Growth Hacking for SME

· 3 min read

A growth hacker is a person whose true north is growth – Sean Ellis


Growth hacking

Growth Hacking is a set of processes to attain business growth in terms of customers / revenue / usage in a short span of time preferably with little effort and cost.
Unlike traditional Marketing, Growth hacking focus on all the phases of customer / user lifecycle for growth.

  • Awareness
  • Acquisition
  • Activation
  • Retention
  • Revenue
  • Referral

Growth hacking Mindset

Although actual steps for Growth hacking will be unique to each organization, they can broadly be defined as follows

Step 1. Defining Experiments with actionable goals

  • Each growth hacking effort should be approached with a mindset of experimentation. If an experiment worked as expected, then we can double down efforts on it.
  • Each experiment should be created with an actionable goal in mind For eg. Growing email subscriber list by 2x is an actionable goal for an experiment rather than stating I am going to grow email marketing efforts.

Step 2. Tracking Experiments with analytics

  • Each experiment can be proved successful only with objective results. Hence tracking the goals using an analytics system forms a critical element. For eg. Having a List Management system like Teleduce will help to analyse the email subscribers.
  • Tracking of data also helps in providing context based on historical trends from previous experiments.

Step 3. Executing Experiments with hypotheses

  • Before initiating an experiment, it is critical to record all the hypotheses. Each of the activities in the experiment and their intended results should be aligned with the actual goal.
  • Allocation of enough resources in terms of time and efforts to do experiments is critical.

Step 4. Optimising Experiments

  • Tweaking experiments is important based on the outcomes is important.
  • A/B testing and cohort analysis would help in finding out the right set of inputs required to run the experiment.

Awareness, Acquisition Strategies

  • Inbound Channels – Make customers / users discover you organically and reach you for a reason.
  • Outbound Channels – Reach to customers / users wherever they are active and drive them to your offering

Inbound Channels

  • Blogging
    • Both for your brand and as a guest blogger in other complementary sites
  • Podcasting
  • E-books / Guides / White papers / Infographics / Drip campaigns
    • Free value provided as part of user signing up with their email id.
  • Webinars
  • Community Events
  • SEO
  • Social Media
  • Product Reviews
    • sites like quora and producthunt are being used by many to discover products. Reviews in these sites would provide solid conversions.
  • Customised Landing pages
  • Powered by links visible in your customer properties will help to bring new customers through discovery
  • Contests
  • App Marketplaces / Deal Sites
    • Listing in app marketplaces will help customers discover your offering
  • Communities
    • Leveraging on existing audience of a particular community will yield quick results

Outbound Channels

  • Advertisements
    • ADs via Search engines like Google/Bing, Social media platforms like facebook/twitter, niche community blogs where your audience typically hangout
  • Co-promotion
    • complementary brands promote each other to their existing audiences
    • run events together to a common audience
  • Affiliates
    • affiliate platforms help us to pick relevant affiliates for the business
  • Cold Calling
  • Influencers

Activation, Retention Strategies

  • Seamless on-boarding in the platform where users are quickly dealt with aha moments
  • Make it easy for your customers to share updates to their social / professional network through your product
  • API integrations with other complementary products will increase the overall value of your offering and increase the stickiness
  • Incentives for users to use the product through points, badges and leaderboard
  • Re-engagement with your product can be done through periodical email triggers based on an event, Push notifications based on user actions
  • Creating a community where the customers are welcome with ideas, encouraged with free brand merchandise like T-shirts and immediately supported when they are in trouble will yield customer stickiness.

Revenue, Referral Strategies

  • Double sided Referral incentives are great in quick customer acquisition. For eg, zoho mail provide free extra accounts to both the existing customer and the new customer being referred when they signup.
  • Pricing page can be a great place for growth . Strategies like discount codes, bundles can increase the conversion rate in a significant manner.
  • Make it easy for your customers to bring their social / professional network to your product is significant. Email contacts / phone contacts import option will quickly increase the userbase.

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