Growth Hacking techniques for your business

With Growth Hacking you can grow your business exponentially. Want to know what strategies you can implement? Read the article and discover the tips to implement them in the best way.

Growth Hacking, which I have already told you about in this article , is useful for having an overview of the business and can make the difference in the activation, retention, revenue and referral phases of a company, whether it is a startup, a SME or a large company.

In fact, every company needs to grow and this type of mindset can be extremely useful precisely because it is based on experimentation and, therefore, on agile and fast processes, and because it is oriented towards a fundamental objective for any type of business.

Definition of Growth Hacking

Growth Hacking is a marketing methodology that allows a company to rapidly increase its user base at minimal cost through a series of techniques and strategies that have the sole objective of business growth and, more specifically, exponential growth.

According to the setting of Sean Ellis, founding father of Growth Hacking, this approach allows companies to test new solutions on a small scale and invest budgets only if the tests give positive results. This makes Growth Hacking perfect both for smaller companies with few resources, such as startups (for which it was actually born), and for large companies.

The growth hacking funnel

To identify the most suitable Growth Hacking techniques and strategies for your business, you need to know your target audience and understand the path that leads them to buy what you sell.

So you have to use a sales funnel. In marketing, the sales funnel is the process that guides the prospect to purchase. This journey begins with awareness and ends with conversion, and can include post-purchase activities as well.

The Growth Hacking funnel was defined by Dave McClure and is called the Pirate Funnel because the initial letters of each phase create the acronym AAARRR, an onomatopoeic word that recalls the typical expression of pirates in children's stories.

The Pirate Funnel is divided into the following stages:

• awareness,
• Acquisitions,
• Activation,
• Retention,
• Revenue,
• Referrals.

Awareness

At the top of the funnel stage, you need to get your target audience (visitors) to visit your website or app for the first time . The techniques and strategies of this phase aim at brand awareness.

Acquisitions

In the acquisition phase , you collect data from your potential customers through website forms and landing pages, digital PR and off-page SEO activities. The reference metric here is the traffic arriving on your site or app.

Activation

Activation takes place when a visitor performs an action that creates a relationship with you : he subscribes to your newsletter, creates an account, makes a purchase, etc. The goal of this stage of the Growth Hacking funnel is to activate visitors and turn them into members .

Retention

In the retention phase, the goal is to convert a member into a user – someone who uses your product on a regular basis. To keep the user in your user base you need to leverage the engagement gained with the Growth Hacking strategies in the previous phases. User experience is essential in this step of growth: a satisfied user has no reason to stop using your product or app.

Referrals

In this phase , satisfied users of your company become your brand ambassadors: by sharing their satisfaction with your products and your company with friends and followers, they encourage visits to your site and allow you to acquire new customers. For the growth of your business it is essential to take advantage of this customer acquisition vehicle, which is efficient and economical.

Revenue

This last phase of the Pirate Funnel is all about results . The growth hacker analyzes the data and optimizes the funnel, prioritizing the marketing channels and initiatives that have given the best results.

Optimize the Funnel AAARRR

The Pirate Funnel gives you all the information you need to prioritize and adjust your growth marketing activities accordingly. It also lets you understand where you are losing potential customers.

For example, if you are converting 50% of all visitors to members and 50% of all members to users but only get 100 new unique visitors per day to your site or app, you will need to improve your growth strategies and techniques. Hacking at the top of the funnel to get more visitors.

Growth Hacking: How to get started

The main objective of Growth Hacking is to implement effective strategies to acquire customers and keep them for as long as possible .

To start Growth Hacking you need to:

• Understand the product.
• Understand the user base.
• Think about the sales funnel.
• Simplify your marketing strategy.
• Establish SMART growth goals and KPIs (your core metrics).

You can start your Growth Marketing plan with a small budget and then scale it up as you start making money.

Remember: Growth Hacking is a creative marketing approach because it does not limit itself to implementing traditional marketing techniques but tests innovative ideas, elaborated on the basis of the characteristics of the user base and the sales funnel.

Growth hacking techniques and strategies

Growth Hacking techniques allow you to reach a large and target audience. Some strategies have already been in use for a few years and have been shown to play a vital role in the growth of modern companies (see Facebook, LinkedIn, Airbnb, Uber and many others).

