According to The Ultimate List of Marketing Statistics for 2021 by Hubspot, 15% of marketers measure the success of their content programs by how many leads they generate. But that implies that most marketers have no idea about what is working, what isn’t, and why. Additionally, the pandemic has left businesses no choice but to adopt an agile approach to strategic growth.
This is where the role of growth hackers and their effective growth hacking strategies can make a big difference. Growth hackers know precisely how to leverage their marketing strategies to ensure that they yield a significant ROI. Therefore, in the face of the shifting global business landscape, marketers must get creative to accelerate growth and adopt growth hacking strategies to achieve business goals in 2021. In this blog, we will cover the following topic:
What is Growth Hacking?
To put it simply, growth hacking is a data-driven, solution-focused, and result-driven approach to grow your business. Employing growth hacks accelerates your marketing efforts and makes them more effective. Growth hacking is not prescriptive at all because a one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t help. It is best done when a marketer exploits a nuance that other marketers cannot see. The intense focus on finding out-of-the-box solutions increases the likelihood of acquiring more customers at less cost, boosting revenue, reaping higher ROI, and hitting the targeted benchmark. But growth hacking only works when businesses are open to experimentation and not stuck with perfection paralysis. There is substantial risk-taking involved that, if successful, can pave the way to the possibility of significant growth.
How Does Growth Hacking Work?
The growth hacking process involves taking a profound look at the operations of your startup or SMB to analyze the missing component or a component that needs change to grow. Once the element that needs improvement is narrowed down, growth hackers brainstorm on innovative and cost-effective solutions to achieve your goals. It is not as simple as it sounds. It takes a great deal to have the right set of people with marketing and operational expertise. It is pertinent to note that growth hacking isn’t a strategy but a set of intertwined strategies, where each of them influences the other.
Why is Growth Hacking Effective?
Growth hacking is exceptionally effective because it revolves around finding innovative solutions that are agile, scalable, and cost-effective. It is especially effective for startups and SMBs because it allows them to quickly transform specific parts of their marketing strategies and business to witness immediate targeted results. These results, in turn, drive serious business growth.
Growth hacking involves trial and error to get things right. It requires a lot of dedication. Without further procrastination, let us take a look into the most effective growth hacking strategies of 2021 given by the best growth hacking agencies to get startups and SMBs to grow their business quickly.
Growth Hacking Strategies for 2021
1. Take The Data-Driven Approach
57% of marketers who follow the data-driven approach have seen their revenue increase drastically. No matter what growth hack you adopt, a data-driven approach has to top the list. A data-driven strategy is a systematic strategy. But before you start trying to make sense of all your data, first identify and pay attention to your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Explore and determine the best marketing channels through trial and error to make your marketing campaigns more effective.
2. Leverage Q&A Sites for Engagement
Visiting niche Q&A forums and websites to offer valuable, informative answers on relevant topics can establish credibility as industry leaders of your business domain. It helps you garner attention around your product/service, engage the audience and earn their trust. Websites such as Quora, Answer.com, Ask.Fm, Researchgate.Net, Askubuntu.com are some of the top 20 most visited Q&A sites.
3. Invest in Referral Marketing
Referrals are the most underrated but also the most efficient way of driving growth. According to a Nielsen survey, website visitors are four times more likely to buy when referred by a friend or a family member. Incentivize your customers to increase your marketing reach and turn them into brand evangelists. Don’t think of Referral Marketing as a low-hanging fruit anymore. If utilized properly, it can catapult your business into new terrains of growth. Referral Factory, Referral Rock, Advocately, Ambassador, Friendbuy, Amplifinity, InviteReferrals, Genius Referrals, InviteBox, and Mention Me are some of the top referral marketing software tools that can be leveraged in 2021.
4. Content Repurposing
Turn your old blog posts into eBooks, guest posts, or revamped email newsletters. Content repurposing is here to stay in 2021. The idea is to do more with less and save resources, time, and money. A growth hacker, for instance, would insist on doing a podcast and then turn it into a video for social media and a blog. Tools such as MeetEdgar, Piktochart, SEMrush Content Marketplace, Animoto can be efficiently used to reuse and repurpose old content.
