exactly what it sounds like: optimizing your content for search engines. It’s critical if you get a lot of your business through search recommendations. Just be sure your copy doesn’t end up seeming like it was meant for robots to read. Instead, use SEO strategically within your quality content.
- Sharing links. One of the best sources of new leads is friends and family who refer them. Use sharing links to make it easier for customers to do so. Set them up to appear following a purchase to announce that the purchase was made and where others can find the same product or service.
- Social links. Make it easy for people to share your content on social media by providing links to popular platforms. Choose the applications you know your target market likes the best, such as TikTok and Snapchat for younger consumers and Facebook for older ones.
- Social media. Social media offers a nearly endless number of ways to reach existing and potential customers. You can offer tips, entertainment, resources, promotions, updates, contests, and more. The best social media content invites some level of participation, such as asking a question people can’t help but want to answer.
- Tags. Tags can be used on just about every kind of content, including articles, blog posts, videos, and social media posts. Use tags that incorporate your SEO keywords — in addition to those directly related to the topic of the content — to attract people looking for information about those topics.
- Valuable resources. Potential customers will grow to trust you more if you offer them content with no strings attached. That includes listicles, resources, and information from experts in your field. Valuable resources are also a great way to spread the word about your company because people who view it are likely to share.
Best Practices and Tools
The following are some tools and practices that can help you be successful with growth hacking.
Project Management Tools
Project management tools can help you keep track of your growth hacking efforts. For example, you can use a spreadsheet such as Excel or Google Sheets to create a tab for each initiative. You could have one for cobranding, another for personas, etc. You could similarly use Trello, with a card for each strategy.
For each one, include important details that will help you and others later to determine the best growth strategies. For example, for lead tracking, note all the possible lead sources and use an indicator for how many come from each source within a specified period of time (such as one week).
Overlap Awareness
One of the challenges with running multiple tests at one time is there may be some overlap between them. For example, you may have developed new content related to target market pain points, and at the same time, you may have encouraged influencers and evangelists to share your content.
You notice that you’re getting more leads from a specific social media platform, but you don’t know precisely why. While growth hacking, by its very nature, is meant to use multiple strategies at once, try to separate those that could cause this kind of confusion.
Culture Change
Additionally, consider that growth hacking may not be a familiar process for some professionals. So, you may need to introduce the processes we’ve been describing here and, at the same time, perform a culture refresh. Coach team members to get into an experimentation mindset. That means maintaining a state of constant dissatisfaction that might be uncomfortable for some.
Research
Begin and back up your hypotheses with research. For example, say that through the use of a business intelligence tool, you learn that a competitor is earning 15% more in revenue than you. Controlling for other factors, such as the size of their operation compared to yours, you can start to examine their marketing approaches and see what’s different.
You may observe that their website has one very important feature that yours doesn’t — a tool that allows prospects to test their online product. So, you hypothesize that it’s a key factor in revenue generation and perform additional research to learn how much more revenue companies generally tend to bring in when they offer such a tool. Because creating such an asset can be costly in terms of time and money, the more research you can perform before deciding to create a tool of your own, the better.
Once you have several viable ideas, determine which ones to work on first based on potential growth.
Planning
When you decide which methods to pursue, take the time to plan your experiments carefully. For example, when beta testing a new feature, create specific questions to ask testers about the feature that will help you determine how helpful it could be to customers. Also, ask them to freely share additional thoughts, which might cover things you didn’t think to ask.
You may also need to consider what tools to use to conduct your experiment, such as a content development system to create two different versions of the same document for A/B testing or Survey Monkey to create a survey for beta testing.
Additionally, set a specific time frame in which your experiment will take place. How long will you give email recipients time to respond to the call to action on the two email versions you will send out for A/B testing? Of course, there will always be stragglers, but you may decide a few days or a week is enough time. This method will help you compare apples to apples if you run a similar test in the future.
Analysis
A recent HubSpot article states, “Building a culture of experimentation isn’t just about getting a ‘pass’ or ‘fail’ answer on an experiment. Instead, true analysis happens when you think about what the results say about your efforts and how you can use what you learned to move forward with new experiments.”
The article recommends asking whether your hypothesis was correct and additional questions such as whether the results are statistically significant, what the results mean, how you can use the results, what you could have done differently, and what the next experiment should be based on your findings.
What Happens After Growth Hacking?
Growth hacking is something companies commonly do in the early stages of their development, but it can be implemented throughout the life cycle of your business. Once you find marketing strategies that work well based on experimentation, keep and build on them.
For instance, say you discover that commenting on others’ posts and providing links back to your site is highly effective for generating leads. Conduct research to find out which sites work the best and discover new ones you can try. Create a schedule to be sure and post comments regularly on the sites that work best. And improve your comment content over time to create more value for readers. Continue to try variations on this approach to see what works even better.
At the same time, watch for strategies that may not work as well as they used to. Think about reasons that may be occurring and test your hypotheses, which by now you should be an expert at! In other words, what happens after growth hacking is more growth hacking and more growth.
