Defining growth hacking is pretty simple. It’s using analytical, innovative, often budget minded strategies to grow a company's customer base quickly. It’s a technique frequently used by startups because founders understand that without growth they are sunk.
Startups rarely have the human or financial resources that their more established competitors do. They can’t afford to place ads on prime time television. They don’t have the connections to earn major celebrity endorsements. Instead, they use less expensive means and take advantage of their often scalable products and services. Here are some steps to follow to growth hack your startup.
Start with a Great Product
Many people mistakenly believe that growth hacking involves cheating a bad product into popularity. Nothing could be further from the truth. Growth hacking involves getting your brand and product in front of a lot of people and convincing those people to buy in. More importantly, it’s getting them to come back for more, and telling their friends. If your product sucks, that will never happen.
Before you launch, clearly identify the problem you are solving. Then, be sure yours is the solution that people want. This is where market research on a shoestring budget really comes in handy.
Target Early Adopters
Traditional marketing involves creating a variety of customer personas, then targeting them with marketing content that is relevant to them. These personas are usually segmented by demographics or other criteria. The idea is to target a wide range of people, but with content that is personalized for their customer segment.
Growth hacking requires a different approach. Here, the idea is to target people who are most likely to adopt a product ‘right now’, and who is most likely to be thrilled with the experience they have. Create a target persona around that.
Focus on The Places Where Early Adopters Spend Time
There are hundreds of places you can reach out to your customers. With growth hacking, you don’t have time 99% of those. Instead, take that focused persona you created, and determine where people like spending their time online. These are the places you’re most likely to connect with your target audience.
Choose One Path to Customer Acquisition
Growth hacking is a focused effort. There isn’t time to have multiple irons in the fire or go through constant iterations. There are three routes to take to obtain fast growth. They all involve content but beyond that each decidedly different from the other.
These efforts include investing money, relying on virality, or evergreen content. The best way to growth hack is to pick one and only one. Your effort needs to be focused.
Going viral can be as simple as giving people an incentive to spread the word. For example, you could provide a free sample or download in return for sharing a post, or posting a recommendation.
There are some industries where the best way to hack your way to growth is to simply be better than everyone else. That includes your content. Evergreen content is content that isn’t attached to any particular fad or trend. It’s simply informative, relevant, engaging, and well-written, and will continue to be so in the future. Evergreen content builds trust and thought leadership, earns organic links and increases traffic.
Finally, there’s simply investing money. Yes, growth hacking is supposed to be done on a shoestring, but that doesn’t mean that it’s never appropriate to spend money. Money invested in a very targeted, paid advertising strategy can create a burst of growth that your startup needs.
Hack Your Call to Action
Ultimately, this is all about creating as many conversions as possible. The most important step someone is going to take is clicking on your "buy now", "download", or "subscribe" button. If they don’t do this, nothing you’ve done until now will matter.
The challenge is that it’s difficult to know what will work. You truly have to test and change, and then test again. The secret in your case could be shortening a form. It could be relocating your call to action button, or changing your CTA text. In many cases, removing the credit card requirement can make a huge difference, if converting means signing up for a free trial.
Conclusion: Create an Amazing First Experience
As important it is to earn conversions, that isn’t the final step. The next step in growth hacking is to curate amazing first-time experiences for your customers. You can do this by delivering one on one instruction or providing self-service tutorials. The idea is to ensure that your first-time customers understand how to use your product and that they get the most benefit out of it. Sometimes, you need to do some hand-holding to make this happens.