Your Ultimate Guide to The Best Growth Hacking Strategies

“Slow and steady” doesn’t always win the race – especially in the digital era. Competition is more fierce than ever and the market is overflowing with similar businesses aiming for the same goal — success. That’s why growth hacking strategies have become crucial for any entrepreneur’s triumph and why successful startups are using nothing but the best ones to fast-track their success.

To reach out to a massive audience, entrepreneurs need to adapt and try out different strategies to get the best results quickly and efficiently. The world of digital marketing is constantly evolving, so many growth hacking techniques are fairly new but equally vital for the growth of a modern-day business.

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Keeping up with the latest ones and adopting some of the best growth hacking strategies we are going to talk about today will prove to be fruitful for any modern-day business or startup.

Let’s dig in.

What Is Growth Hacking?

Growth Hacking is a popular buzzword, but does anyone know what it means? Growth hacking is the use of resource-light and cost-effective digital marketing tactics to help grow and retain an active user base, sell products, and gain exposure. Simply put, it is a process of rapidly experimenting with and implementing marketing and promotional strategies solely focused on efficient and rapid business growth.

Growth hacking achieves results fast, with minimal expenditure. The name says it all – the “hacking” part is all about finding clever and astute shortcuts, that bring in big results. This means that the growth hacker is focused on experimenting with different marketing tactics, advertising solutions, web designs, and other important components to reach out to a wide audience.

Who Are Growth Hacking Strategies for?

Growth hacking is not just for startups – any business can use growth hacking techniques to accelerate its success without breaking the budget. Those who understand growth hacking strategies will have a competitive advantage that is hard to overstate. So, this ultimate growth hacking guide is for entrepreneurs, founders, growth leads, or anyone trying to grow their way to the top.

Why Are Growth Hacking Strategies Important? Growth Hacking Examples

Growth hacking is an experimental approach that happens very quickly and is always changing. The goal of those experiments is to adopt something or rule it out, move on to the next thing and repeat the process. If you keep doing what you’ve always done, there isn’t much room for change and growth, is there?

Implementing different growth hacking strategies can either make or break a business. Let’s illustrate this with an everyday example. How many times have you heard that a certain restaurant has closed within a few months of opening? Why? Because they didn’t achieve a sufficient amount of growth to be turned into profit quickly enough.

Who Is the Growth Hacker?

Anyone who executes a growth hacking strategy is a growth hacker, but there’s more to the term than it might appear. A growth hacker is “a person whose true north is growth”. Growth hackers dramatically enhance or “hack” business growth potential. They focus on inducing and improving market expansion for companies by analyzing performance and goals, experimenting with strategies, testing outcomes, and implementing solutions.

A growth hackers’ top focus and priority are overall growth metrics. This means that a highly skilled growth hacker is going to attempt to achieve growth across as many metrics as possible by using very low-cost marketing tactics and strategies that involve creativity and innovation above all else. Many modern-day companies built their entire business based on creative and user-generated content that encourages word of mouth.

How Is A Growth Hacker Different from A Marketer?

People usually assume that a growth hacker is a marketer, but that isn’t necessarily the case. Marketers are rationality-driven people who mostly rely on numbers and facts, meaning they are taught to cut expenses, focus on conversion and conduct long-term experiments.

Unlike traditional marketers who may have a broader view and be concerned about things like brand recognition or public relations, growth hackers are solely interested in strategies and tactics that drive growth, ASAP. If marketing tactics don’t have the potential to drive growth – growth hackers aren’t interested.

Before You Start Hacking: Foundations for Growth Hacking Success

Growth hackers love to write about their “ultimate growth hack that got 200% ROI”. That means there is an enormous wealth of information about growth hacking online. There is a revolution taking place in the world of startup and business growth, and we’re here to help you understand this phenomenon.

The three main types of growth hacking strategies are:

• Content marketing
• Product marketing
• Advertising

Growth hacking strategies aim to increase the customer base as quickly as possible while spending a minimum amount of money. There are many different growth hacking strategies you can try out but before we get into that, there are a few things to have in mind:

A Great Product

First, you need to have a great product or service. Otherwise, all the marketing in the world can’t help you achieve the growth you want. Second, your product must meet the needs of your customers. You can do that by creating a buyer persona.

