The strategies and channels to apply Growth Hacking to your online business to win new customers.
The question on your mind is always the same: How can I grow my online business?
Reaching more people and winning them over to become your customers is one of your priorities, and you want to take advantage of every means available. Web included.
This goal should result in the consistent growth of people interested in your products, in the shortest possible time and at a low cost.
Fantasy? Sean Ellis, entrepreneur and consultant tells us that there is a process through which the most effective solutions are found to grow a company, with a holistic approach that includes an analysis of all the elements around a given product.
Once all the factors have been considered, it is necessary to use them in communication to find the most effective combinations for fast growth.
Based on this idea, he created Growth Hacking.
Have you ever heard of it? Let’s get to know it together.
What Is Growth Hacking?
The existence of Growth Hacking dates back to 2010 and has seen a wide spread in the United States.
In Italy, however, it arrived later, but today it is one of the most exploited and most requested marketing techniques.
The term indicates a set of marketing strategies for growth on the web.
It is used mainly by companies and start-ups but can also be applied to sites, mainly if they sell products and services.
The figure who deals with this strategy is called a Growth hacker.
The Growth Hacker is an exceptionally trained person in the online marketing field, but he must also have programming knowledge, SEO, and be very creative.
Social networks, viral marketing, targeted advertising, e-mail marketing, and SEO are used to build a campaign with this approach.
How Does Growth Hacking Work?
The first element to identify is the strong point of the company’s growth.
In other words, which services or products do you want to focus on to propel your business.
As a preliminary step, work on these aspects, creating services and products that are truly useful to the audience and of value.
Test the product and identify the niche of interest. This way, you will determine the main characteristics of direct marketing.
Have you developed your proposal? Well, now apply Growth Hacking.
This marketing technique will allow you to reinforce and emphasize the strength of your proposal, to reproduce it to multiply the growth factor.
Let’s see precisely what it is.
What Are The Growth Hacking Strategies?
The main goal of web advertising campaigns is to get as many visitors as possible and turn them into customers.
The main Growth Hacking strategies consider all the main channels of the web.
Therefore, it is not just advertising, but notions that go beyond a general smattering of marketing are necessary, and you may also need the support of professionals in the sector.
But let’s start with a rundown of the main Growth Hacking activities.
- Use of social networks
- Any marketing tactic nowadays cannot be separated from these virtual places.
- Social networks are the first showcase and the primary tool for quality marketing.
- Publishing a blog or site
- Having a blog or a reference site for the company is indispensable.
In addition to posting product photos, you can learn more about the proposed topics and your brand.
Having a blog, then, can attract visitors by creating a dynamic relationship and giving more credibility and authority to the company.
If, in addition to selling the product, you tackle all the issues that concern it, you will strengthen the brand’s reliability and build customer loyalty.
Blogger Marketing
Product reviews are critical; they are even better if they come from bloggers.
Bloggers have a well-established community that trusts (almost) blindly in their judgment or take it very seriously.
Having the approval of one or more bloggers significantly increases the influx of visitors and potential customers.
Influencer Marketing
What we have just said for the blog also applies to social networks.
In this case, we are talking about influencers, but their role is increasingly fundamental in the virtual market.
Questionnaires And Forms
You have at least two advantages of using these tools:
- On the one hand, you can filter visitors by collecting data
- On the other hand, you can involve the customer to understand preferences and perfect your product.
Plus, the required opinion will make your audience feel important. Sure, pay attention to the right questions.
SEO Optimization
Site texts, blog articles, and short publications cannot give up SEO.
Write all the content, thinking first of the person who will read you and then setting the pages in An SEO Perspective
Free content
Offering free material (for example, ebooks, downloadable pdfs, videos, checklists, etc.) is a way to do lead generation, asking to register to download the document, creating a trustworthy bond with the customer, and encouraging them to buy the product.
Referrals
Don’t worry about this big world; it’s nothing more than word of mouth.
In short, it is a process based on affiliating customers with other customers, promising both, for example, a discount coupon.
Finally, before moving on to some practical examples to get you into Growth Hacking, we want to reveal two tricks widely used when using this marketing strategy:
- Principle of scarcity: make it perceive that a product is about to run out so that the customer is pushed to proceed with the purchase.
- Timed discounts: encourages the customer to buy in a short time frame, proposing the use of a deal.
How To Apply Growth Hacking: Some Examples
Does Growth Hacking Work? Let’s see some concrete and successful examples:
- Airbnb: Airbnb took advantage of the existence of other brands to make itself known. How? In the form that hosts fill out, he added the link to Craigslist (one of the most used classifieds portals in America). Airbnb also uses the referral for each customer who invites another one.
- Dropbox: Dropbox used referral by offering additional free space for each customer who invited friends and acquaintances to the portal.
- Youtube: Youtube allows you to view and upload videos easily on many other platforms.
- Netflix. Do you know how Netflix became one of the most popular platforms globally? With forums. He kindly knocked on the door and started advertising himself on the movie fan forums.
- Booking: This hotel booking site uses the pressure strategy a lot. As you browse the page looking for a hotel, you notice several messages: some warning you that a hotel has just had its last reservation, others that a hotel still has only one room available.
We just introduced you to Growth Hacking.
Look around, peek on the web and find out what others are doing; you will be able to identify many applications of this marketing strategy.
Observing and studying the marketing tactics of the significant sales sites will help you better understand the dynamics and give you ideas to create your Growth Hacking strategy.
