Do you know many top companies such as Facebook, Dropbox, AirBNB are using growth hacking strategies from an early age? Because this method makes them stand out faster than other traditional marketing techniques. Every business needs constant growth, and for startups, It’s crucial to get traction no matter whatever your business is. From all early-stage startups to big unicorns, growth hacking strategies are now widely used to get the highest possible revenue on minimum investment.
In this article, we come up with some of the best growth hacking strategies for startups that guarantee success. We’ll also cover some questions related to growth hacking that you’re looking for.
Let’s get started.
What’s Growth Hacking?
The founder of Growth Hackers, Sean Ellis, introduced the growth hacking term in 2010. He helps many startups like DropBox, Uproar, Lookout with growth hacking strategies in Silicon Valley.
According to Sean Ellis, growth hacking is a continuously experimental process to get the best potential ways for growing a business. There is a misconception that growth hacking is a part of marketing. It also involves many other factors like development, engineering, data analytics, and user experience.
To sum up, growth hacking is finding a quick and most cost-efficient way to ensure business growth. From product development to customer acquisition to customer retention, it helps to get maximum outcome by spending as little as possible.
What Does A Growth Hacker do?
A growth hacker is someone who has the potentiality to plan and execute cost-efficient strategies for business growth. From gaining traction to acquiring potential consumers, he or she experiments many data driven innovative tactics to figure out the actual one.
Growth hackers are always focusing on constant growth. Not only do they acquire potential customers but also they retain them for as long as possible.
A growth hacking lead along with his team can make the job done. It’s rare that one person has diverse experience in all aspects like development, design, analytics, marketing to ensure growth.
How Does Growth Hacking Strategy Work?
The strategy will work after continuous experimentations. A strategy that brings massive growth for one startup may not work out with another. So, it really varies from one business to another. Here is why we suggest you continue your experiment until you find the correct one for your business.
Growth Hacking Strategies For Startups
Every startup needs to scale, and in order to scale one startup faster, growth hacking strategies may help. But we already mentioned every strategy won’t work out for every startup. You have to give every possible strategy a try and then figure out which of those are perfect for you.
Some common strategies probably you shouldn’t miss to give a try:
Pre-Launch Email List
Before launching your product or service, create hype for your business. For this, you’ll also come to know how people take your product/service(s). Some people will be interested to consume, but you need to turn these people into customers.
For example, you can make an offer to those who love to share their email address. After launching the product, you can let them know by sending a conversion-oriented email copy. That’s how some of them are willing to make a purchase. The more you can build a pre-launch email list, the better you can convert in this way.
Referral Marketing
It’s one of the most popular growth hacking strategies that many startups use. Get some potential customers and turn them into your brand ambassadors. You can encourage your customer to share your business with family and friends and offer them a decent amount of credit.
For example, one of the popular startups, UBER, was using this method at an early stage. They give $5 credit to users for a successful referral. Another example, DropBox inspires their customers to refer and get free space for each successful invitation. That’s how they can grow their audience segment and become successful right now.
Brand Partnerships
As a startup, you’ll need to collaborate with various renowned brands to stand out. Some of your potential partners are already leading the market, they have the ability to bring your targeted customers.
Moreover, collaborating with renowned brands can increase your brand value. People can rely on you and know more about your business. In that case, you’ll also get benefitted. Sounds good, right?
Social Media Growth Hacking
Social media is now booming, why don’t you focus on it? There are many social media networks on the internet. Your aim is to figure out one or two ideal platforms for your business.
We don’t recommend giving effort to almost every social media platform at an early stage. Better focus on where your ideal customers are hanging out.
A proper strategy is important. By delivering quality content, engaging directly with the audience, and offering exclusive deals can help you to convince your wide audience. Both organic and paid promotion you may consider.
Content Marketing
You’re just starting, how do you make people aware of your business? If people don’t know your business well, they’ll not probably take service from you. Can you expect growth in that case?
Here, content marketing works. The beauty is you don’t need to spend too much money. Create content relevant to your business, distribute and promote those on various channels. Add values and focus on industry trends.
Famous SaaS startup, HubSpot, was using the aggressive content marketing strategy to leverage their business. Almost all startups do content marketing, you can do some research as well.
Guest Posting
In simple words, guest posting is the combination of creating and publishing content for other relevant websites. It helps to increase your brand value and get a targeted audience from where you do guest posting.
Keep in mind only posting on some high authority websites can bring positive results. Don’t mess with quality content, avoid low-quality websites. It may take some time, you need to have good outreach skills too. Happy guest posting!
Regular Competitor Analysis
This is important because you always need to keep up-to-date with what your competitors do. You need to figure out their strengths, weaknesses, and other business stuff. You shouldn’t copy them, it’s advisable to learn from your competitors and do better than them. And this is what you need to do regularly.
Moreover, you can make wise operational decisions by following your biggest competitors. Maybe they’re attending community events, sponsoring various programs, conducting influencer marketing. Evaluate their success rate and think about what you can do for your business growth.
How To Become A Growth Hacker?
Growth hackers are not traditional marketers. Marketers have strong marketing and communication skills while growth hackers have some technical skills too. They’re creative, innovative and aren’t afraid to take risks. They’re working from product development to market and sell this product. Anybody who wants to become a growth hacker can go through the following steps:
- Understand what growth hacking is, and learn as much as possible.
- Strong knowledge of acquisition channels like social media, search engine, email, and many more.
- Familiar with data analytics and know-how to use potential data.
- Basic coding knowledge can give more flexibility but not mandatory.
- Get on-job training experience with talented growth hackers.
- Keep practicing and experimenting.
Final Thought
We know how hard it is to scale a business and when it comes to startups, we can’t figure out what to do. Our growth hacking strategies are not only for startups, you can implement any type of business as well. Hope you find it useful. If you want to grow your startup at an early stage, get a free consultation from our experienced growth hackers. Thanks for reading.
