Growth hacking is the art of quickly growing a company through creative, budget-friendly strategies. This term has transformed from a buzzword into a viable marketing game plan, in part due to notable success stories from brands like Gmail and Dropbox.
A growth hacking tool is software that businesses implement to boost growth in their sector. Marketers can use these tools at any part of the funnel, merging their creative instincts and data insights for more precise strategies.
In this post, we’ll run through how growth hacking applies to modern-day marketing and round up all the tools you need to jump in.
What is growth hacking?
Growth hacking is a way for any business to quickly grow its customer base and revenue with low-cost and creative strategies, regardless of sector or budget. With growth hacking, marketers leverage available resources to produce a sharp uptick in growth in a short time period.
Whether you represent a startup or a conglomerate, you should know the central tenets of growth hacking:
- Rapid growth: Rapid growth for a company should be based on market demand, staffing resources, and budget. Whether a business defines growth based on subscriber numbers or revenue, marketers should set reasonable metrics before choosing growth-hacking tools.
- Market penetration: Even marketers in niche sectors may need help breaking into an industry. Growth hacking gets the word out across platforms, giving customers multiple reminders that there’s a new player on the scene.
- Cost-efficiency: Growth hacking is not about blowing the budget. The strategy prioritizes low-cost or organic solutions over expensive bells and whistles.
If you’re asking “what is growth hacking,” you should know that it’s not a magic fix that one ambitious or rogue marketer can implement. For continuous improvement, you need all hands on deck. Once you have the right blend of technical skills and insider perspectives, it’s easier to brainstorm, evaluate, and implement different growth hacking strategies.
The role of growth hacking tools
Growth hacking tools and software help marketers identify the straightest line to business goals. Whether marketers are gauging the response to a product, tracking social media posts, or estimating growth hacking ROI, these tools support efforts across the spectrum.
One of the biggest obstacles for a marketing team is selecting the right tools. This task is more than checking reviews or researching case studies. Just because a tool is well-respected doesn’t mean it fits with the company’s larger mission. For growth hacking to work, you need to first establish who the target audience is before finding them in the digital landscape.
The best growth hacking tools are built for experimentation. With improved A/B tests, customer data collection, and analytic insights, you can draw more accurate conclusions. Plus, the richer the details, the easier it is to predict how the wind will blow as consumer demand changes.
12 best growth hacking tools for marketing campaigns and strategy
There are numerous solutions on the market, and it takes some effort to comb through the merits of each one. To save you time, we’ve compiled the best ones for your marketing strategy.
1. Bitly
Bitly is a marketing tool that shortens long URLs, tracks links, and collects critical campaign data. With Bitly Campaigns, you can see what’s driving traffic, which CTAs perform best, and whether affiliates have the right crossover audience.
Users can customize shortened links based on brand, campaign, or SEO keywords, reinforcing everything from company values to product descriptions. For instance, you might run a 20% discount on Facebook ads, with the shortened link referencing the percentage.
With a Bitly paid plan, you can see the total number of engagements, engagements over time, and the device used to access the link. When implemented across your campaigns, your team can evaluate the content, schedules, and variations that inspired customer engagement.
2. Optimizely
Optimizely is a user-friendly tool for A/B testing a website. Known as a digital experience platform, it can transform your many virtual touchpoints. At Bitly, we use it to assess the success of our calls to action or website layouts.
With Optimizely, developers don’t need to create several test pages to separately track engagement. Instead, all users end up on one page, but they see customized content depending on the campaign’s parameters. At the core of growth hacking is testing. It’s constantly setting hypotheses and running experiments until you find the stickiest strategies.
Before investing the resources to roll out major updates, like a revamped checkout process or new subscription page, A/B test user response using a tool like Optimizely.
3. Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a web service that analyzes which customer patterns influence campaign performance. You can think of this growth hacking tool as a deeper exploration of your data collection. You can discover everything from the customer’s location to referral traffic ROI.
