Many people have discovered digital marketing is a consistent ladder. It’s always about finding new ways to evolve marketing strategies. It can be hard to keep up with new terms and trends, although it’s important to stay up to date because of your competition. One concept you may not of- or have been familiar with – is growth hacking. Many marketers have found this strategy to grow their business without a huge resource investment, which is neat, right? Let’s take a look at what growth hacking is and tips for scaling your business.
Growth hacking is a mindset that does exactly what it sounds like- prioritizes growth in your business. Sean Ellis coined in 2010, defines a growth hacker as someone who has thrown out the playbook of traditional marketing and replaced it with only what is testable, trackable, and scalable. A growth hacker’s tools are e-mails, pay-per-click ads, blogs, and platform APIs instead of commercials, publicity, and money. It’s a more modern way of digitally growing business rather than traditional marketing. This mindset helps businesses pursue users and growth— and when they do it right, those users beget more users, who beget more users. “They are the inventors, operators, and mechanics of their own self-sustaining and self-propagating growth machine that can take a start-up from nothing to something” (Ellis). The most interesting part of growth hacking is that smaller companies without massive resource investment can utilize its core principles. However, growth hacking differs from traditional marketing because many of its users have fewer resources or are working with smaller brands. Therefore, it puts these smaller companies up for smarter, innovative, and agile marketing.
Hubspot was looking for growth in its brand. They were focused on building content tools that would generate more leads and turn those leads into sales. Their strategy for building content and tools was invested in blog posts, eBooks, and educational tools for marketers. They also launched the website and social media grading tools and invested in webinars and teaching manuals. Their site became a main learning resource for their targeted audience – those who want to learn more about digital marketing. According to the Digital Marketing Institute, the company had $883 million in revenue by 2020. Their growth hacking strategy of building content tools helped Hubspot generate more sales with engagement, education, and being a useful resource for their audience.
There are many ways you can implement a rapid growth strategy, no matter the industry you’re in. One of the main steps in building a growth strategy is thinking outside the box and knowing who you’re targeting.
1. Work Out Your Product
A key tactic of growth hacking is building a product for an already established set of customers. Target your set of customers and build a product based on their interests. This will eventually lead to more users based on your set of users. Think of it this way, isolating who your customers are and designing a product that will blow their minds are essentially smart marketing decisions, not just development and design decisions.
2. Ensure You Can Scale
Before starting, make sure you can actually meet that growth. If you want to start driving rapid growth, ensure that you have the infrastructure to handle success.
3. Test Over and Over
Any digital marketing approach needs testing, as does growth hacking. As creative and different as strategies can get, you will not know if they’re actually succeeding without a good set of simple, lean tests. Try out your strategy and see if it is working. If not, it would be time to redirect.
4. Analyze and Optimize
We always say to pay attention to your metrics because this will help you know what is exactly working. Analyze your results and optimize your website, pages, and content to ensure your growth hacking strategy is reaching your targeted audience.
At MSM Digital, our team is dedicated to growing business, whether it be small or large. We are ready to come up with the best strategy that can help your business reach new heights. Our web development team is experts on SEO and web design. Our social media team can help come up with innovative content that reaches new audiences. Ready to start and get your business ahead? Contact us today! https://msmdigitalmedia.com/contact/
