Welcome to the Growth Hacking Academy! In earlier lessons we covered what growth hacking is, how to become a growth hacker, and the best tools and growth hacking examples. In this lesson we’ll walk through the best growth hacking strategies. If you missed the earlier lessons you can always read them now.
If you’ve been looking for information on growth hacking strategies, it’s probably because you’re trying to build your business and grow. You’re in the right place.
As we saw earlier, growth hacking isn’t low-cost marketing but a different approach to marketing, one that aims for the best possible result by using the budget as well as it can (so it doesn’t mean spending little, it means making the most of the budget you have).
Growth hacking aims at refining everything you do, using tools, techniques, knowledge, ability, creativity, analysis and testing.
Every company — small, medium or large — has to be studied carefully, and for each type of business different growth hacking strategies have to be tested.
The same strategies don’t work for every kind of business.
So today we’ll look at some of the growth strategies you can test, to see whether — and which — might work for growing a company. Remember that growth doesn’t necessarily mean an immediate rise in revenue, but moving from an early stage to a better one.
Let’s get started.
Need a list of growth hacking tools?
Need tools to grow your business? Want to use growth hacking for your clients and work out which tools are available? No problem, we’ll give you the full list. FREE!
Request the free growth hacking tool list
The five stages of the growth hacking funnel
Growth hacking is built on a path through several stages, and it doesn’t end at the sale — there’s more to it. Here are those stages:
- Acquisition: using various channels to bring the user to your website. This is the first part of the funnel, where the user takes the first action: the click;
- Activation: here we learn whether the user was drawn to us enough to leave their contact details and become a lead. This is where we find out whether we were good and engaging enough in presenting our product;
- Retention: keeping the customer, building loyalty — that’s what retention handles. You have to guide the customer towards buying an accessory, a product or a service that fits their needs. Offer things they’ll actually find interesting;
- Revenue: time to monetise consumer behaviour. Analysing how users behave matters, so that you can offer a customer experience and a product that fits and keeps improving;
- Referral: now you need to encourage the customers who bought your product or service to share their experience with their network, to speak well of you and what you sell. How? One of the best examples is word of mouth, through which those customers can bring you new ones.
Those are the five stages of the growth hacking funnel. To get good results you have to pass through each of them.
So before building growth hacking strategies, follow this model and develop them with these parameters in mind.
Analysis comes first
Another thing to concentrate on before thinking about growth hacking strategies is analysis.
You have to know exactly which stage you’re at, what you want to reach, what you can solve, how you can solve it, what you can offer the user, what the user might want from you, how you’ll offer it — in short, ask plenty of questions and try to answer them accurately.
So, as you’ll see, there are steps to weigh before you even begin.
It’s worth asking:
- What’s the problem we have to solve? If we want the user to buy something from us, we have to give them help — a solution to a problem of theirs.
- How can we tell whether what we’ve done works? By running plenty of tests.
- Adapt the growth hacking strategy to the answers our target audience gives us. If a product takes hold the way we’ve presented it, we can carry on; otherwise changes and improvements are needed.
How many strategies are there?
Growth hacking strategies are numerous, and they differ from case to case.
Growth hacking strategies call for every tool and technique that can grow your users and customers. The goal is finding scalable strategies for acquiring more and more customers.
What matters here is the process: growth hacking is a process.
The experiments you run often fail. Which is why you always have to be ready and keep testing, using other tools, channels, techniques and initiatives.
That said, there are growth strategies that suit particular kinds of business, ecommerce sites among them. Let’s see what they are.
Give something away
Customers get tired of receiving messages about products. They get plenty every day, and very often those messages go unopened — or the emails are marked as spam.
Let’s think instead about how to make the customer happy and be different from everyone else.
We could give our customers something without asking for anything in return. That makes people far more inclined to open the emails that come from you.
That’s an example of a growth hacking strategy: don’t think about grand gestures, think about the detail.
Referral programmes
If you remember the Dropbox case from another of our lessons, it told how that cloud storage platform transformed its business within a year, going from 100,000 users to 4 million.
And do you know how?
Through a referral programme: giving users incentives in exchange for sharing the product. In this case users were offered extra storage (500 MB) for inviting other people to use Dropbox.
Other referral systems include discount codes and cash offers (see the PayPal example).
So don’t underestimate referrals in your growth strategy.
Need a list of growth hacking tools?
Need tools to grow your business? Want to use growth hacking for your clients and work out which tools are available? No problem, we’ll give you the full list. FREE!
Request the free growth hacking tool list
Nurture the people you already have
Whatever your business, it matters enormously that you surprise your users and visitors and keep giving them content and information that’s interesting and worthwhile.
The aim is always to turn a contact into a customer, and to keep that customer buying from you.
What does that take?
You have to analyse how users behave and then nurture them — look after them, give them information, tell them what’s new, make them feel important.
Think about it and this is the simplest growth hacking strategy there is: study your users and give them the best possible experience.
Freemium
A business that wants to grow has to know how and where to position itself.
A growth hacking strategy along these lines can work well: offer a free plan for your service, where users start using it and try the various features, plus a paid plan adding more.
That way users can use the service at no cost. If they decide they want, or come to need, something more, they’ll be willing to pay for premium features. Obviously the service you offer has to be good, and users have to find it useful.
This growth strategy is widely used by apps and by sites offering software.
Free image from Pixabay
Scarcity
For users, the feeling of possibly losing an offer, a product or access to a service is a powerful one.
Which means time-limited offers capture people.
It’s an effective growth strategy, because once you spark the worry that the product may not be available any more, there’s a good chance they’ll buy it.
What we’re describing here is an exclusive product — one a person has to perceive as such.
Reviews and trust
When you’re confident you’re offering an excellent product, you can certainly grow your business.
It always starts with a quality product your audience will like. Once you’ve won approval from your potential audience, you have to invest in trust.
Give customers the chance to leave you feedback. That’s an excellent test — first for improving yourself, but also for growing your customer base. People very often base their buying decisions on reviews and on other people’s opinions, so if you earn positive reviews, attracting new users and customers gets far easier.
Free image from Pixabay
Video
As you’ll know, video catches the eye immediately. A video has to tell the product’s story. A video with a well-told story can bring you plenty of conversions.
Images stay in the memory far more readily than text, not least because they’re more immediate — so taking advantage of that can only help your business.
So remember to build video into your growth hacking strategy.
Get people talking about the product
One growth hacking strategy you can put in place easily is getting people to talk about the product.
First you have to get the news to the customer. So you might create a dedicated page about the product and promote it so word reaches your users.
On that page you can put a form where they leave their contact details, and you can also encourage people to spread the word by giving them something (a discount code, say, or the product itself).
If you want more success stories, we’d suggest this lesson from our Academy: How to do growth hacking marketing
Conclusion
In this lesson we’ve covered growth hacking strategies. You’ll find ideas here for getting your own business moving with a few useful tools.
Our advice is to work with experienced growth hackers, though you could also try it yourself if you have the right skills. Growth hacking is a way of getting the best possible results in the shortest possible time while making the most of the budget available. If the subject fascinates you, stay tuned to your favourite Growth Hacking Academy.
Want advice on growing your business? Get in touch! With growth hacking we’ll work out and implement the best strategy for reaching your goal.
Want to become a growth hacker? Get in touch! We’ll find the right course for you.
Want to ask us something or just talk to us? Get in touch! That’s what we’re here for.