A growth hacker can combine different techniques and strategies to achieve his goals, for example email marketing, SEO, content marketing, social media growth hacking (e.g. social ADS), viral marketing, collaborations, etc.

The best growth hacking strategies are actually a mix of marketing, development, design, data and analytics.

Let's see some Growth Hacking techniques and strategies that you could use to grow your business exponentially.

1. Create a pre-launch email list

Email Marketing is an excellent Growth Hacking tool: it has a low investment cost and a high ROI (up to 4,200%). There is no better channel for obtaining leads and conversions , as well as for nurturing the relationship with the user base over time.

Among the best practices of Email Marketing is the segmentation of the contact database to send personalized email campaigns. By implementing this strategy, you can create a list to which you can send pre-launch news about your company's new products and features.

This Growth Hacking tactic allows you to create hype around an important event for your business, acquiring potential customers even before launching your novelty on the market.

To use this strategy and grow your business, you need to rely on a reliable Email Marketing provider, with high deliverability rates, such as the Italian Mail Up, Sendinblue or MailChimp.

2. A Content Marketing strategy based on customer feedback

To make what you sell want, you need to know your user base well, understand what problems they want to solve and show indisputably that your product is the best possible solution.

Content Marketing and SEO are fundamental strategies in digital marketing and continue to be so in Growth Hacking too but here, instead of starting from the product, we start from customer feedback.

This means that you have to create valuable, shareable content that your audience will find when they need it and will read with interest because it helps them solve their problem .

Make your content go viral by appealing to users' emotions, leverage the video format whenever possible (e.g. create tutorials) and use the right hooks to get people to your landing pages.

3. Use influencer marketing

Partnering with the social media influencers your audience congregates on is a great growth hack. Influencers with more than 50,000 followers help you attract people who don't know you (we're at the top of the funnel). The micro-influencers of a niche related to your business, on the other hand, allow you to work hard and reach a smaller but much more targeted audience.

Influencer marketing with big names allows you to reach a huge reach, but if your company is just starting out and doesn't have big budgets, micro-influencers will be your lifesaver.

4. Ride the trends

To do Growth Hacking successfully you must have a creative approach to marketing and adapt quickly to industry news. New trends represent a unique opportunity for visibility . Identify them when they are still in their infancy and ride the trend, creating and sharing ad hoc content and adapting your communication.

The trend can also be a new social media . In this case, however, before embarking on a new adventure, check if your potential customers are really there.

5. Create a referral program

It is a growth hacking strategy that allows you to expand your user base at a lower cost than the standard acquisition of customers.

To develop your referral marketing strategies, create an incentive system that stimulates your customers to tell friends and followers about you. The incentive is usually a perk such as a discount, exclusive offer, cashback, etc.

Referral marketing allows you to have a constant flow of new users on your platform with a lifetime value 16% higher than that of non-referral customers.

Other growth hacking techniques you can use are:

6. Conquer adjacent markets.

7. Write guest posts and host experts with large followings on your blog.

8. Use platforms such as HARO (Helping A Reporter Out) to connect with journalists and press offices.

9. Create an affiliate system.

10. Do Broken Link Building.

Growth hacking tools

We have seen some useful techniques and strategies to grow a business quickly and at low cost. But if you wanted to start Growth Hacking today, what tools could you use?

The Web provides you with hundreds of solutions, you just have to choose the tools that suit your needs and, of course, your budget.

Let's see some of them:

• Google Optimize : A tool for A/B testing.
• Instapage and Landingi : are tools for creating landing pages.
• Expandi : a tool to automate Growth Hacking activities on LinkedIn.
• Sumo - Allows you to place banners and other objects on your website to get more people to subscribe to your mailing lists.
• Zapier : is a tool that connects more than 1,000 marketing tools and apps to automate your workflows.
• Landbot : a tool to create your chatbot in just a few steps.
• Hotjar : a tool for obtaining heat maps.
• Hunter.io : a tool to find the company email address of a professional you want to contact.

Excellent free tools for Growth Hacking are those offered by Google:

• Analytics
• Tag Manager
• Date Study
• Google My Business
• YouTube
• meet

As you can see, you are spoiled for choice in the tools and techniques you can use to get started in growth hacking – and you don't need big budgets. Remember to always keep an open and responsive mind and to test every idea before implementing your growth hack .