4 Steps to Reach out to More Customers with Growth Hacking
There’s a new buzzword in town, “Growth Hacking.” You may have heard it a thousand times by now, or you may be hearing it for the first time. Whatever be it, one thing’s for sure.
“Growth Hacking is here to stay and is the Happening Thing in the digital marketing world, right now.”
Do you know that “Growth Hacking” is the reason why a few start-ups manage to achieve ridiculous growth rates within a short span?
Ever wonder how Uber, Airbnb gained millions of users within a short time? The answer is “Growth Hacking.” More and more start-ups are looking to implementing growth hacking to increase revenues and reach out to millions of users.
Wondering, what the Heck is “Growth Hacking?”
You’re not alone. Here in this definitive guide, we don’t just explain what it is, but also share with you some secret tips for implementing growth hacking successfully. Grab a cup of coffee and settle for a great guide on the best strategies to achieve growth hacking.
Growth Hacking – The Definition
The term was coined by Sean Ellis in 2010. He initially introduced the term “Growth Hacker” to distinguish them from traditional marketers.
A growth hacker has only one aim – To help a start-up, a website, or a blog grows big within a short span of time. He doesn’t bother about budgets, conversions, and expenses. Instead, he’s solely focussed on spreading word of mouth about the start-up big time.
Growth hacking uses inexpensive, creative, and innovative ways, to grow the customer base exponentially.
Growth Hacking isn’t Just a Fancy Term for New-Age Marketing
Growth hacking is entirely different from conventional marketing techniques. It’s all about thinking out of the box.
A growth hacker thinks of unconventional marketing strategies to win more customers, improve revenues, and outpace competitors.
The Secrets to Successful Growth Hacking
Wondering why a few start-ups succeed while others fizz out? The secret to effective growth hacking is to implement the right framework and adopt the right strategy, at the right time.
However, that’s easier said than done.
Here in this article, we present you with a super-easy-to-implement growth technique and we also mention how you can attract, engage, acquire, and maintain your customer base.
1. Attract
The first step in building your customer base is to “Attract potential customers.”
Here are four steps to help you achieve that.
CONTENT CREATION & BLOGGING
You may have spent hours of your work time crafting the perfect article that adds value to your potential clients. However, if no one spends any time reading it, then it’s of no use.
Here’s where an empathy map comes in handy. It helps you identify the feelings of your potential audience. What is he/she thinking about? What makes them worried? What motivates them to click the like/share button? What does he/she share with his/her friends?
An empathy map helps you in figuring out the answers to these questions. Once you’ve worked out the answers, you can create the perfect content that is likely to interest your potential audience.
While drafting content, remember that it must offer a unique solution to your reader. They must be able to gain some knowledge that they weren’t aware of before reading the content. It must be able to help them with some issues or must make it easy for them to get the bigger picture.
Always, highlight the points that you think will add value to the user. This way, even a skimmer will be able to get the idea and will motivate him to read more.
GUEST POSTING
Improve brand awareness and increase the visitors to your blog or page, by getting industry experts to contribute. The aim here is to offer some unique value to your potential audience. Look for guest bloggers who are experts in their domain.
DIVERSIFY YOUR CONTENT
No one has the patience to wade through pages of text. Make it attractive and appealing by varying the type of content you post. Add infographics, visuals to pull in more customers.
They say, “A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words.” Leverage the power of images and visuals to draw in more customers.
Wondering how to create a great infographic that has the potential to go viral?
Three-step Guide for Creating a Viral Infographic
Pick a topic that interests your Target Audience – Don’t just randomly choose a topic and hope for the best. Instead, spend some time on market research. Make use of the right tools to identify trends and select a topic that appeals to your customers.
Use Reliable Facts and Data – Scrounge reliable sources to gather as much data as possible. Don’t overload your visual with plenty of numbers. Keep it minimal. The idea here is to create a compelling story and build a narrative around it. 10 to 12 key points is a good number.
Share the infographic – This one goes without saying. Once you have designed your infographic, it’s time to spread the word. Don’t just publish it on your web page and hope that people will land on it. Instead, share it extensively on social media, email subscription lists to get it in front of a large number of your audience.
MAKE USE OF FORUM MARKETING
It’s one of the most underused marketing techniques. Plenty of forums are available for all niches. The first step in forum marketing is to join a reliable one and work on building your reputation. People who come to forums are looking for answers to their problems.
So, instead of just self-promoting your products and services, offer solutions to users. Initially, try to spend as much time as possible on forums and provide answers to users. Once you have gained a reputation for yourself, you can now alter the solution to include your brand’s value. Quora is an excellent place to get started.
2. Engage with your Visitors and Try to Convert them into Leads
All visitors who land on your web page will not make a purchase the first time or even after several visits. This is where customer engagement is essential to improve conversions. One of the best growth hacking strategies is email marketing.
Not all your users may check social media regularly. But, you can be pretty sure that they’ll check their emails at least once a day. Also, people don’t often change their email ids. All these reasons make email marketing one of the best ways to reach your target audience.
The first step is in building an email list. Make use of tools like subscription bars and pop-ups to improve the number of subscribers. Give people an incentive to sign up. Instead of just selling or promoting your services, you can offer them exclusive discount codes, offers, and promotions. This works as bait in getting customers to sign up for your newsletter.
Once they sign, make sure that you follow your promise. If you promised them a 10% discount coupon, make sure you send that coupon right away to the customer’s inbox.
The next step is to draft an email marketing plan and stick to it. If you have decided on a frequency of two emails per week, ensure that you send two emails every week without fail. The secret to successful email marketing is to figure out the sweet spot.
Not too many mails so as to become annoying or too infrequent so that customers forget about your brand.
3 & 4. Acquiring Customers and Retaining Them
How do you acquire customers and ensure that they remain loyal to your brand? One of the efficient strategies of growth hacking in solving this issue is to use A/B testing.
It involves conducting a set of experiments to optimize your landing page, based on user responses. It’s also known as split testing.
The purpose of a landing page is to ensure that all users who land on it are converted into buyers.
While it isn’t possible to please all visitors, you can improve your chances of success by offering something that attracts a majority of the users.
Make use of the following four steps of A/B testing to ensure that your landing page is highly optimized.
1. Collect Data – Identify pages that have low conversion rates or pages that have a high drop-off ratio? Make use of tools like Crazy Egg, Hotjar that have heat maps to identify portions of your page that interested users and sections that earned the largest number of clicks. Data is your friend in growth hacking. Try to collect as much info as possible, before you proceed with the next steps.
2. Define your Goals – To identify if your A/B test is successful, you must set specific goals. Don’t just set vague goals like improving customer conversion rates. Make it highly specific by assigning numbers to each target.
3. Run the experiment with variations – Create both A and B scenarios. The differences can be something superficial like changing the background color or something more significant like including a Call-To-Action button and so on. Run both versions of the experiment. Crunch the numbers, and check the results to identify which appeals the most to users.
4. Make Changes based on the Results – Make a decision based on the results.
Wrapping it Up
Remember growth hacking is all about achieving long-term learning and not just focussing on immediate results. Repeating split testing is critical and is the only way to ensure that you remain relevant and continue to appeal to your target audience.
Implement these strategies and witness massive growth.
Growth Hacking is the recent vertical added in Webfries suite of services. As we have seen if you want your marketing results to grow North, Growth Hacking is the solution you should look out for. We will be glad to discuss more on this topic if you feel it’s cut out for you. Webfries is available at www.webfries.com | +91 124 4382-633.