5. Get a Social Media Platform Advantage
Find a platform that your competitors are not using. Differentiate your business in the ‘blue ocean’ space and corner the market. It will improve your online visibility by adding more followers, more shares, and likes to your posts. Everyone knows about Twitter, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn, but others can help your business grow. Quora, Ello, Snapchat, Medium, Reddit, Pinterest, Telegram, and Tumblr are lesser-known social networking sites.
6. Use of Interactive Content
Quizzes, videos, and webinars count as interactive content that is extremely popular and increases engagement and brand loyalty. If your content can make someone stop scrolling and take time to interact with your content, it is a significant growth hacking win. A key pirate metric is the high retention rate, and quizzes have just that.
7. Influencer Marketing
If you are starting your business on social networking accounts from scratch, it is prudent to invest in popular social media influencers. They have a more extensive social media reach and followers who would trust their opinion. They might even order a product/service that their all-time favorite social media influencer voucher for and reap a great ROI. Tools such as Grin, CreatorIQ, Upfluence, Tagger Media, AspireIQ are some of the software tools/platforms focused on influencer search and discovery. Some of them also help virtually run an entire influencer campaign by employing a combination of software and apps.
8. Boost Online Appearance and Presence
According to Gartner, businesses have directed 80% of their multichannel budget towards digital advertising. In the wake of Covid-19, online services are more critical than ever. Big companies have strengthened their online services and made it convenient for consumers to place orders online and get them delivered to their doorstep. An effective consumer-friendly website and a booming presence are all it takes to reach the customer directly and stay ahead of the curve. Digital Marketing tools such as Google Keyword Planner, Hubspot, ActiveCampaign, Buzzsumo, and Google Analytics can improve your online presence.
9. Automate Your Social Media Presence
There aren’t many ways of achieving organic growth on social media channels, but a robust social media presence is a must nonetheless. It can be done by automating the social media processes with the help of tools such as MeetEdgar and Phantombuster.
MeetEdgar is a content recycler that can automate the sharing of all your content across significant social media channels. Unlike content schedulers such as Hootsuite, you can create posts to your content strategy once and then have them posted on a recurring schedule for a long time. It promotes your best content repeatedly, saves scheduling time, auto-generates, and carries out A/B testing of posts linked to the same content.
Phantombuster offers over 200 code-free automation and data extraction tools that can be used to create workflows for your teams, such as marketing, sales, and HR. Workflows can be made for Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, Medium, Quora, etc. Phantombuster can be used on social media channels to save time, build audiences, generate leads, and increase engagement.
10. Generate Leads Using Chatbot Auto-Responders
Chatbots are replacing email communication with customers quickly. Chatbots offer end-to-end automation, increasing engagement with 20-50% click-through rates and 80 – 90% open rates. Facebook Messenger bots top the list when it comes to acquiring new customers via chatbots. They capture lead info instantly and automatically. If someone comments on your Facebook post, a chatbot can be programmed to send a private reply in Messenger. This is one of the several ways to generate new leads using chatbots.
Famous Growth Hacking Examples
Marketing is all about growth, but very few businesses experience significant growth in their lifetimes. Some of them are listed here.
1. PayPal
PayPal penetrated the online payment market through paid referrals. PayPal paid decent-sized referral commissions that helped them grow to 5 million users.
2. Shopify
Shopify increased its revenue by 90% in just under one year by committing to its unique partner program. They got their partners to build and grow their products for them.
3. Mailchimp
Mailchimp grew steadily over the last 15 years, but they did see significant, one-time growth in 2016 thanks to a growth hack. They ran ads to their inactive users, encouraging and helping them set up their first campaign.
Trust The Growth Hacking Process
Startups are on a shoestring budget and have fixed budgets to promote their businesses. But these growth hacking strategies can offer an efficient way for startups and SMBs to market their product/services to their target audience, gain traction on scalable solutions, and differentiate their business in the larger market landscape.