Rohit Prasanna Munipally — October 3, 2018 — October 3, 2018
The owner of a small business must successfully manage a lot of tasks simultaneously. As an entrepreneur, you must overcome resource restraints and at the same time focus on growth.
Statistics indicate that growing your business at the initial stage is not easy. Nearly 20% of businesses do not last for a year and 50% of them don’t make it to the fifth year.
It is a bit tricky to fight a battle on every front at the same time. You need help to boost sales and grow your business. That’s where growth-hacking comes in.
In the piece, we will see what growth hacking actually is and how it is useful for small businesses.
What is growth hacking?
Growth hacking involves quick experimentation across various areas of your business to identify the most efficient methods for achieving growth. The term was coined by the CEO of GrowthHackers.com, Sean Ellis after he found the absence of focus on growth in traditional marketers. In Ellis’s own words, “A growth hacker is a person whose true north is growth.”
The use of word “hacking” in the term suggests that it’s a clever way of producing higher growth results through a few shortcuts. The main aim of an ideal growth hacking strategy is to increase your customer base by keeping investment to a minimum.
Now, let’s take a look at some of the proven growth hacking tactics that every small business owner should know to grow their business.
Best and proven techniques to growth hack your small business
- Prioritizing content marketing
Content marketing is one of the most valuable marketing strategies for businesses. Statistics cite that it’s 62% cheaper than traditional marketing and generates three times more leads.
Create a blog with content that is properly optimized with trending, high-volume, and low-competition keywords to present your business as an expert in the industry. These blogs generate heavy traffic on your website and produce more conversions.
Blog posts and other informative content is meant to educate readers with high-quality information. Users visit your website to gain important, helpful knowledge, which helps in building credibility and enhances brand awareness.
- Online reviews matter
Online reviews are essential when it comes to building brand credibility. According to a survey, 84% of users trust online reviews and testimonials when considering purchasing a product or service.
Make it easy for users to view and react to all the praise you have received online. Present the top quotes and testimonials on your homepage as comments from satisfied customers. It is helpful in encouraging your prospects to make the purchase.
- Integrating calls-to-action with your social media platforms
In order to boost growth, you need to encourage your prospects to take a specified action. Integrating your calls-to-action across various social media platforms is the best way to motivate your customers to take action.
Ask users to sign up for your product or share or like your posts. Ensure that your call-to-action is precise, clear and easy for customers to understand and take action.
- Requesting feedback
Listening to your customers is the best way for any brand to grow further. Ask users for their feedback on their experience your product or service. Improve your business accordingly to present a best-in-class user experience, which ultimately is helpful in boosting sales.
For better interactivity, use popups to ask for users’ comments after making a purchase. The aim is to capture insight and feedback from customers so you can improve the customer experience.
- Offer freebies
Offering free downloadable or viewable assets is one of the most effective ways of growing your email list quickly. You may try offering a free ebook in exchange for the user’s email address.
Ensure the freebies you are offering are aligned with your marketing strategy and the theme of the product.
- Use customer retargeting
Retargeting simply means bringing your customers back to your website in an attempt to sell to them again. The best way to do it is by showing targeted ads to customers who have been to your website previously.
Google and Facebook retargeting contains optimizations, which show targeted ads to your previous customers and encourage them to make the purchase.
- Offer discount coupons
Another effective way to build your email list is distributing discount coupons, which also encourages users to make the purchase. Adding the feeling of urgency in your deal also helps boost conversions as users don’t want to miss interesting deals.
You can use exit intent pop-ups containing information about your coupons. The system detects a visitor, who is about to leave your website.
Use pop-up creator tools to create best-in-class customized pop-ups, which instantly catches customers’ attention.
- Implement organic SEO strategies
Using organic SEO techniques is an effective strategy for engaging prospects. Data suggest that 70-80% of users ignore paid ads altogether. Moreover, organic traffic is the most effective way to drive traffic to your website.
Upgrade your SEO strategies and go organic as much as you can. Pure SEO techniques help you bring more traffic than social media outreach and helps in increasing conversions.
- Create an app
Having an app gives you a significant competitive edge over the competition. Mobile apps are becoming extremely popular as apps account for a whopping 89% of mobile media time.
Build an app with advanced capabilities with the help of a popular app building service in order to bring more visitors to your site.
- Take mobile optimization seriously
As 48% of users use mobiles to search on the internet, it’s extremely important that you optimize your website for mobile devices. 61% of mobile users won’t be visiting your website again if they have trouble accessing it. Considering its importance, Google also emphasizes making your website mobile friendly.
Ensure that your website and marketing emails are fully compatible with mobile screens to get the most out of mobile traffic.
- Gamify the onboarding experience
Gamification is used by various businesses as it makes the whole customer journey interesting. Gamifying the onboarding experience involves rewarding new users for using the product and referring it to friends and colleagues.
Incentivise users as they refer your brand to their friends and colleagues in order to increase your user base. Offer various milestones as the customers use your product.
Gamification helps to make the whole customer experience interactive and encourages to the customers to use and recommend your service or product.
- Use deep analytics for decision making
Data and analytics are at the heart of every business. Measured data helps in maintaining complete insight into the results of your business.
You can use data to trim all your unnecessary expenses, identify areas which need improvement and the places where you are committing resources without any results. Measure and use the data for intelligent decision making.
- Make freemium products
People like to use free products. Making a freemium product helps you attract a lot of attention from potential reviewers as they don’t need to buy the product to review it.
However, freemium does not mean the product lacks best-in-class features. A freemium product with amazing features is what you are looking for.
You can then encourage the users to go for the paid version of the product for more seamless support, additional features, and unlimited integrations.
- Keep experimenting
Experimentation is a scary topic for small businesses. Usually, small businesses don’t have enough room to experiment considering budget limitations.
However, experimenting opens new doors for new growth opportunities so that you can bring in more customers.
Sometimes, your strategies may fail but in the long run, your gains could be much higher and worth the time and amount you are investing into it.
Conclusion
Growth hacking is all about finding new shortcuts to grow your business and bring in more consumers. It is a completely ethical and efficient practice. Small businesses must try innovative ideas to make growth-hacking simple and easy.
Follow the tips above and get the most from your growth-hacking strategy. This will help in taking your business to the next level.
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