The catch is that Google Analytics can take up to 48 hours to process the data. Ideally, marketers should combine Google Analytics with a more immediate tool like Bitly. This way, they can quickly assess the initial response of a campaign strategy before tackling the bigger questions.
So, let’s say you post a shortened link on Facebook promoting your flagship product. With Bitly, you can see the initial click-through rates before reviewing the Google Analytics report on conversions, lead generation, or engagement levels.
4. Semrush
Semrush is an analytics tool that supports content marketing, research, advertising, social media, and SEO. This growth hacking solution can run in-depth audits on websites, suggest new strategies based on market position, and dig up your competitors’ promotional tactics.
This is a rich platform with a lot to learn, making it good for experimental marketers who want to parse results across platforms. To make it easy, Semrush breaks down the packages so marketers don’t have to sign up for a custom plan if all they need is keyword tracking.
One impactful way to use Semrush is to measure your website against those of your competitors. Growth hacking is all about starting off with a bang. If your website is falling to the bottom of the list, it will put that much more pressure on the rest of your channels.
5. Movable Ink
Movable Ink is a content tool used largely for landing pages and email campaigns. With this growth hacking tool, you can design dynamic campaigns and track individual components over time.
The most memorable feature of Movable Ink is its real-time flexibility and versatility. So, let’s say you send an early-morning email to 100 email subscribers offering half off a product and sell out within minutes.
With Movable Ink, you can alter the email after it’s been sent, so customers aren’t clicking on an offer that’s no longer available. You can also use this content tool to create interactive polls, integrate live countdowns, and choose an engaging layout, so customers are more connected to your brand.
6. Hootsuite
Hootsuite is a social media management platform where marketers can schedule, publish, monitor, and analyze content. Use it to respond to comments, track brand mentions, and see related industry news across all your social media channels.
Hootsuite debuted in 2008, and it has consistently evolved to meet the needs of both marketers and users. The platform helps marketers capitalize on the initial excitement of a new service, product, or brand before moving to a consistent content calendar that strikes a chord with the core audience.
For example, a new fintech company incentivizes sign-ups with a $100 bonus. The brand posts this offer across its social media platforms, with little to no direct engagement. With Hootsuite, marketers can see if users are discussing the offer on other social media platforms, giving them the opportunity to respond to potential concerns or criticisms.
7. Moz
Moz is an SEO tool that helps with keyword research and website analytics. You can quickly assess where your website ranks, the quality and quantity of backlinks, and which SEO issues require immediate attention.
Search engine optimization can be an exceptionally powerful tool in growth hacking, depending on who your audience is. In fact, some business owners have achieved incredible growth by cutting out all other marketing efforts and focusing solely on SEO mastery.
When search engines like Google change their search algorithms up to 600 times a year, marketers rely on tools like Moz to help them stay current with customer trends, platform policies, and competitor tactics.
8. Unbounce
Unbounce is a software platform used for both the creation and optimization of landing pages. With a simple drag-and-drop interface and AI-powered assistant, Unbounce is a shortcut for marketers who don’t have a team of coders at their disposal.
So, if you were promoting a new product, you might use the Unbounce tool to A/B test two landing pages. On one landing page, you show a fun infographic showcasing the product’s value. On another, you feature a pop-up video showing a customer using the product. From there, you can gauge which strategy had the best conversion rates, so you can focus on content that works.
9. HubSpot
HubSpot is a CRM system that helps growth hackers manage their contacts and sales team pipeline. With HubSpot, you can also create landing pages, automate email campaigns, and manage leads. Centralize tools, automate workflows, and connect different data points in its operations hub to see the big picture.
So if a growth hacker is appealing to potential customers, they might use HubSpot to track interactions across audiences. Once they have an idea of how their brand is perceived, they can start fine-tuning the audience segments and sharing relevant information. It’s an excellent growth hacking tool for marketers who want to support their respective sales teams.
10. BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo is a content optimization tool for your entire content strategy. The software monitors public conversations, assesses competitor content quality, and identifies the best personalities for influencer marketing in your sector.
The nature of growth hackers is switching things up on the fly, which is par for the course given how quickly consumer sentiment can shift. With BuzzSumo, you can track trending topics to see what’s resonating, thereby elevating the quality of your posts and your overall reach.
So, if you’re in a niche market and primarily using micro-influencers for outreach, you can use BuzzSumo to track average retweets, domain authority, and follower counts for both established and emerging authorities. This is a great way for growth hackers to identify up-and-coming influencers who may not need much incentive to form a lasting partnership.
11. Zapier
Zapier connects web applications and services, automating workflows and reducing the need for manual intervention. With Zapier, beginner marketers don’t need coding experience to automate or integrate platforms. This tool’s library features more than 6,000 applications and services, so odds are good that you’ll find what you’re looking for.
Zapier is also recommended to streamline your project management, which can alleviate the worst of an already packed workday. For example, if you’re constantly receiving requests through email, Zapier connects your project management software and email, so you can keep track of tasks.
12. Hotjar
Hotjar is an analytical tool that shows marketers how visitors interact with their web pages. More than just clicks and conversion calculations, you can see how a user is navigating the features, what holds their interest, and where customers drop off before conversion.
With Hotjar, you can watch user session recordings, which gives you stronger insights into which elements need some adjustment. So if you have high rates of cart abandonment, you can assess whether the customer filled in their information before clicking off the page or if they merely viewed the final price with tax. This gives marketers an idea of their interest level, so they can customize follow-up messaging or retargeted ads.
How to integrate growth hacking tools into your workflows
In addition to our 10 growth hacking tips, we bring you a few how-to tips on tool integration.
Establish clear objectives and KPIs
Your KPIs and objectives need to be well-defined and measurable. So if one of your KPIs is retention, your metric might be a 50% customer return rate, and you might invest in an analytical growth-hacking tool. This is a critical step that can help you select growth-hacking tools that directly contribute to your bottom line.
Try automation for repetitive tasks
Growth hacking and automation go hand-in-hand. Save time and money by automating email marketing, data entry, lead generation, social media posting, task creation, and more. Implementing marketing automation wherever possible allows a digital marketing team to use its mental bandwidth for more strategic tasks.
Optimize landing pages for conversion
A landing page spotlights a single campaign element so customers can make faster decisions. An optimized landing page plays a huge role in capturing interest and converting website visitors into leads or customers.
For better results, use growth-hacking tools to create and test landing page variations. Take advantage of landing page templates, and then customize them to fit your brand and audience. Consider incorporating your own high-quality graphics or videos to flesh out the page, and choose a growth-hacking tool that integrates optimization best practices for better search engine rankings.
Leverage social media
The right growth hacking tools take your social media strategies to the next level, giving you an easy way to create, schedule, and analyze posts.
Automate social media responses whenever possible, so you have more time to focus on testing different elements of the campaign (e.g., different CTAs, headlines, images). As you interpret A/B testing results, use a growth hacking tool that pulls in additional data, so you’re able to draw the correct conclusions.
Implement A/B testing
A/B testing should be a cornerstone of growth hacking workflow, because it allows marketers to systematically improve outcomes in real time. You can tweak every variant, from CTC placement to headline language, so you can land on the best combination.
A/B testing and its results should consistently match the objectives and KPIs established at the beginning of the campaign. This way, you can evaluate the numbers based on larger business goals, which results in better decisions across the board.
Expand your growth marketing opportunities with Bitly
If you’re looking for the best growth marketing tools, choose a software provider with a proven track record. At Bitly, our functionality provides immediate feedback to growth hackers. When every second counts, you can see what’s sticking and keep rolling one success into another.
Ready to expand your marketing opportunities with Bitly’s link management and analytics tools? Find your perfect Bitly plan today!