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Amol Ghemud Published: August 14, 2018
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Is your startup in search of new avenues for growth and expansion? Then you’ll want to read the blog further on which types of growth hack ideas growth hack techniques as popularly known will be needed to achieve this growth.
Each technique mentioned in the article serves a different purpose and to achieve this purpose, your business will need the right tools in place.
From growth hacking techniques such as customer feedback to user testing and from email marketing to lead generation, there’s no doubt digital marketers have a lot on their plates when it comes to prioritizing and selecting the right approach, including which tools aid in that approach. So we’ve made it easier for you… In this overview, we will analyze the different growth hacking techniques and tools that you can apply to achieve growth.
Key growth hacks for startups are not reserved only for professionals and companies belonging to a certain sector. Any startup can use the skills mentioned and anyone who has the right skills, tool stack and drive can build upon these tactics to increase a product’s reach and subscribers.
But what exactly is Growth Hacking?
Otherwise known as growth hacking marketing, Sean Ellis, CEO and Founder of GrowthHackers, first came up with the term growth hacker. According to him, “A growth hacker is a person whose true north is growth.”
Want to talk to an experienced growth hacker and pick his brains?
Everything a growth hacker does is aimed towards a uniform, single goal –growth. A growth hacker uses all initiatives, tools, and techniques to achieve consumer growth. This professional needs to be both a marketer and an engineer who seeks out the best marketing ideas through testing and analyzing results. The end game for any growth hacker is finding scalable strategies to bring in more users. A growth hacker ignores everything else to focus on infiltrating the market through product innovations, new distribution channels, and technology-based features. Growth hacking tricks for startup need to be precise, concise and achievable in nature.
We’ve mentioned 6growth hacking techniques in particular:
Customer Insight and Feedback
Traffic Generation
User Testing
Lead Generation
Email Marketing
Inbound Marketing
Consumer Insight and Feedback
Having a better understanding of your customers (on a deeper level than any web analytics tool provides) is pivotal to having a successful digital business strategy. In other words, knowing what your customers want, how they arrive at their decisions online and how they are interacting with your brand can shape this strategy tremendously – so how do you access these insights?
These insights can be extracted in two different ways depending on how ‘in-depth’ you want to go. The first growth hack technique is the customer feedback. There are several different customer feedback tools on the market that collect data from your customers, whether that’s via online feedback forms, surveys, reviews, etc. The feedback is gathered directly from your customer base and reflects their opinion about your brand and website.
Some examples of customer feedback tools include Mopinion, PollDaddy and WebEngage. Source: Mopinion Feedback Analytics software
Alternatively, you can focus on another growth hacking technique: generic consumer insights. Tools in this area are often geared towards the e-commerce industry and collect insights from the perspective of an entire market. They are focused on insights collected from metadata level, such as how consumers search online, their purchase behaviour, device usage, etc. A good example of this is Consumer Barometer.
Traffic Generation
Traffic Generation is all about maximizing the engagement and relationships by inserting yourself in relevant conversations with your customers and sharing content amongst potential customers/visitors. This is a very useful growth hack idea and is very critical to the growth of your company, tools that use this growth hacking technique help businesses establish a strong online presence.
When the question of successful growth hacking techniques for startups is asked, generating traffic with consumer engagement pops up. They also provide insight into how your competitors are performing in regards to incoming traffic and which parts of your website need optimizing to achieve higher traffic levels. Source: Colibri.io
Online communities, in particular, are a powerful source of traffic and can significantly aid in facilitating online engagement. Also the members of a community are encouraged to interact within the community and can do things like vote on an idea or provide a suggestion. Alternatively, online communities also provide a lot of insight from a customer service perspective. These communities provide a usable platform for members to indicate that they have encountered a problem on the website, which may be a problem shared by other users. An example of this is Colibri.
