At this point, most marketers agree that growth hacking isn’t a fad. Thanks to its practical tips and proven results, it’s proven to be a viable alternative to traditional marketing tactics. Instead of spending months holding focus groups or waiting for the final logo design, growth hacking encourages marketers to leverage automation software and testing to achieve rapid growth.
Growth-hacking tactics cut back on heavy workloads, prioritize low-cost solutions, and provide flexibility if marketers need to pivot. With markets changing faster and more frequently than ever, demand has catapulted for the best growth hacking tools.
Below, we’ll show you how to implement growth-hacking techniques to achieve faster business growth and higher customer retention.
Step-by-step guide to implementing growth hacking
The steps for growth marketing share some similarities with traditional marketing. Here, we walk you through the stages and provide examples of growth hacking.
Step 1: Identify your growth goals
Because growth hacking can encompass a number of marketing efforts, your goals serve as your foundation. Above all else, you want your objectives to be realistic and measurable.
First, establish how the company defines growth. Whether it’s new customers, subscriber numbers, or revenue, your metrics give you a practical framework to work within. As with all business growth strategies, determine whether your business model is capable of maintaining quality should your customer base double (or triple) in size.
Step 2: Analyze your current performance
Before you can identify improvements, you need a baseline. Accurately assessing your current business metrics can help clarify your strengths and weaknesses. For example, maybe your social media following is solid, but your conversion rates are low. Or perhaps your customer satisfaction survey results are high, but your referrals are middling.
If your current metrics are vague, you may need to invest in new tracking or analytical tools. For example, Bitly’s link management solutions identify which platforms and content are driving the most customer interaction. With Bitly Analytics, you can see which links get the most engagement, where these customers are engaging from (city-level data), and even what type of device they’re using. The more in-depth the analysis, the easier it is to spot patterns in user behavior.
Step 3: Understand your audience
Whether you’re aiming to be a household name or you’d prefer a small but mighty customer base, your audience’s needs, preferences, and pain points are the driving force behind all growth hacks. If you understand your target demographics before implementing your strategy, you’ll spend less time fine-tuning down the line.
We recommend creating in-depth buyer personas based on your current customer data. For example, specify the age groups, income levels, and taste preferences in different segments of your current base.
As with traditional marketing, avoid making broad assumptions. Instead, break down customer values so you can craft creative content without confusing your brand’s values. Growth hacking involves some prep, but a data-driven strategy pays off!
Step 4: Choose relevant growth-hacking tactics
Once you’ve exhausted your data and drawn insights about your buyers, it’s time to evaluate the best growth-hacking tactics based on the results. So, if your main goal is to improve brand awareness in local markets, you might optimize your keywords and content for your top three target neighborhoods. Or if you want to increase sales of a new product, the growth team might run a limited-time sale on social media, with incentives for followers who share the post.
Keep in mind that not all growth-hacking tactics will align with your brand. You can experiment as long as you firmly root your testing in your predetermined objectives. When trending topics and consumer sentiment can shift on a dime, your original goals and buyer personas can keep you grounded (and prevent a digital wild goose chase).
Step 5: Implement and execute the strategies
Executing strategies may mean integrating new SaaS platforms, launching social media campaigns, revamping your web page, building individual landing pages, or establishing your brand on community forums. During the implementation stage, every team member should know how they contribute and what they should do if they run into unexpected issues.
As you put theory into practice, remember that you have some flexibility to make adjustments. Start small and test quickly. This way, it’s easier to pivot if and when the market changes.
Step 6: Measure and analyze your results
How you measure and analyze the results of your growth-hacking tactics depends on the tools you use. For example, the Bitly Dashboard is user-friendly and intuitive, providing you with fast facts about user engagement. This includes which platforms drove the traffic, how long people spend on your site, and what device they used to access the link.
For the best results, you should be continuously comparing your growth-hacking performance against your goals. For example, if a product demo video goes viral but doesn’t result in strong sales, it may be due to a confusing final payment page.
Step 7: Scale successful tactics
Your most successful tactics will offer a window into your customers’ lives. Do they scroll Facebook during their lunch hour? Do they love solving mysteries? Will they engage more with social media content if you post in the evening? Once you know their motivations and habits, you can refine and improve on your strategies.
Keep in mind that these efforts need to be scalable without diluting your unique message. This is a delicate balance for marketers to strike, but it speaks to the core of growth hacking. Your content needs to be specific enough for your audience to relate to, whether you have two or 200 customer segments.
Step 8: Learn from failures (and adapt)
When you’re growth hacking, failure can be every bit as important as success. Every defeat is a learning opportunity, and everyone on the team needs to adopt this mindset. The responses you receive after a campaign, whether they’re lackluster or openly hostile, provide insight into how to adapt your content to better convey your brand’s inherent value.
For example, let’s say you’re marketing a luxury good that’s far more affordable than its direct competitors. Your digital marketing focuses on its low price point, but it’s met with direct and indirect customer feedback about how most people still don’t have the budget for it.
This feedback helps you adjust the language to target value-oriented customers in a higher income bracket. If you get discouraged, remember that even the most successful companies have seen their efforts go ignored (or worse, mocked).
7 successful growth-hacking strategies and techniques to try
Part marketing, part product development, part engineering: there’s no silver bullet to growing your business and winning the market. Growth hacking merely sets your “true north” to growth. We’ll share some expert advice to put it all into practice.
1. Gamification
“Human beings are wired from birth to play games. When we play games, our neurons release dopamine in anticipation of winning. Study after study has found that people who play games remember more, are more engaged, and feel positive about the experience.”
