Growth Hacking The Right Way
Engineering growth the modest way
Lowering your prices is a smart move until it drives you out of business. You don't want to compete on price, you want to attract ideal customers that pay for the value you create.
Entrepreneurs today are providing solutions that create unimaginable value in the world of business. To do this, they are not just obsessed about demand and traffic, but rather maximizing their skill sets and resources to bootstrap their business. It therefore speaks that their main focus is on the product and their users, technically. I put together some of the best growth hacking strategies that help businesses scale and experience rapid growth. Read on.
P.S If you're looking for regular marketing pulse, please subscribe to this newsletter.
Referrals are a double edged sword
New businesses will testify that more than 80% of their customers come from referrals. One customer probably spread the message by word of mouth, email referrals, social media recommendations or through online reviews and it brought a flow of other customers. By offering a special package to existing customers, you can get them to introduce their family, friends and contacts to be your customers too. Dropbox utilized referrals to grow by 3900% in 15 months- a significant growth rate in the history of referral marketing while PayPal, the original growth hackers used this strategy and grew 7-10% daily accelerating their user base to more than 100m users. Businesses can also utilize these tips below to market their new product.
Deliver a great product & win customers' trust
It's true-great products enjoys tremendous acceptance in the market. The product development team needs to be aligned with a growth mindset to facilitate product innovation, exhibiting unique features that are a desire of the customers. Once customers note and interact with the product fulfilling their needs they reward you with trust and ditch the competition.
Run loyalty programs
Turn your repeat customers into cashflow machines because it is less costly to sell to them than to tread the acquisition path once more for new customers. Customers who access loyalty programs are more likely to shop again as they get cashbacks, rewards, points or perks for purchases they make. This strategy increases customer retention and referrals, incentivises repeat buying leading to more sales, fuels brand advocacy, and cultivates trust between customers and your business. To capitalize on this businesses should come up with a loyalty program well alinged with their business model, goals and customers. Focus on rewarding recurring interaction with your product and dominate.
Create a sense of exclusivity
Communicating a sense of urgency and scarcity of your product is a stimulus which customers respond to by assuming exclusivity. This prompts customers to make a purchase decision before stocks last.
Network Effects
Leverage platforms, channels and relevant influencers that expose your product to a wide and superior network. Customers buy products that their neighbors, friends, family and contacts associate with. That way you market like a salesman going from door to door. It creates a buzz that eventually brings you closer to a sale.
Market Development
If your market is already saturated, you have little or no guarantee to making significant progress that translates to growth. You can only be at the mercy of your competition which is not your primary focus. To circumvent this growth barrier, you have to define a new market and move fast to serve it. This might need you to improve existing products with distinct features that appeal to an entirely new market. Craft customized and appealing marketing campaigns if are looking to lure the international market too.
Segment your market
If you seek to expand your product lines to serve more customers you'll have to bet on segmentation. This involves profiling your customers by various attributes after thoroughly doing your market research. Bases of market segmentation include:
Geographic
Firmographic
Demographic
Behavioral
Psychographic
Visibility & Accessibility
You have to ensure that customers get hassle-free access to you and your product. If you're banking on e-commerce then a responsive site should be your priority. In addition work on your landing pages to provide better navigation to category as well as product pages. For visibility management, leverage online visibility tools such as ahrefs, semrush, serpstat, etc for your SEO, starting with a proper keyword research to set up your site for traffic resulting from search.
Freemium for the win
Provide value for the customer first. Offer the most basic features free of charge combined with a free trial package for customers to get exposure to your product. In the meantime, you give customers space to develop evaluative criteria for your product and in this case to develop a bias for a premium version.
Have any growth hacking strategies you use or know about? Please let me know in the comments.
If you like this post, take a moment to share it with your friends, workmates or community