The Importance of Growth Hacking for Startups

Ever wonder how successful companies like Dropbox, Airbnb, Facebook, and Twitter grew so rapidly in a short period of time? Well... rapid business growth happens as a result of developing excellent business strategies.  Companies such as Dropbox and Airbnb set the perfect example of growth hacking. The term growth hacking means becoming successful in a short period of time. When your startup or business is booming at an early stage, it signifies that you are using the right marketing techniques.

Growth hacking is a part of digital marketing ecosystem of interacting and interconnecting ideas. Some strongly believe that growth hackers utilize marketing techniques such as SEO, web analytics, content marketing and A/B testing for rapid growth. While others believe that growth is not only through marketing but also through product support and development. According to Sean Ellis, the inventor of the term growth hacking, “Growth is not just a concern of sales and marketing, but of product, engineering and support too. It is this organization-wide commitment to growth that ultimately sets these companies apart.”

Most startups that start from zero such as Airbnb often use inexpensive, yet creative and innovative methods to grow their company’s customer base. They do this through analytical thinking and by testing different varieties of marketing techniques in order to increase their sales and publicity.

Below is a list of ideas that could transform your startup to a scalable fast paced company.

As a startup, always offer some free services at first. For instance, share free content with your customers via blogging, YouTube channel or social media. You'll get to know what they dislike or like about your product/service. According to Neil Patel, a well known marketing strategist, sharing content is the simplest way to learn what people like and dislike and what they want and need. It’s a great channel to get feedback on your ideas.

Find strategic ways to attract potential customers within a short period of time. You can do this through your content creation and blogging skills. You can also benefit from guest postings.  Guest posting is the act of contributing a post to another blogger's website. This method of contribution will increase your brand exposure and awareness. In fact, many brands are now guest posting instead of distributing press releases. By the way, most website owners allow you to post your articles for free if your content is worthy and authentic.

Convert your visitors into leads. You can turn your website visitors into potential customers through various ways. That is where you will be using the A/B testing method for your Growth Hacking process. Start by using strategic channels for increasing your conversion rates. Email marketing for instance, is known as one of the best practices for conversion optimization.

Another practice is remarketing. You can easily re-target all those who have recently visited your website but did not take any specific action by using the re-marketing strategy. With remarketing, your ads will appear to your past visitors on other websites or social media. Therefore with this practice, you will be able to catch your visitor's attention once again and will have higher chances to convert them into customers.

Growth hacking is an essential strategy for startups looking to scale quickly and efficiently. It involves using data and creativity to identify and exploit opportunities for growth. But it's not just about acquiring new customers, it's also about retaining and expanding your existing user base. To learn more about how reach-out emails can benefit your startup, check out our blog post on 7 Proven Strategies for Writing Reach-Out Emails That Get Results where we dive deeper into the subject and give you actionable tips to implement in your business.

To conclude, every business has different ways to set up growth hacking techniques. To succeed in it, you need to acquire unique ideas for your marketing strategies. Most importantly, ideas that are innovative and creative. Now that you are acquainted with some of them in this article, are you ready to become a growth hacker?