If you are a business owner, “growth hacking” is a methodology worth paying attention to. Developing your own growth-centric skills or teaming up with someone that has those skills may be vital to your business’ success.
Excuse Me, Did You Call Yourself A Growth Hacker?
What’s that?
“A person whose true north is growth.” - Sean Ellis, entrepreneur
Sean Ellis, the founder of GrowthHackers, a platform that utilizes your team’s collaborative power to enhance communication, coined the term “growth hacker” in 2010. It was a phrase born out of his own experiences working as a marketing consultant for startups like Dropbox.
Rapid advancement is key for any startup, which means that their strategic plan needs to emphasize growth. While a more traditional marketer at an established business may be focused on budgets and maintaining linear growth, a growth-centric marketer or “growth hacker” is focused on utilizing more non-traditional and experimental methods to accelerate a startup’s customer base to accomplish exponential growth. How Can I Become A Successful Growth Hacker?
Ensure, Target, Expand, Prioritize.
Ensure product-market fit. To be a successful growth hacker you have to start at the product level. Confirm that your product or service is something people actually want by gathering feedback before and after initial development. Those early-adopters and followers can provide you with valuable feedback and usage data (aka Analytics) as well as generate interest about your product.
Target. Determine who will benefit the most from your product or service, and market ONLY to them. Targeting your ideal customer from the start will create the necessary buzz around your product that is needed to successfully expand into a larger audience later. To be a successful growth hacker you must use the right combination of email marketing, SEO, content marketing, viral strategies and analytics to increase customer acquisition at a low cost. Plus, sustaining a regular stream of high-quality content will gain you followers.
Expand strategically. One method of expansion is to incentivize product sharing. This utilizes your existing customer base to bring more people through the door. Another option to consider is integration - partner with other businesses and integrate your product or service with an existing one of theirs. A simple, but effective example of this is allowing customers to register for your service through one of their social media accounts. (e.g. letting people login to an app using their Facebook or Google accounts).
Prioritize retention. A large percentage of your business’s revenue will come from existing customers. Ensure that you are engaging them by providing product updates and offering an outlet for existing customers to submit feedback. This information can be used as you continue to improve the user experience.
Trust In Troy Web
Are you looking to become the next growth hacking startup? You need a strategic partner to help you with both design and development as well as support your path to product-market fit, identify your ideal consumer, expand and prioritize retention. At Troy Web Consulting, we take pride in partnering with startups and small businesses on their journey to success. In fact, we’re a proud supporter of StartUp Tech Valley, Startup Weekend and NSF iCorp, all organizations which have helped place many Capital Region businesses on the map!
Our team of experts have learned a lot throughout the past 15 years, and we’re committed to providing our clients with the best technological solutions available. We’re Troy Web Consulting and we design, develop and deliver technology that works.