Dan Grech, Founder and CEO of BizHack, succinctly sums up why games turbocharge profitability and growth more than baseline campaigns. Plus, marketers can adapt gamification for both employees and customers.
Games turn tedious tasks, such as signing up for an email newsletter or muddling through the onboarding process, into engaging entertainment. The more thrilling you make it, the better the retention. As Grech put it, “Every aspect of a business can be made more fun and more profitable through the use of gamification.”
2. Email marketing segmentation
With the move toward one-to-one marketing, segmentation across platforms is a priority for top marketers, and email is no exception. The more segmented and specific your emails are, the better the response from all audience personas.
Email is a cost-effective marketing strategy for practically every brand, but there’s no doubt that your customer’s expectations are higher than they’ve ever been. With growth-hacking tactics, you can A/B test within segments, polishing your language so it’s clear and concise.
As you segment, consider how growth-hacking tools like Movable Ink could improve the user experience. With this platform, you can edit emails even after sending them, adjusting the subject line or updating the offer based on your current inventory. When your email content is as engaging as it is relevant, you can count on higher conversion rate optimization.
3. Search engine optimization (SEO)
When Google processes 99,000 search queries per second, improving your search engine page rankings draws more organic traffic and serves as underlying support for all growth efforts.
When you apply SEO to the growth-hacking process, SJW Partners Founder and Managing Director, Steve Weiss, advises, “One constantly undervalued tactic is simply optimizing page load times. By cleaning up some code or scripts and properly compressing images, you can make your site load much faster and prevent people from bouncing off to whichever site they want to visit next—possibly to one of your competitors!”
For Peter Schroeder, Director of Integrated Campaigns & Partnerships at Circle, “Growth hacking comes down to four steps: curation, creation, distribution, and discussion of content.” He advises growth hackers to repurpose content whenever possible, such as by creating a blog post from a video. The last content step should always be starting a real dialog with your followers.
4. Optimized landing pages
Landing pages focus on a single promotion, making them an important part of the customer journey. Instead of navigating multiple homepage sections, they see one offer and one call to action (CTA). The best landing pages boast a simple design, compelling copy, and targeted messages.
This technique may require pre-planning on your end. Founder and CEO of Planning Pod, Jeff Kear, recommends, “Push product/feature landing pages live at least six months prior to release of the product/feature. [Doing so] gives us a big leg up in getting traction with the search engines so that when we launch we are already ranking for those search terms.”
5. Target audience exposure
Niche online communities often have tremendous influence in their spheres, whether these include podcast hosts, bloggers, or Reddit contributors. If you’re aiming for word-of-mouth advertising, this technique may be most effective at boosting your growth-hacking ROI.
Actively participating in online conversations can improve your target message, guide better incentives or referral programs, and convert skeptics into loyal advocates. The testimonials, reviews, and social media mentions you generate from target audience exposure can easily go further than any other growth-hacking strategy.
Former Growth Hacker at Golem, Eddy Azar, specifically recommends Reddit as a potential channel. “If you run a blog and you publish legitimately interesting content, Reddit alone can get you tens of thousands of highly interested readers every month.”
Raviraj Hegde, Head of Growth at Donorbox and former VP of Growth at EMERGE App, found his success on Quora. “At EMERGE App, we engaged with our potential users over Quora and were able to drive a constant stream of traffic on a daily basis.” Whichever digital space your customers favor, ensure you understand the platform’s formal rules and unspoken etiquette before you post.
6. A/B testing
A/B testing is a big part of growth hacking’s experimentation process. You can perform these tests on a broad or micro-scale, making it a smart tactic for early-stage and established companies alike.
For instance, if you’re marketing a multi-purpose kitchen tool, you can create content that promotes all functionality in equal parts. You can then simultaneously run this with content that gives one product feature top billing to see which campaign sparks more interest.
Or you might try something as small as running two email subject lines—one with a CTA of “Click Here” and one with “Click Now”—to see if the variation affects open rates.
As you’re iterating A/B tests, consider the gap between response rates. If you’re only seeing very marginal improvements from one version to the other, it may signify that neither variant is making a difference.
7. Content marketing
Valuable, relevant content attracts and engages your target audience, which is a proven way to drive growth. Every word, picture, video, and blog post is a touchpoint with your brand that customers are free to engage with or scroll by.
Founder and CEO of Southern Swallow, Erica Swallow, shares, “I’ve consulted with brands from The New York Times and NASDAQ to Contently and American Express, all focused on growth hacking and product marketing. The one thing I’ve taken away from all of those projects is the power of content.”
If you’re aiming for rapid growth, she recommends social media. “Through targeted blogging and consistent social media engagement, we’re often able to dramatically increase site traffic and conversions.” Tools like Yoast SEO and CoSchedule can automate your strategies and optimize blog content for various types of search traffic.
Unleash your growth potential with Bitly
Effective growth starts with evaluating the many strategies and tools at your disposal. When you have so much to do in so little time, you can’t take anything for granted.
If you want to assess the real merits of each campaign, integrate Bitly into your growth-hacking arsenal. Our tracking, analytics, and link management platform can serve as guideposts as you work through the process.
Lightning-fast assessments are the essence of successful growth hacking. With Bitly’s packages, you get more than just link shortening. Make data-driven decisions, streamline marketing efforts, and enhance user experiences by quickly quantifying the most critical aspects of your campaigns.
If you’re ready to maximize your company’s growth potential, learn how Bitly’s link management tools can help!