Buyer Persona

The best way to understand the needs of your customers is to create a buyer persona. This will help you understand your customer base and pinpoint crucial information for future marketing efforts and growth hacking strategies such as:

• Age
• Gender
• Education
• Key information sources
• Goals
• Values
• Challenges and pain points

Once you connect all the pieces of the puzzle, understanding why certain groups of people are attracted to your product will be much easier. You can then tailor your growth hacking strategies according to your buyer persona, by giving them something of great value that is going to solve their problems. Once you connect all the pieces of the puzzle, understanding why certain groups of people are attracted to your product will be much easier. You can then tailor your growth hacking strategies according to your buyer persona, by giving them something of great value that is going to solve their problems.

The Customer Journey

Apart from knowing your customers, understanding the customer journey is also crucial for implementing good growth hacking strategies. It consists of three stages:

Awareness – People need a solution to their problem, but don’t know where to get it

Evaluation – Is your product going to solve their problem?

Conversion – They’ve decided you’re the best option

SMART Goals

Setting SMART goals is one of the most important things when starting your business. SMART goals are:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Achievable
• Relevant
• Time-bound

In other words, you need to set realistic goals. When it comes to digital marketing, there’s no such thing as wishing for the stars, crossing your fingers, and hoping for the best.

How Can I Hack My Business Growth? Top 14 Growth Hacking Strategies

Have you ever wondered why some companies grow at such an increased pace? Other than pure discipline and strong work habits, they’re probably fueled by top-notch growth hack strategies.

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Let’s look at some of the best growth hacking strategies out there, proven to work wonders for your business.

1. Repurposing Blog Content

Blog posts can benefit from more than just edits – they have the potential to be transformational and can be repurposed in many different ways. One of the most popular ways to grow hack them is through video content!

You’re probably aware of how popular multimedia content is these days – 78% of video marketers say video has directly helped increase sales. This comes as no surprise since Youtube and Instagram’s IGTV are some of the most visited platforms on the internet.

Having interesting and “shareable” informative content is a great way to reach out to new audiences. Furthermore, having visually appealing short videos catches the attention of people much easier than a long blog.

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2. Enabling Social Media Sharing

Speaking of social media — are you making it easy for your audience to tell their friends about you? As a growth hacker, you can’t ignore the potential of millions of social media users around the globe. Consider building easy sharing tools for Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram directly into your website content to enable users to easily share your content across social media platforms.

This hack works particularly well with things like one-line quotes or statistics. Since social media platforms usually have a character limit, these short snippets are prime for sharing. Anything striking and concise is shareable on social media and should be used when creating growth hacking strategies.

Since social media posts are meant for sharing, embedding them in your web content can also be a great hack – like tweets from happy customers, for example. This growth hack is best used on post-conversation pages because you don’t want your customers to be distracted from your primary CTA.

3. Testing Your Conversion Points

Leads — they’re great! Not sure where they come from or where they’re most likely to convert? You can easily test different conversion points with a non-intrusive exit-intent popup. Always make sure that the popup is non-intrusive and doesn’t interfere with a positive user experience, especially on mobile, because Google penalizes websites that have intrusive mobile interstitials.

4. Prioritizing Keywords and Ranking

Keywords – they might be more powerful than you think. Keyword research is crucial, but there are a million keywords out there. Prioritizing exactly which ones to pursue is key. If you want to rank for certain search terms, you need to know what’s already in the top ten results for those queries. Do so by searching from an incognito window to produce unbiased results and see what’s on the first page.

Pro tip? You can also tag your YouTube videos with those keywords, and not necessarily for the video’s content. It can help your YouTube videos appear as “suggested content” for audiences you want to reach.

5. Creating an Email Waiting List

The age-old adage “The money is in the list,” literally applies to growth hacking as a powerful strategy to gain new leads and enable conversions. The list here is of your email subscribers.

Building your email list will allow you to pre-launch your product and gain an idea of how customers respond to it before you officially launch it to the public and acquire prospective feedback and maybe even buyers before the official launch.

6. Pre-Launching on Third Party Platforms

On top of creating an email waiting list, gaining some outside perspective by launching your product/service onto third-party platforms is another great growth hack. Users and startups submit new products every day, so real people can share and discuss the latest mobile apps, websites, and tech projects.

This allows you to gain valuable feedback on your product or service. Not to mention you can receive much-needed exposure at an extremely low cost, which is what growth hacking is all about!

