How to Growth Hack without Burning a hole in your Pocket- Part 2

Now that the marketing scene is overcrowded with brilliant minds, emerging as a successful business is harder than ever before. Every business wants to grow and take over their market and industry. This scenario calls for more than just traditional methods of marketing and that’s exactly what growth hacking is in a nutshell. With limited budgets for large scale marketing, growth hacking is certainly the best bet for startups. This is the second part of our blog series on How to hack growth with more actionable growth hacking tips.

Make the landing pages to the point

This might sound too generic, but it’s a fact that landing pages that have a cluttered interface and multiple call to actions will confuse the users and dilute the results. Targeting a page for just a single CTA and keeping it clean and simple is the best approach with landing pages. The goal of the landing page should be unmistakable. The best place to have the CTA is at the center of the page where it gets maximum visibility. Landing pages with simple UI and a clear message tend to outperform the ones that try to do too much.

Use heat map tools

This one is again about optimizing the landing pages for higher conversions. Even when you think your landing page is clean, simple and has a perfect design, there is still room for further optimization. The best way to track user behaviour on your page is to implement heat map tools that can exactly pinpoint where users click, what distracts them or where their focus is. This valuable user behaviour data can be used to do a complete redesign of your landing page, improving your conversions and reducing the bounce rates. If you need maximum conversions from your landing pages, visualizing the activity on your site using heat maps should be on your list.

Create a sense of urgency

This growth hack is as old as marketing itself, but it still works. ECommerce sites running flash sales of smartphones is a great example for this tactic. You might be having an awesome product to show off and customers could already have made up their mind to buy it, but they are more likely to hit that buy button when the quantity or time is limited and running out. You could try to distribute a promotional code that expires in a short period of time or just limit the quantities of your products. Even if the limitations imposed are artificial, customers tend to act faster when they feel this urgency.

Follow your competitor’s followers

Sometimes, a lot of growth hacking potential is hidden inside the simple things that we overlook.  Twitter is a great marketing tool being used by businesses from every category and industry. There is a good possibility that the followers of your competitors are not completely satisfied with the service they are getting at the moment. They might be totally unaware of your business which has exactly what they’re looking for. If you have well defined buyer personas, it should be easy to spot potential customers from your competitor’s followers list. By following the followers of your competitors, you are introducing yourself to a niche audience interested in products like yours. It’s likely that they will check out your twitter handle and better yet, your website. This is one of the easiest ways to reach prospective customers without spending a dime.

In case you want to automate the process of monitoring your competitors on twitter, web scraping services can be used to crawl and extract data from twitter for the same. You can even do sentiment analysis, brand monitoring and consumer pattern researches using dedicated twitter crawl services.

Use easily accessible sharing buttons

People are lazy when it comes to engaging with content on the web. You could be having a great piece of content that could do really well in social media. But if you don’t make the sharing process as simple as it can be, you will miss out on a lot of engagement. Keep the sharing buttons easily accessible and simple to increase the number of shares it gets. Floating sharing buttons are known to outperform static ones at the beginning or end of the content area.  However, depending on your website’s design, you can test different locations and sizes for your social sharing buttons and keep the one that performs well.

Use web scraping for competitive intelligence

Web scraping is already disrupting the way businesses develop and leverage. With the power of big data harvested through web scraping, even newer businesses can gain enough competitive intelligence to compete with the big players in the industry. Competitive intelligence can work as a powerful growth hack now since big data is still in the adoption phase. Pricing your products with reference to competitor’s pricing and being responsive to their actions can make sure you always have the edge when it comes to competition.

Remarketing

Remarketing is a brilliant way to try and connect with people who visited your website, but left without making a purchase or doing the call to action. With remarketing, you can target these people with ads on other websites they might be visiting on the web.

Remarketing might sound a bit creepy because of the way it tracks users, but it has proven to be a great strategy with high CTR and response rate. Since the attention span of internet users is rapidly decreasing, remarketing helps in bringing the lost visitors back again. It is highly effective as it targets the people who previously searched for your service/brand on the internet or have been on your website. Remarketing is one growth hack you can always rely upon to get great results.

Focus on retention

Retention is often ignored by most companies in the unending quest for new customers. What is the point of getting more clients if a good share of them are leaving you? Focusing on the retention of customers is one great way to keep your growth graph going up. The best part is, retention doesn’t cost as much as customer acquisition. Providing exclusive benefits and discounts to the existing customers can be a good way to make them stick with your company.  

Email newsletters can be used to let the customers know what you are doing for them, how you have implemented a new feature or simply expressing your gratitude for being with your company. Customers tend to stay when they feel like you are always there and listening to them. Maintaining a great support system is another crucial part of reducing the churn rate. Customer issues should be given highest priority and solved promptly to keep your churn rate low. In short, you will have to establish and nurture a good relationship with your customers. This can help bring your churn rate down considerably provided that you are already good with your products and services. You could also use several different marketing tactics apart from providing great service to make sure that your customers stay happy and satisfied with the service.

Bottom line

These are some of the generic growth hacks applicable to most businesses out there. Depending on your business model and industry, there can be more unexplored growth hacking strategies that could work for you. Time to discover and apply them in your business to make it a successful one.

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