What is Growth Hacking In Digital Marketing?
Growth hacking is a smart yet cost-effective strategy to help grow your business exponentially online. It is a mindset, a strategy, and a method, for achieving rapid growth in your business. Simply put, growth hacking refers to a set of creative, innovative, and usually low-cost strategies that companies use to grow their customer base on a low budget. Hence, you cannot ignore growth hacking if you want to grow faster and have a distinct, better, and greater recognition of your business.
Usually, it is associated with small businesses and fresh start-ups to grab quicker results digitally. It’s a concept that focuses specifically on any online business and digital presence. Many big names grew by leaps and bounds, for example, Paypal, LinkedIn, dropbox, Instagram, Airbnb, Slack, and others.
There are three main pillars of growth hacking around which the whole game surrounds. The essential thing is to test-run your product, be it any service or product, based on gathered data and buyers. Does it have enough space to facilitate your entry into that market? Understanding key buyers and their age groups are essential to target marketing tactics.
To sum up, these are the three elements that need great attention, while focusing on growth hacking:
- Content marketing
- Product Marketing
- Advertising
Another vital thing about growth hacking is that there is no specific set of strategies. If one approach works for one business, it might not work for the other.
What are the benefits of Growth Hacking?
You must look at its benefits to fully understand why growth hacking is essential. Some are them are cited below:
Enables faster monetization:
Applying outdated marketing and promotion strategies will yield results much later. But using growth hacking from the start can give your business a quick recognition as well as substantial attention from the customers/users.
The faster you onboard new customers/clients, the faster it will translate into revenues and cashflows.
Embrace growth mentality:
The essence of growth hacking is the growth mindset. By choosing growth hacking, you focus all your thoughts on growing your business.
This forces you to step out of your comfort zone and become more proactive. By being proactive in looking for growth in any situation, you’re sure to discover ways that can work for you quickly, and you can take advantage of them.
New business models and product concepts:
You’re always ahead of your competitors by building, improving, and analyzing your growth hacking experiences. With this, you have a deeper understanding of your customers, business, and industry.
Growth hacking involves a lot of experimentation, allowing you to explore more about your business and core industries. From this, you learn new business models and product ideas.
Develop better products:
It helps create better products that your customers actually want to use. A lot of experimentation in growth hacking involves measuring and analyzing your product which results in an improved version of the product.
If your product/ service is well-liked and used by your customers, this increases the chances of them referring more people to your product.
Discovers suitable marketing strategies:
The most complex problem is always knowing the winning strategy of your business. Not every strategy works for every business. Hacking helps you discover the marketing strategies that work best for you.
To find the right strategy, you must undergo a process of experimentation until you find it.
Makes you achieve market dominance:
Growth hacking helps you dominate the market. This can get you closer to becoming a well-known name in the market. Becoming a market leader is even easier when you provide better products to your customers that your competitors.
It moves you up a rank despite the presence of strong competitors.
Cost-effective and beneficial:
Growth hacking came out of a need in marketing when companies wanted to expand without spending too much on traditional advertising strategies.
Growth hacking is a creative, cost-effective strategy that helps increase return on investment and grow a business. This lowers the cost of customer acquisition, and you end up making more profit than the overall cost of advertising.
Growth Hacking Strategies:
1. Be Unique and Innovative:
Research what your potential customers need most and what your competitors cannot provide. For example, if you plan to expand your product feature list, do an in-depth review rather than following your competitors.
Find out what their customers complain about, their pain points, and where they want improvement. This is the best way to beat other companies!
2. Reach Out to Experts:
Ideally, add a growth hacker to your team to take your business to the sky of success. But if you can’t do that, you can connect with experts on freelance and other platforms like LinkedIn. Ask them what kind of growth hacking strategy your business needs, which aligns to the company’s overall goals and adjectives.
3. Use Social Media:
The more channels you use, the better your growth hacking will be. Millions of people use social media, and this platform is a hub for them to get information. Use all your social media accounts Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Also, take advantage of social media by finding and using platforms your competitors aren’t using. This will put you in a winning position against your competitors.
4. Content Marketing Strategy:
Ignoring content marketing is one of the reasons many start-ups close down before they could make their name. Developing a content marketing strategy is crucial if your business solely depends on digital.
Develop a content marketing strategy for your company. Ensure you create a content marketing strategy that grabs your audience’s attention, including blogs, visuals, videos, etc.
Images and videos can enhance the visual appeal of the post, and generally grab more attention from the users. Video is the most effective content, with 78% of marketers who use video saying it increases ROI. Moreover, 90% of consumers say that videos help them make purchasing decisions.
5. Content Repurposing:
Content repurposing means taking an old or existing piece of content and repurposing it for a new purpose. A single piece of existing content can serve a variety of unique needs.
6. Referral Marketing:
Referral marketing is one of the principles of Pirate Metrics and dramatically enhances your other marketing efforts. In general, customers are four times more likely to buy based on a referral.
Word of mouth is the primary factor behind 20% to 50% of all purchase decisions.
All the giants of digital start-ups started with referral strategies, including paypal, dropbox etc.
Conclusion:
Businesses need the most effective growth hacking strategies to keep up in this fast-paced world. There is no perfect strategy or checklist for growth hacking and it is vital to figure out what strategy works best. Growth hacking is not just a name for shortcuts and experiments. Instead, it’s about working out the requirements of your customers. That’s why growth hacking is a great way to jumpstart any business.
If you enjoyed this post about growth hacking in digital marketing, check out our guide on how to become a content creator here.