Start-up businesses are on tight marketing budgets, and growth-hacking marketing can show significant promise.

Growth hacking marketing for start-up businesses is nothing new and has been around for a long time. However, recent changes in the digital economy have allowed startups to Leverage marketing tools and strategies that only large enterprises once help. The playing field has been leveled.

Online marketing has become an instrumental tool for any business. From tech giants to small mom-and-pop stores, if they’re not online, then they don’t exist. 

You can use different strategies to achieve more exposure for your business and your brand’s need. One that’s been taking the industry by storm is growth hacking marketing book, including growth hacking vs growth marketing.

What is growth hacking marketing?

It’s more than just a phrase created to catch your attention. Growth hacking proposes an aggressive approach in which growth is the main target of your growth hacking marketing strategy. 

According to Ryan Holiday, one of the men that made growth hacking so popular, growth hackers relentlessly pursue users and growth, and when they do it right, those users beget more users. Who begets more users?

The goal is that it becomes a growing snowball of clients heading your way directly. This is precisely the main benefit of using growth hacking strategies. Importantly, specific characteristics are of the base of growth hacking, which must be trackable, testable, and scalable.

Therefore, for your growth hacking strategy to succeed, you need to be able to test it on different audiences before launching it on a bigger scale.

Furthermore, you should be able to develop various options for an ad, for example, before deciding which one to release. Also, it would be best to accept that many of these strategies might fail, but this is exactly how you achieve success.

Furthermore, you need to be able to respond. If your strategy is effective and the demand for your product increases tenfold, you’ll need to be able to meet that demand. You might need to get online personal loans to do this, but your clients must not leave dissatisfied. If you can’t scale things up, you should reconsider your campaign’s scope.

That your strategy is trackable with marketing attribution should be a given. After all, the online world is all about analytics. You should know how many people your campaign engaged, their demographic characteristics, and how they can help you reach even more people.

Also, it would be best if you saw what the results of your strategy are. For example, 53% of growth hackers actively track the revenue increase after they apply their strategies.

Your Growth Hacking Team?

When you decide to implement this strategy, you should keep in mind that the people dedicated to growth hacking should work hand-in-hand with the digital marketing team you already have. Interestingly, while their goals might differ initially, their teamwork and ability to share information will help your business succeed.

If you have a small business, then all the more reason to encourage teamwork. The idea is that growth becomes a core part of your marketing strategy without forgetting other goals. The idea is to increase traffic, which will increase revenue.

What Marketing Tools Should You Use for Growth Hacking?

1. Know your audience

Your audience will speak to you if you’re listening. Consequently, one of the smarter things you can do is study your target customers. This will allow you to identify what they might need. Furthermore, it would be best to learn how they search for what they want. 

This is the part where a lot of people get lazy. Often the marketer may think that there are only one or two, maybe four personas, but there may be as many as 24. To increase your conversions, you need to know who you are talking to and what makes up their buying decisions.

This is where search engine optimization (SEO) tools can make all the difference. There is a reason why approximately 61% of companies have as a main priority the improvement of their SEO tools. If you are not one of the first options your prospective customer sees when they search for what they want, then you need to optimize. 

2. Create a direct product

Once you’ve identified what your customers want, you can create or reintroduce a product that responds to that need. Marketing should focus on promoting a product, highlighting how this will be the key for your audience to get what they want. 

Take, for example, the success of Spotify’s decision to offer a rewind of the music its users played during the last year. They listened to what the customers could want at the end of the year and decade- and offered them a product that answered this need. They took it further by making the song lists easy to share. This caused the snowball effect we mentioned at the beginning.

3. Make the most of different platforms

It’s not only about placing ads on social media platforms, but it’s also about using the free features of these platforms to promote your product. Let’s take GoPro as an example. One of their campaigns encouraged users to post their videos on YouTube. 

Why is this move so smart? YouTube is an already well-established platform used by millions of people. This is a great way to get free publicity while directly showing the usefulness of your product.

Small businesses have used this strategy, as well. The restaurant chain Haidilao encouraged customers to post about their new do-it-yourself (DIY) plate on Tik Tok. 

This was a product designed to get the engagement of their customers while using Tik Tok for free publicity and gaining a new generation of young customers. Here we see a combination of using smart platforms and creating a direct product.

4. Be Bold with Your Growth Hacking Strategies 

Remember that you don’t necessarily need the help of big companies to achieve your goals. That’s precisely one of the great things about growth hacking.