7. Going Live

Live videos are one of the best growth hacking strategies as it allows an unlimited number of people to tune in and directly engage with you, then continue to share this valuable information. Plus, any kind of live video can be streamed on various social media platforms – imagine the wonders this growth hack can do for your traffic. Planning a traffic-boosting live stream, like a webinar or YouTube Live? Embed it for a powerful growth hack combo.

8. Connecting with Industry Leaders

Connecting with industry experts will not only gain you visibility but also show that you mean business. Following and connecting with industry experts on social media platforms can expand your knowledge, inspire you, and sometimes even be a lifesaver. It also allows you to mention a big name in the game as a source in your blog post or video.

This is directly correlated to growth and is one of the most valuable growth hacking strategies that promote a sense of connection.

9. Connecting With Real People

Sometimes, people get so focused on acquiring new visitors and customers that they forget about the existing ones. Your faithful customers are your best source of information, especially when it comes to feedback and ideas on how to grow your products or services.

Listen to what your users need, like and don’t like, write it down, and update accordingly. People will go crazy for these new updates because it is exactly what they needed! What a great way to gather valuable insight and create a deeper connection with your existing customers, right? After all, you’re doing it for them!

10. Joining Q/A Sites, Forums, and Communities

One extremely simple growth hack strategy is visiting niche Q&A websites and forums to provide answers on relevant topics. This is where users generally pose questions containing long-tail keywords, which is the main reason why these platforms have gained popularity.

Answering user questions on Q&A sites and forums can help you establish credibility as an industry leader. It can also help you variegate your link profiles, boost traffic to your website, garner attention around your product/service and gain the audience’s trust.

11. Custom Audience Targeting

Thinking about creating an ad or promoting a post on Facebook or Instagram? Identify whether your targeted customers have some common interests or similarities such as location, age, and gender. This way you can create a custom, lookalike audience that emulates your current “fan base,” helping you grow where you’re already doing well. However, make sure you exclude your current customers – you’re trying to reach out to new people.

Twitter also offers an ad personalization feature called “Custom Audiences”, which allows brands to create sponsored tweets that target users most likely to be interested in their products and services. This helps to retarget people who are already familiar with your brand from a website visit or another previous interaction.

12. Using HARO For Press Opportunities

Another great growth hacking strategy is HARO, as a platform to showcase your expertise. It helps you sate curiosity and generate good press around your product/service by answering requests and questions posed by journalists and reporters. While it’s a time-intensive practice, it’s also a really good way to build brand awareness.

13. Creating Free Tools – Not Just Free Content

Having different types of free content is great, but having a free tool is even better. While other digital content, like videos, can teach your prospects and build trust, free tools like calculators, kits, and templates help them experience the benefits of your products more directly and illustrate what they can gain by becoming a customer.

14. Leveraging Growth Hacking Tools

You don’t have to hack your growth all by yourself. There are some amazing and useful tools out there that can help you develop great growth hacking strategies.

Google’s Tools

Consumer barometer is a free tool you can use to gain insight into your target audiences’ online behavior and create custom analyses with their fantastic graph builder. Think With Google is also a free resource that provides information about online consumers, current trends, and insights to help you understand your audience’s online behavior.

Click to Tweet

A free tool that allows you to promote your content on Twitter. Tweet, generate a link, add it to your content and easily track the number of clicks on that post.

Amplitude

Amplitude helps you use customer data to build great product experiences. You can analyze your products and see how customers interact with them, thus improving user engagement and optimizing conversion.

SessionCam

This is a cloud-based set of tools that can help you visualize visitors’ behavior on your website and see where your user experience can be improved. Some of the best features include heatmaps, customer journey mapping, and struggle detection.

Ahrefs

A great set of tools to optimize your website and blog and drive search traffic. It also helps you research your competitors, audit your site’s SEO performance, explore keywords and other SEO-related resources.

Growth Hack Your Way to The Top

Growth hacking might seem intimidating at first, but with a little digging around, you too can become a successful, self-taught growth hacker. These growth hacking strategies provide an efficient and proven way for you to market your services and products to your target audience and skyrocket your business fast and cost-effectively.

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Feeling energized to start growing? We certainly are. Decide which of these hacks would be the easiest for you to tackle first and don’t be afraid to experiment. Have patience, learn from the pros, bookmark this blog and come back to it whenever you need to.

Best of luck!