Growth Hacking 101 for Startups
Want to increase your profits and grow your company in 2019? Well, then you need to work on your marketing strategy especially if you are a startup. It is vital for every startup to market their products properly during the initial stages. For reaching out to huge audiences and increasing brand awareness, entrepreneurs need to work and spend on the growth hacking strategies for their companies.
A lot of entrepreneurs are looking for growth hacks for their startups since it is the main key to success in today’s business world. These entrepreneurs want to garner millions of clients and grow quickly so that they can increase their revenue. But not all of the companies know which growth marketing strategies are worth implementing.
Before we can talk about the 7 main growth marketing strategies that can help your company grow in 2019, let us understand what growth hacking is.
What is Growth Hacking?
Growth hacking is a marketing technique that is experiment driven. It is used to figure out the most productive ways of growing a business. In this process, you would have to mix engineering, data, design, development, marketing, and analytics. And the main reason as to why it is called growth hacking is because the growth hacker would use these techniques and find the most innovative, cost-effective and rapid way of achieving growth instead of following the conventional processes.
The methods that the growth hacker uses to achieve the growth goal include reverse engineering, A/B testing, SEO, email marketing, viral marketing, and content marketing.
And the main formula that every growth hacker uses is —
Product + Growth = Impact
Now that you are clear about what the growth hacking is all about, let us move ahead and talk about the growth strategies that can help you prepare your business for 2019.
Growth Hacking Strategies You Should Follow
To help you in making the best growth hacking strategy for your business, I have gathered 7 top growth hacks that every startup should use. Leverage the mentioned growth strategies for expanding your limits and increasing your profits sharply.
#1 Follow Your Biggest Competitors
Competition is always there is every part of life regardless of the size of the competition. But as the founder of a startup company, you would encounter a huge amount of competition for your company in many places. This means that you would have to acknowledge the competitive landscape. You would have to find out an advantage of your company that would show why it has a competitive advantage to grow faster than other companies in the market.
Basically, you would ensure that you do not only focus entirely on your business ventures but also be aware of the factors that are changing in your competitive landscape. This would put your startup in a place where you can leverage and quickly adapt its strengths.
A lot of startups fail since they tend to follow the competition without making a proper plan. And due to this, the work that they put in for helping their company grow doesn’t offer the desired results, leaving them disappointed. So, when you are making a good plan, remember that it should focus on finding out all the conversations that take place around the target brand, which is your brand.
And to be able to do this, you would have to be in those places like social media, forums, etc., where the target audience hangs out. Moreover, the plan should also have a thorough and frequently done analysis of the competitor’s blogs along with the keywords used in the blog.
This would help you tailor your content to get a maximum footprint on it. At the same time, you should also track all the backlinks that your competition has created. This would help you get a much better idea regarding how they are marketing their services and products. You can use tools such as SEMRush or Spyfu etc.
#2 Build a Social Media Community Around Your Brand/Product
Social media platforms are the most popular ones in the world currently. It is a place where almost everyone is there on. And this makes social media an important part of the marketing strategy for any startup. In short, you can easily leverage social media and promote all about your company, get market feedback and also interact with all the industry influencers.
But for this, you need to understand that you would need to give time and energy to it. Moreover, you might have to even spend a little money on it. In short, you would need to create great content by spending time. This is what would help you build your audience. So, it is vital for startups to align their social media activities to direct the company towards growth.
And out of all the social media platforms available, the one that should not miss being a part of your growth hacking strategy is Facebook. On Facebook, you can create a group about your brand so that the audience can engage with you and others in case you are creating value for them through the group.
Moreover, by creating valuable content on your group, the people who are still not aware of your brand would also learn about it as soon as they come across the content in the group. Just make sure that you keep updating the group regularly so that people stay engaged. Do not just start something and leave it in between.
#3 Launch on Product Hunt or Similar Platforms
For every startup, a launch on Product Hunt or any other similar platform is a very important checkpoint. This is because every week a new company launches in the market. These platforms allow you to deliver the message that you have to the audiences and eventually entice them to avail what you have. From many such platforms, Product Hunt is one of the best ones where it has helped several startup expose their services or products on a global scale.
In short, it is a golden ticket for any company that enters it. It would also allow you to get the attention of many journalists, investors and innovators. This would allow you to be on the news, get feedback and new ideas for any opportunities. With the feedback, you would be able to get a good sense of what your weaknesses and strengths are. This would help make what you are offering better. You might also gain more investment and grow your company with the help of this platform.
#4 Create a Pre-Launch Email List
Another kind of strategy that has to be on your list is email marketing. It is the most influencing kind of marketing and also the most effective ones. A company that uses this method ends up getting many leads that eventually turn into conversions. So, for this, you need to give enough time to build the email list since this is the thing that would help your reach audiences and get profits in the company.
It is also a great way to build pre-launch hype for any startup. In short, it would assist you in getting potential customers even after you launched your business. But for this, you cannot just create a list and sit idle. You would have to take time and effort to build the hype. Let the audience get eager for the launch of your brand. To build your list. MailChimp is the best application that would help you get the email list.
#5 Leverage Q&A Sites like Quora, Reddit, etc.
One thing that is in trend now is the question and answer sites (Q&A) websites that help many companies gain traffic to their websites. The platforms are basically a place where the users ask questions and the other users answer those questions. And since they are natural questions, these questions and answers usually contain long-tailed keywords.
This helps the sites get a large amount of traffic on their website. Some of the top Q&A sites out there are Reddit, Quora and Stack Exchange. Out of these, you might have already heard of or seen Quora by now. It is the 140th biggest website in the world. And it holds answers to anything and everything in the world. In short, using any website like these would help you get a lot of traffic to your website as you assist people to get answers to some questions.
#6 Repurpose Your Old Content to Videos, Infographics, Slideshows, etc.
Intelligent content is the main thing in marketing. But when a startup just picks up dust and put it online, it is normal for them to not get any good response from the audience. That is why it is important to repurpose the content. In short, the content should offer value. In short, you would need to pick research to then repackage and represent an existing content with a fresh and better approach.
One way of repurposing content is by editing the content to have value and give the desired message in the best way possible. You can also tweak the layout, formatting, structure to make it much better. People would begin to trust your brand and follow it more if you offer them valuable, interactive, and intelligent content.
#7 Leverage Referral Marketing
Referrals have always been the main way of growing a business for decades now. A referral from a family member, friend, or even from any of the industry influencers would convert a lead much faster than you can think of. The cost of getting referrals isn’t much and this would allow you to reduce the costs that you are putting into your company growth strategies.
And the customers that come with referrals are the ones that have a better chance of being retained as compared to any of the other kind of leads that a company gets. In addition to this, the sale experts who offer referral programs end up earning about 4 times to 6 times higher than normal.
Now that you are aware of all the tips that can help you in building the best growth hacking strategy for your business, you can get to work immediately and implement the process in your business soon.
