The term growth hacking reflects the processes and experiments carried out in a company to boost its customer base and revenue. These changes and effective strategies aim to increase the conversion rate. If you’re amending, testing, and updating your content, you are already growth hacking!
If you wish to learn growth hacking in-depth, this guide will help you understand the concept well.
Let’s begin!
Growth hacking is highly suitable for start-ups desiring escalated growth but with a limited budget. They follow a sequence of steps to discover some bottlenecks on the website and aim to improve it. However, beginners in this field may be ambiguous about its implementation. Luckily, we have ‘Pirate Funnel’ or the AARRR framework used by most growth hackers to conduct a deep analysis of a website. Here is what AARRR means:
This framework is open to your own interpretations and usages. You can follow the best steps that suit your brand and leave others. Simply, the **Pirate Funnel **helps find the blockages in a site impeding its growth!
Growth hacking comes with a plethora of advantages. It can help boost your leads and revenue.
Here are some steps to build effective growth hacking strategies:
It is important to conduct surveys and know the customers' reviews and feedback about your product. Many businesses use them to determine whether their product benefits the customers. After all, only customer satisfaction will result in more leads. So, you must assure that your brand aligns with the demands of your customers. In addition, you can formulate these surveys as per your company's needs. Either ask for the details of your target audience or ask them about your product. This strategy will give you insights into what you are lacking or what your customers like!
A business must know its target audience. For that, you can consider demographics like location, age, gender, interests, and profession and create buyer personas. Moreover, it is always beneficial to interact with the target audience and understand their needs to best serve them.
There are plenty of metrics to analyze your brand's performance and make relevant improvisations. But it is crucial to choose the most relevant metrics that suit your strategies and direct you towards your objectives. For that, there are many data analytics software available, both free and paid. Take a look at the list of some key metrics to understand your performance:
Conversion rate
Cost per click
Number of impressions on your site
Number of engagements
Cost per landing page view
There are many marketing channels and platforms recommended for successful growth hacking campaigns. Therefore, understand your target audience and choose the right marketing channel.
If done right, this decision can generate more ROI and immense growth for your brand. Below are some marketing channels:
SEO (Social Engine Optimization)
Email marketing
Search Engine Marketing
Guest blogging
Influencer marketing
Offline advertisements
Trade shows
Networking events (B2B)
Social Media Marketing
There are two most used tests, A/B test and multivariate test. Growth hackers usually conduct these tests on different elements of a site, such as blog posts, content, videos, podcasts, emails, and more. These tests help to make changes to these elements and bring out the absolute best results in your favor.
Analyzing the statistics and setting goals to improve further is crucial.
In addition, jot down the strengths and weaknesses of the company and work on its improvement. This careful examination will lead you to prepare optimized marketing budgets and target users efficiently.
With the right growth hacking tools, you can soar high. Here is a list of some of the best growth hacking tools divided into 3 categories:
* CrazyEgg
* Optimizely
* VWO
* Amplitude
For Market Research
Market research is an integral part of understanding customers and their needs. For that, here are some top tools available in the market:
Olark
Typeform
Qualaroo
For Email Marketing
Email marketing is a powerful tool to reach more audiences and discuss your brand. 49.1% of internet users actively check their emails in a day. Hence, emails are a good way to capture users and spread awareness of your business. Check out these growth hacking tools to incorporate into your strategy.
Mailchimp is one of the most widely used email marketing tools. It helps provide email marketing analytics and send timely automated emails.
The top benefits are mentioned below:
It’s an excellent email service provider for business communications. The email marketing campaigns are automated in nature. Further, the reports and analytics help the team track the subscribers' activities.
The top benefits are mentioned below:
This platform helps send emails to people based on their behavior on your website. Moreover, it personalizes and tests your campaigns. If you are from a non-IT background, Vero is highly suited.
The top benefits are mentioned below:
It’s crucial to bring new clients for your company to increase revenue. This is what customer acquisition is! Some of the best tools in the market can help you ace this. Let’s see.
CrazyEgg is widely used by people worldwide. It’s an excellent analytics platform that tracks and optimizes your website’s visitor behavior.