In addition to online communities, there are many other ways of generating traffic. Some of the growth hack ideas are mentioned here. Users can implement spy tools which allow them to research their competitors and gain insights into which traffic sources, text ads or banner ads they are using – e.g. MixRank. Alternatively, there are tools more geared towards content promotion such as PayWithATweet that allow users to access your content only if they’ve tweeted or posted about it.
User Testing
Another important growth hacking trick for startups is user Testing techniques. It is also known as user experience (UX) techniques, are very beneficial in terms of boosting user interaction. Variety of tools are available within this category that will help to achieve improved website usability as well as provide you with insight into how visitors experience a website or mobile app. These tools include heatmapping, A/B testing, session recording, event-tracking and design & wireframing tools. Source: Clicktale
Heatmapping and session recording tools, for example, shows how your visitors are interacting with your website based on factors such as clicks, scrolls and mouse movement. To use this growth hacking technique, tools such as Hotjar and Clicktale can be applied.
A/B Testing, on the other hand, is focused more so on testing different versions of websites and/or landing pages. Examples of these tools include Visual Website Optimizer (VWO) and Optimizely.
Lead Generation
One of the best growth hacks is growing your customer base, and for obvious reasons, an important goal if you want to achieve growth. Which is why many growth hackers choose to use various lead generation techniques. Tools that use this type of growth hack techniques are intended to help businesses improve in areas that will promote growth such as Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) content visibility and of course, customer acquisition. As you might’ve guessed, this can cover a wide range of tools.
Lead gathering techniques are among the most popular amid growth hacks for startups who are looking to build up a list of prospects. This growth hacking technique is demonstrated using tools such as SalesForce, LeadCrunch and Lead Genius. Alternatively, in terms of SEO, tools such as Google Keyword Planner are also very helpful in making sure you score high in keyword rankings within digital content.
Email Marketing
Once the leads are gathered, you’ll need a way of ‘reaching out’ to these prospects. The best growth hacks usually used in this are to do with email marketing. A very effective and long withstanding growth hacking technique, email marketing tools are a great way of targeting both existing and potential customers with relevant content (such as blogs, newsletters, updates, etc).
Email marketing is still considered the most targeted and valuable channel for contacting potential customers. And what’s interesting about this field is that many marketers just kind of ‘stumble’ into it, which makes choosing the right tool all the more essential. Some of the well-known growth hack examples for email marketing are toolsinclude, MailChimp, CampaignMonitor and AWeber.
Inbound Marketing
Last but not least we have a growth hacking trick for startup which was the best growth hacks in past and continues to be the best growth hacking techniques in 2018; inbound marketing. A lot of tools that are focused on bringing in new customers are available for this growth hacking technique. It is usually done by way of relevant content creation and sharing. Creating content that entices your readers can help you quickly build up trust among them. Without having to fight for their attention (bonus!). And in addition to trust, these tools also help build awareness of your brand and what it has to offer. This includes introducing new solutions to your readers’ problems.
Many inbound marketing tools have multiple capabilities. Take HubSpot, for example. This tool is not only tracks and measures blogging activities, social media marketing and email marketing. But it can also help you create landing pages and offers a content management system that assists you in optimizing your content. There are also tools that serve as content discovery platforms, such as Outbrain. With these tools, companies can increase their reach in terms of readers – a great growth hacking technique.
To skyrocket your inbound marketing results, diversify your inbound marketing tactics by using more than one marketing channel.
Conclusion
The growth hacking strategies you decide to use largely depend on. The type of business you have, your current situation, and what you intend to achieve.
It’s worth noting that growth hacking only works when you invest your time and resources on the right strategy. For optimal results, try out different growth hacking techniques to see what gives you the best ROI. Then put all your efforts into what works and abandon what doesn’t.
Amol has helped catalyse business growth with his strategic & data-driven methodologies. With a decade of experience in the field of marketing, he has donned multiple hats, from channel optimization, data analytics and creative brand positioning to growth engineering and sales.
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