There’s no need for massive resources as long as you know who you’re targeting and your goals. Airbnb and Uber have employed these strategies to grow from small companies to worldwide moguls in just a few years.

By being bold and making headlines, you can get your desired attention. Remember, investing in online marketing is one of the most affordable ways to get out there and an effective method to reach millions of people simultaneously.

5. Use Paid Media and PPC Ad Campaigns

The best way to be bold and get out there is by using ad campaigns. Your ads must contain essential information, such as how to initiate contact and your location. If your audience doesn’t immediately see how they can get in contact with you, they might quickly forget about you or lose that first drive.  

Interestingly, it has been shown that awareness of your brand can increase up to 80% by using paid advertisements or hiring online advertising services. While this is not the primary goal of growth hacking, it’s undoubtedly a win for your business.

6. Make Things More Visual

Another good way to reach your audience is by making things easy to grasp. There has been an 800% increase in searches for infographics. This is because they are catchy, often making people pause and stop to see what you have to say.

Growth hacking marketing tactics like GIFs, infographics, images, videos, and more draw your audience in.

7. Make Them Come Back

People often visit a website without committing to any purchase. This is when you should make the offer more attractive to them.

Sometimes just a small discount or an extra gift can turn a prospective client into an actual client. This is a great way to remind them there was a reason why they were interested in the first place.

Furthermore, don’t hesitate to offer your newest products to older clients. Moreover, the retention of these clients is essential. If you follow the numbers, it’s estimated that getting new customers is up to five times more expensive than retaining old ones. Despite this, only a minority of companies focus on client retention.

8. Marketing Content, Content, Content

Content marketing is everything. You must map your content strategy to how your prospects research and engage with your brand. If the right marketing content is at the right stage of the buying process, your sale cycles will become shorter, and your deal sizes will become larger.

One of the things you need to do is introduce the content on your website that goes well beyond what you’re selling.

Customers now want to engage more but need you to provide content. There’s a reason why over 3 million blog posts are written and published daily. Furthermore, 91% of organizations are now big producers of content marketing. 

Personalizing these blogs as much as possible will distinguish your company from the rest. 78% of polled consumers have stated that the more personalized the content is, the more likely they are to purchase something. 

9. Educate Your Clients

From the same idea that you need to generate content, there comes the concept of educating your clients. This is a brilliant way to get them to engage effectively. An example of this is the company HubSpot. Growth hackers of this company focused on the development of educational tools. From e-Books to assertive blog posts and webinars. 

This was a big bet that paid off. After becoming a public company, HubSpot increased its worth by almost $1 billion.

Significant growth since its beginnings, with only three people developing the company. Your revenue will increase if you show how useful you can be to your prospective customers.

10. Give Them a Taste of Your Growth Hacking Marketing

Giant platforms such as Spotify and LinkedIn have made an art out of this strategy. If you can provide a free sample of what you have to offer, people will be able to see the value of your product. 

This sometimes called the freemium strategy, encourages users to try what you offer with the possibility of upgrading if they want the rest of the benefits. An app that applied this is Slack. This messaging tool provided a free version of its service. This resulted in a 30% increase in enrollment to their premium option.

11. Make Your Goals Specific Ones

Growth hackers focus on particular target market segments and personas. This can be reaching a determined number of sales in a year or getting specific numbers of visitors to your website. The important thing is that the goal is attainable and that you’re open to adapting and adjusting to make sure you reach this goal. 

The best way to determine if this will be necessary is by setting smaller goals to reach the larger one. Let’s say you want to sell 100,000 models of your signature product by the end of the year. You should set monthly goals to help you evaluate if you’re on your way to achieving this larger goal. 

This is where metrics and analytics can help you study what you’ve accomplished so far and determine what you need to do to bring your business where you want it to be.

12. Metrics are Everything

Your parameters are one of your best tools. If you do your analytics right, you can once again learn from your audience and identify the next thing they want. This way, you can return to the start and begin working on the next product. The key is to stay current, which will help you keep growing.

Customer feedback also plays an important role in this area. You can learn of ways to improve the product, as well as adjust pricing if necessary.

By studying the response to your growth hacking strategies, you can continue developing more efficient campaigns and techniques to help you succeed in digital marketing. 

Wrap up on growth hacking marketing.

Startup growth hacking is the buzzword for startups. Forget pivoting and iterating. It’s all about growth hacking marketing.

Growth hacking their way to the top through testing and scaling growth hacking marketing. 

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