The top benefits are mentioned below:
This platform provides ways to escalate engagement and conversion rates on your website.
The top benefits are mentioned below:
VWO is a great tool for customer acquisition. It helps conduct A/B and multivariate tests on your site in a simplified manner.
The top benefits are mentioned below:
Amplitude is a self-service digital analytics platform. This tool helps businesses understand users’ behavior diligently to boost growth and, ultimately, revenue. The top benefits are mentioned below:
Real-time analytics.
15 metrics to track customer acquisition, such as engagement, retention, activation, and monetization.
Easy process to reach out to the customer based on gathering insights from each step of the funnel.
Customers using Olark have seen more conversions, accurate user insights, and lower call volumes.
The top benefits are mentioned below:
Typeform is a platform that allows you to create interesting forms and surveys for customers. These questions are engaging and prompt the users to take part in filling out the forms.
The top benefits are mentioned below:
It’s a credible platform to conduct surveys and analyze visitors to your website.
Here are the top benefits mentioned below:
It is crucial to analyze the current strategies of your business and formulate a plan that directs you toward growth. For that, you can implement various changes to your site and analyze the results.
Here we are mentioning the top growth hack resources to help you achieve your goal.
The blog content of a website holds a lot of potential to increase conversion rates. As it is said, content is the king, it becomes essential to present polished and informational data in front of the users. According to statistics, approximately 77% of people read blogs online regularly. Therefore, it’s a great way to capture users. Here are some tips:
Keep the data crisp and easy to understand.
Do not use complicated words, it can increase the bounce rate.
Add multimedia content to attract more visitors.
Moreover, another growth hack is to add videos to your blog posts. It can be a live stream, tutorial, or any such option that may interest users. As a matter of fact, it is easier for users or readers to get quick information and save time. Therefore, such clips can attract them by providing beneficial information quickly. Do you know video content is 1200% more successful than any other type of content? Moreover, the viewers grasp 95% of the content while watching the video.
Users always look for the credibility and authenticity of a brand. For that, connect with industry experts. In addition, you can take their interviews, hold a live session, or talk about any topic that may be of user interest. These experts have spent more time in the respective industry, and their experience can benefit your audience immensely. This exercise can attract many users and increase your brand's value.
Make sure to update your old articles regularly. You can add new information or statistics related to the content. This growth hack increases the chances of improvement in your ranking on different SERPs. According to a survey, updating old posts get 270% more results than the posts that stay dormant.
Add social media posts to your website. For instance, add reviews of customers, testimonials, or tweets to your site to reflect the credibility of your business. This practice helps to earn the trust of users. Moreover, it can also bring more followers on social media channels.
As you know, ads are an excellent way to reach your target audiences and increase your conversion rates. There are different sections of audiences based on age, gender, preferences, etc. So, to fulfill users' needs and target multiple sets of audiences, publish more than one version of an ad. Some ad versions can result in better performance, and some won’t do well. Hence, you can discard the underperforming ads and invest wisely!
Keywords are very effective for a business’ growth. If you are publishing a YouTube video, it is obvious that you would wish to see it in the search result! If that’s the case, you must use the correct keywords. This growth hack can help your YouTube videos show in the ‘suggested content’. Further, it will increase your brand's reach and attract more audiences, as YouTube accounts for a staggering 2.1 billion monthly users worldwide!
Email marketing is one of the most popular and powerful ways of digital marketing. According to HubSpot, here are some of the most effective strategies for email marketing campaigns:
The growth hack here is to create different versions of an email and test them. For instance, try changing the tone of the mail in your emails and analyze which email gets more responses!
Know about the best email testing tools here for better email marketing.
Every business aims to grow in a significant period of time. That’s the ultimate aim, right? Well, growth hacking targets to fulfill this purpose. It is obvious that it can be intimidating initially, however, with time, experimentation, approach, and resources, you can excel in this field!
The results require patience and effective strategies. There are multiple growth hacks, but it’s important to experiment and see which aligns with your brand the most. It’s not necessary for what works for one business, will work for yours too. Therefore, you must give it some time to see the best results. I hope this growth hacking playbook and the growth hack resources will help you bring the expected results for your business!
Good luck!