Jul
21
Do You Consider Yourself A Growth Hacker?
Yesterday I was asked if I consider myself a growth hacker? I pondered the question for a moment and answered Yes. Though I do not necessarily call myself a growth hacker but I do leverage marketing and the product selling side in order to help companies build both awareness and user (customer) growth via digital and social channels. Lets take a step back to really understand this latest tend in Growth Hacking.
What is growth hacking? According to Wikipedia, Growth hacking is low cost approach to leverage marketing in traditional guerrilla marketing approach or most recently online and social media techniques to help increase customers or subscribers. Those this term was coined several years ago, I am beginning to see increase in this marketing trend and even seeing a jump in job postings for companies looking for growth hackers.
What’s the benefit to your company? The key aspect of growth hacking is not to spend a huge amount of money on a new marketing campaign but to be smarter with your marketing plans especially if you have resource constraints.
There is also a tremendous amount of opportunity for small and medium businesses to leverage growth hacking as the overall cost is very minimal and the return on the investment is typically very high.
How to you find your growth hack? Determining the best approach to growth hacker or simply where to begin is often difficult task. I typically take a step back at and assess what is currently working well and where I see gaps for potential growth. It can be as simple as increasing the awareness of the company but the majority of the time it is ‘How can I obtain more customers’.
From a digital and social perspective the amount of campaigns you can plan and execute are never ending. By starting small and picking 1-3 key areas to focus on and test a hypothesis is really the best approach.
How do you begin with growth hacking? The most important aspect here is knowing your customers and the more specifically the demographics of your customers. It might be a small targeted customer set or it be be an all age/all background customer set. Here are some quick-wins you can leverage (that are also very inexpensive) ways to growth hacking for your company:
- Search engine optimize your webpages, really take the time to understand the purpose of each page, how and what people are searching on to obtain results on search engines.
- Though very effective, blogging can only work for certain companies and can take quite some time to determine topics, posting frequently and actually writing the posts itself.
- If you are a small and medium B2C company add yourself to all the databases. These databases and websites include Yelp, TripAdvisor, Angies List, Google+ and other sites. This is typically free of charge and a very easy to complete as you know your companies address, phone number and so on.
- Ask your customers to post reviews of your company and service on those 3rd party sites. As like most of us, potential customers do read those reviews and word of mouth is still very much powerful!
- Offer a special promotion. Such as referrals received a certain percentage off with next purchase or a week long coupon/promotional campaign.
Always measure results. Sometimes success happen where you least expect it. Leverage and analyze data to identify insight and potential opportunities. One way to measure results is an increase in subscribers or calls during a weeks time. Or it can be tracked all the way back to the sales funnel and attributing campaigns to sales revenue.
Good Luck! Remember growth hacking is inexpensive and practical, start small, set realistic goals, measure, and continue trying new approaches to reaching your target audience.
