Growth Hacking: The Key to Successful Startups
Startup founders need someone who focus only on one thing: growth.
Are you an entrepreneur or startup owner looking for a way to expand your business? Chances are you’ve heard of the revolutionary phenomenon spreading like wildfire around the startup community: growth hacking.
Though considered to be relatively new, but it has successfully captured everyone’s attention and gained massive momentum. It’s for obvious reasons of course: everyone wants to get big fast and earns millions of dollars fast. But let’s get back to the basics first.
What is growth hacking?
Growth Hacking: Put Simple
Quoting the godfather of growth hacking, CEO and Founder of Quaraloo, Sean Ellis defined growth hacker as a person whose true north is growth.
A traditional marketer as we know it has a very broad focus and probably a set of valuable skills, such as team management or strategic planning. The thing is, these qualities are not necessarily important in the early phase of a startup life. Instead, during this stage, founders need someone who focuses on growth.
Put simply, growth hacking is a concept that involves around growing your business through unconventional marketing experiments (Read also our Three Unusual Marketing Strategies article!).
Why is it so powerful and effective? Because it leverages on OPN (Other People’s Networks) and OPR (Other People’s Resources) to conduct low-cost experiments that have the potential to yield incredible results.
Growth Hacking Strategies
Naturally when we talked about growth, as marketers, we always connect it to sales. But in reality, there are other parameters to consider such as the number of followers, subscribers, or engagement rate. Applied with the right strategies, these metrics can grow as your business expands.
Here are some simple strategies that you can implement.
Find a niche social media platform
Social media is a highly competitive industry. From Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, there are a bunch of businesses of all sizes squeezed into the platforms, trying to catch the audience’s attention. Consider looking for smaller social networks outside the mainstream ones, such as Ask.fm for a simple Q&A interaction, Delicious for social bookmarking service, Profit.ly for stock traders, or The Dots for creative creators.
This is one of the most effective growth hacking techniques as you can get an early head-start over your competitors to grow your followers. Additionally you can funnel traffic from your website to the said-platform and vice-versa to make good use of your existing fans.
Use A/B testing regularly
Also known as ‘split testing’, A/B testing is a business model where you essentially divide your audience into two groups, with one of them acting as a control group. Each group receives a distinct version of your landing pages, homepage, sales page, contact page, email campaign, or discount offer. After which you can track each version’s performance. By looking at the results, you can tweak your strategy accordingly and move on to another test variable.
The key here is to focus on one area at a time. Be very clear about the goal and how you will measure the results. Don’t forget to set an appropriate deadline. This is especially useful to know what works and what doesn’t for your business, so it can help you find the right strategy to grow engagement, audience base, or other business goals you’ve set in advance.
Offer Freemium
Viral Access CEO, Folke Engholm, capitalized the power of freemium content. Freemium content is basically offering something free for people to try and once they are hooked and see the benefits of your products or services, they will naturally come back for more. This is such a great growth hacking strategy to expand your audience base.
Yes, granted, some people are always in for free content and will never convert into paid users, but as business owners, you need to focus on the process. It’s easier to retain customers than to acquire them. With freemium content, you basically pile valuable leads which you can re-target with more specific and personalized strategies to convince them to convert.
Growth Hacking: How to Start
Unsurprisingly, behind any successful growth hacking strategies is a meticulous and systematic process. Whether you’re a startup or a large organization, growth hacking tactics can be customized depending on your goals.
Here are 5 simple steps to get you started:
Redefine and perfect your products
A successful growth hacking strategy starts with your own products/services. It is important to ensure that your offer is strong enough to be the foundation of your growth.
Set appropriate goals that can be measured
Define a set of precise, actionable goals that will trigger growth. This step is necessary to ensure you are maximizing your time and resources.
Experiment on your approaches
Folke once emphasized the importance of having time for experiments. Tests after all are essential to initiate growth. Just remember to keep it focused and simple.
Analyze and evaluate your performance
There’s no denying the value of data to keep track of your growth. Beyond that, data can also be used to re-evaluate your overall performance.
Optimize and if necessary re-calibrate your strategies
Most often, growth hack strategies won’t yield success immediately, but the important thing is to learn through experience. Whether to implement an entirely new tactic or to redefine your previous effort, growth comes with patience.
Are you ready to start your own growth-hacking tactics? Leave us a clap before you start implementing the techniques!
