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What Growth Hacking is and how to use to accelerate your business

Have you ever wondered why companies like iFood, Airbnb or Uber have become so successful so quickly? The old saying “Slow and always” does not always win the race, especially in the Internet era. Today, successful companies and startups are using growth hacking strategies to accelerate their success. [...]

· · 9 min read

What Growth Hacking is and how to use to accelerate your business

Have you ever wondered why companies like iFood, Airbnb or Uber have become so successful so quickly?

The old saying “Slow and always” does not always win the race, especially in the Internet era. Today, successful companies and startups are using growth hacking strategies to accelerate their success.


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What is Growth Hacking 

It is a process of quickly experimenting and implementing marketing and promotional strategies that focus exclusively on fast and efficient business growth. The term was coined by the CEO and founder of GrowthHackers, Sean Ellis, 2010.

Growth hacking achieves rapid results with minimal spending. The hacking part is about finding smart shortcuts that bring great results.

The term hacking usually has a negative connotation associated with it, because it refers to programming. But even people who “hack” programs are not always doing something illegal or causing harm. 

Hacking is sometimes an alternative solution or a shortcut. Applying the same logic to marketing also works. That's growth hacking. It was a concept originally applied to startups that needed to create awareness and adoption, but they had no marketing budget or resources for it. 

The Growth Hacking Funnel

Growth hackers are obsessed with strategies that increase business. They usually set priorities to get new customers and expand their business. Then they develop, implement and test ideas to help them achieve their goals.

An important part of planning any marketing strategy is deciding how to measure success. Many growth hackers focus on “piracy metrics,” so called because of their initials: 

AARRR, which represents the five stages of the growth hacking funnel:

  • Acquisition: obtaining new customers
  • Activation: Convince customers to use the product
  • Detention: Keep customers and reduce turnover
  • Revenue: making money
  • Reference: To make other people indicate new customers

Where to start?

Before you can start hacking your business growth, it is important to understand in depth:

Who are your clients? What do they want?

The essential point is to take care of the product's suitability to the market. In other words, you need to have an amazing product and make sure it meets the customer's needs.

To do this, you need to understand your customers. That means knowing:

  • Age, sex, education and other demographic data.
  • Where, besides their website, they seek information.

What are your values, as well as your goals, challenges and weaknesses that your product can solve. Think of the ideal persona you need to draw to achieve. 

The customer journey matters

But you also need to understand how your prospects or leads end up becoming customers. This is called customer journey, which usually goes from recognition to evaluation and conversion.

And that's when they decide that you offer the best product or service and become customers that they become part of the growth hacking funnel.

Always ask yourself: is your website helping with conversions?

Conversion-centered design is another important aspect of hacking your marketing. This means making it easier for visitors: finding the information needed to take the next step in your interaction with you or your company. 

Have a chance to get visitors to the site to interact with you.

Capriche in the social proof that establishes your experience and authority. 

It is also important to identify any bottlenecks that prevent visitors from converting. 

Have Realistic Goals

Do not set goals without meaning or impossible. Learn what you want to achieve and how it contributes to growth. Find out how you're going to measure it and set a time limit to reach it. 

The key words that should guide your goals:

  • Specific – Measurable – Reachable – Relevant – Time limit

Follow below, five growth hacking strategies already tested by small ones of all ports and that work:

1. From pop-up to email marketing

One of the reasons why the email marketing It's a great hack is that you don't need to spend too much to start. There are tools to use for free until it gets big enough and upgrades.

But it may take a while to increase your email list. That's where our first growth hack comes in. You can fire your email list with an output pop-up on the site that offers some free material.

It's a kind of digital incentive or bait that you'll offer visitors in exchange for sharing your contact information with you. Downloadable content are quite common, such as checklists, spreadsheets, reports and e-books.

The exit intention detects when visitors are about to leave their site and shows them their offer as decoy. This kind of campaign is proven to attract the attention of the interested and convert well.

2. Hacks for Social Networks 

Find platforms or social media channels not used by your competitors. Building an audience on large platforms like Facebook, Youtube, Instagram and Twitter can be more time consuming and laborious. 

Consider building a social base of followers on platforms where your competitors are underutilizing or not even using. 

Some of the platforms include Quora, Reddit, Pinterest, Tumblr or Snapchat. This can help differentiate your followers and allow you to be more competitive.

Join established influencers. Established influencers will have a faithful audience and followers and if you find one that fits your niche, you can leverage their audience to promote your products and services.

Use scheduling and management tools. It may be extremely time consuming not only to create a part of the content, but to have to distribute it on a multitude of different social media channels. Similarly, monitoring and analysis of results can be easier to measure.

One of the most popular tools for social networks in the market is currently Mlabs. But there are hundreds of options. Test to see which fits best in your strategy. 

3. Learn from your competitors

Even for those who do not have marketing skills, the analysis of competition is a natural habit. The contestants will always be there, unless you're doing something that nobody dared venture into. 

The important thing is not to consider your competition as a threat but as a learning. To get where your competitors are, you need to learn what they do and especially, how they do it.

You can call this hack a kind of reverse engineering. First, you find out how they got there and then follow their strategy, designing it to suit your brand. 

Find out what worked for them: Social media campaign? New advertising campaign? SEO and link building? A redesigned website? Whatever it is, study well, analyze and follow, but not to the letter. Make sure you always optimize your campaigns for your specific target audience.

And there are certain tools that can help you do this: Google's advanced search operators, SimilarWeb, MOAT, among others.

4. Customize the visitor experience

What can you add to the site or Blog pages that is customized to the visitor or targeted for it? Are they already customers? Are they coming back? Are they clicking on a reference link? If you can customize the experience based on who they are, you can conduct a better conversion activity.

Remember that value content should be a priority in your communication for attraction. Apply storytellingcan help build the purchase journey. 

5. Assessments as testimonials

Get reviews in the form of comments in your blog posts or social networks. Collect potential customer success stories and place them on your website homepage. 

This way, you will turn new visitors into potential customers. Because everything your current customers say about your product is a decision-making tool for new customers about whether to click the purchase button or go away.

What to do and what not to do

To help you figure out how to hack your growth in the right way, you need to focus on what you should be doing and what you shouldn't be doing. These elements facilitate the development of a leaner strategy that will produce better results and faster.

  • DO IT: ♪ Innovate and try it ♪
  • NO: follow the same old tactics
  • DO IT: Remove everything that is not working
  • DO NOT DO: Add resources without first validating
  • DO IT: Reward and encourage your customers
  • NO: Try to appeal to everyone (yet)
Growth Hacking - illustration
Growth Hacking – illustration

Conclusion

Growth hacking strategies are important to have within your initial and current company because they can provide alternative ways to attract customers, establish brand recognition, and even sell products or services.

It is important that you experience different strategies consistently to find those that work best for your industry and niche. Try different strategies often and make sure you measure your results to get an accurate idea of what is working and what is not.

You will be surprised how subtle minor changes in your business processes and marketing strategy can have a major impact on your overall results.

Gustavo Trentini · Nacionalvox

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