Growing a startup is no mean feat. The average startup must compete with established businesses for customers and networks while trying to work with limited funds. For most early-stage startups, marketing is one of those scary areas that determine the future of the business. Get it wrong and you risk joining the more than
Growth hacking is a modern marketing principle that enables startups to grow rapidly within a short time. It’s one of the main secrets behind wildly successful brands like Uber and Airbnb that grew their customer bases rapidly within what felt like hours.
Growth hacks typically require start-ups to think outside the box and away from typical traditional marketing strategies like paid ads. Below, we go through some of the most effective growth hacks that have been shown to work for startups across different industries.
#1. Content Repurposing
Great content is the lifeblood of a good marketing campaign strategy. It puts you in a good place with search engines and enables you to engage with your audience at different levels. However, coming up with original and inspirational content on a regular basis can be quite difficult, especially when your marketing budget doesn’t allow you to bring in content creators.
As the name goes, content repurposing lets you turn old content into fresh content that can be shared across different platforms. For instance, you can turn an old article on your blog into an infographic that can then be shared on Instagram, Pinterest, or other image-friendly sites. This way, you can revamp your content marketing strategy without spending a single marketing dollar for content creation.
#2. Influencer Marketing
Over the past few years, the likes of Coca Cola, PayPal, and other big brands have capitalized on the power of influencer marketing to grow and expand their brands. Startups are also increasingly using influencers to boost their marketing campaigns, which can be wildly beneficial for start-ups with limited marketing funds. Influencers primarily work by promoting your products and services to their audiences, which makes it one of the most cost-effective growth hacks for startups.
#3. Optimize Your Landing Page
Splashing your marketing dollars on social media campaigns and paid ads will get you nowhere if your landing page doesn’t captivate visitors who eventually come to your site. Your landing page should take precedence over every other page on your website and should be made as interesting and catchy as possible.
Use your landing page to provide snippets of easily digestible information about your products and services. Avoid the temptation to bombard visitors with excessive information here or they will bolt within seconds, driving your bounce rates through the roof. If you must include additional information on the landing page, create separate landing pages for new and existing customers because your current customers may be easily bored by excessive information on this page.
#4. Optimize Your Website for Speed and Uptime
Your website is among the first things that a potential customer looks at during the early stages of the buyer’s journey. As such, hosting your site on a slow and undependable server to save an extra buck can be detrimental to your business. In fact, your startup can suffer a 7% decrease in the conversation rate from just a second of delay in response for any of your pages.
Reducing the page loading times is one of the simplest growth hacks you can implement immediately. There are plenty of inexpensive ways you can use to cut down your page load times to under 2-3 seconds, which can help you increase conversions significantly. In fact, you need a complete guide to web hosting and cloud hosting for startups and small businesses to get the optimum website performance.
#5. Take Advantage of Big Data
Big data has been transforming businesses for years. It’s been one of the most constant facets of growth hacking, which is why your startup can benefit immensely by using big data analytics to make marketing decisions. You can utilize marketing data to determine everything from site traffic and page views to revenue streams and the customer’s journey in the conversion funnel.
There are a handful of tools you can use to get ahead, including Google Analytics that can help you make sense of the tons of data your business will be collecting.
#6. Optimize Your Social Outlook
Never underestimate the power of a like, a share, or any action that involves one customer sharing their interaction with your product or service with another customer. This is the basis of social proof, a psychological concept that seeks to explain why people are more likely to conform to certain behaviors when they see others doing them.
Even though social proof as a marketing strategy has been around for ages, it became wildly popular with social media, which has made it easy for potential customers to interact. There are a ton of ways you can use it, including testimonials, logos, and customer statistics that have been placed strategically everywhere on your website.
#7. Create Interactive Content
Interactive content is one of the hallmarks of a good content marketing strategy, largely because it has one of the highest potentials for improving user engagement and brand loyalty. VenturePact, an online marketplace for software development, used a simple calculator that helped them bag over 11,000 leads within two weeks. With the right interactive tools, that can be you.
#8. Pre-launch Marketing
Creating a buzz before your startup goes live is one of the few ways that you can get customers for your product or service without an actual product or service. When run effectively, a pre-launch campaign can be the best growth hack for your business, enabling to bag emails, capture the interest of potential customers, and gauge the efficiency of your marketing strategy.
There are many ways you can go about the pre-launch campaign. You can run a contest, install a viral landing page that promotes referrals or create an engaging video to help build your client list.
#9. Add Video to Your Content Marketing Strategy
Speaking of videos, did you know that the average internet user will spend over 88% of their time on a site that has one or more videos than a site with no video? Videos are also poised to take up 74% of internet traffic within the coming year, which is why you should include video in your growth hacking strategy.
For maximum results, integrate elements of storytelling to your videos to make them more engaging. Engaging videos are easily shareable and have a huge potential of going viral, which can be a huge plus for your marketing campaign.
