We are living in a start-up generation wherein we can find a thriving bunch of people running errands to greet success at every nook-and-corner. No wonder the cut-throat competition amongst the startups is soaring and looking at the current scenario we can only say that this is just the beginning.
That said, what is it that actually comes forth as daunting tasks for almost every early stage startups? Despite of putting in a lot of effort as well as investment in terms of time and finances, startups are finding it hard to get the due attention from their potential customers. The fiercely competitive market has made the most impressive websites, outstanding logo designs, and inspiring visual elements simply of no value. The cutting-edge is surely demanding something more than just putting across a well-framed and fabulously functioning business in order to greet hordes of customers. This is where growth hacking tactics play a vital role for startups that are just in a lookout for optimal solutions. As mentioned by wishpond.com, growth hacking has become an essential element of starting and growing a new business.
Understanding the term “Growth Hacker”
In simple words, growth hacking is a new way of looking at online marketing. One can also put it as trying and testing different tactics with a single goal to multiply. Usually growth hacking is meant to be done considering a lower budget or in fact free strategies that helps the business grow in leaps and bounds. This allows the startups to use all their possible resources such as creativity, tech skills, and of course resourcefulness.
Exploring the proven Growth Hackers
Unlike big companies that can afford to throw money at marketing, it is obvious that all startups cannot. There are a number of successful growth hackers till date who have masterfully aced the art and science of growth hacking. This includes doing a few important things like understanding the customer, conceptualizing an ideal product, as well as leveraging each and every tool available to them, and that’s it. This mighty strategy has led the gold-diggers of our times to acquire from zero to millions of users in just couple of years. You can count on Facebook, Quora, Airbnb, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Dropbox, Spotify, Paypal, Hotmail, and the list continues.
Let’s consider Quora for instance. The idea behind Quora was to serve a platform that would let people engage in quality conversations. While the world already had N number of Forums, Quora chose to be different.
Quora is known for having aced two growth hacks that led the company to grow in millions. One of the hacks that worked for Quora is that they designed a feed that would generate interesting content based on a user’s interest. This feed provided the users with the present topics and that too of the user’s interest from most recent conversations. This worked for Quora in terms of holding back the users for a lifetime we would say.
You can explore more such gold-diggers of the recent times and you might just encounter some valuable growth hacking insights right away.
Here are 4 Growth Hacking tactics every early stage startups should consider:
1. Consider exploring remarketing
Remarketing plays a vital role when you have just entered the market with your thriving business. It is essential to advertise your brand to only those users who have shown a potential interest towards your brand or your online services. You can even consider those who have recently visited your web page. This turns out to be a great way to manifold growth wherein you focus your PPC campaign on such visitors.
2. Serve engaging content across website & social media
Having a professional website design is just being enough today. Just as we mentioned above, you need to battle the cutting-edge and for that you would have to make considerable efforts to entertain, engage and retain your users. This is where content can do wonders to your business, provided it is marketed in the right way. Blogs have been around for a while and worry not as they are here to stay. Apart from maintaining and marketing your own blog, you should invite other bloggers to write for your brand.
Don’t forget that Social media and any sort of content that’s relevant to your business goes hand in hand. Make sure your business has a social media presence and you are making rigorous efforts to keep in touch with your audience. Remember that social media is even more creative platform and it will demand you to come up with relevant as well as engaging content that helps you build a stronger audience base.
3. Offer Freebies
The mass never says no to free things and so offering freebies is one of the best ways to drive your potential users to use your paid services or product. In a way, you are letting your users avail the service or product which further allows them to witness the quality and consistency of the business. For instance, Moz. has set an ideal example. It manages to provide free SEO tools and resources to its users in order to attract them to subscribe for its paid subscriptions. The good news is that this strategy has done wonders for the company.
4. Use Referrals
Providing referrals is a proven way to build a solid customer base. You can choose to start a referral program just after you have few hundreds of genuine customer in hand. Take Dropbox as an example. Just within 15 months, Dropbox was successful in raising its user base from 100,000 to more than 4 million. All that this startup did is, it lured customers by offering upgraded storage amounts to referral party with an extra 500MB of storage free.
Wrapping up
While these are few proven growth hacking tactics, you can always think and do something different in order to leverage your startup visibility and growth. The moment you think you are about to take a risk with a brand new strategy, remember what John Rampton has to say in one of its blogs : “no two startups are the same. Which means that you need to find the best way possible to get your startup off the ground.”
