8 Secret things that you don’t know about Growth Hacking

When coming into the term “Growth Hacking”, the majority of the users of this is “StartUps”.

Simply saying, this is the bread and butter for startups. Let’s dig deep.

Each year, thousands of startups immerse from every industry all over the world. But only a few remain stable and make a difference. Others collapsed and or maybe thinking to quit due to the frustration of unsuccessful results.

If you are into StartUp or thinking of joining one, you definitely do not need to fall into the latter category I mentioned earlier.

So what should you do?

This is simple but highly logical and you can always improve the results with your common sense.

Or you can become this Growth Hacker that every startup wants. Growth Hacking is much popular nowadays and will be a highly demanded skill in the near future. Since everybody wanted to grow, you can be a natural with these tips.

The beginning of the concept Growth Hacking was started by Sean Ellis in 2010.

Sean had helped a number of companies achieve incredible growth which led the silicon valley to him for any growth tip. He was like this “All-in-one solution” with system changes, processes, and every other essential for the considerable growth of a startup. But when he left those companies after successful results, there was none to carry out the big work for him. He hired many individuals for his replacement, but none of them didn’t actually got what they should do.

They were marketers with professional qualifications but they lacked this one secret essence.

A traditional marketer has a broad view and understanding of marketing, but still, this was not the skill for startups. These skills are really demanding in bigger companies, but what startups need is something different. They need to “GROW”. This is where “growth hacking” comes into life.

A true growth hacker does not need bigger budgets, expenses. What he really needs is growth. He can make a dead mouse into a bigger company chain with his beaming skills.

Eg:

• Facebook
• Airbnb
• Instagram

What Growth hacking actually do

Generally, a startup uses analytical, inexpensive, creative, and innovative methods to expand their company’s customer base.

This is growth hacking. Use it wisely and your startup will rise up to the sky.

Let’s talk about each of these strategies in short.

First of all, say if you have this awesome idea in your mind. But you may have targeted the whole wide world for that. NOPE, my dear friend. This is where most of the startups get their wrong turns.

1. Do not target the whole world.

The narrower and precise your target audience is, the bigger you get your first passing rate.

Think of Instagram. This is for photo uploading. Target audience is narrowed down to that point.

Other strategies and features come next, but this narrow audience at first is important. So it helps you to identify your target and their actual need.

This is theoretically proven by Law of Diffusion of innovations.

You have to pass through innovators and early adopters to reach the majority of people.

So the first rule to remember is to target a minimum crowd and then you can think of Who would get the maximum benefit from your product. Be specific. Describe a real person as best as possible.

Eg: If you want to sell your beauty tips based software, then who should you address? A whole bunch of women?

No.

If I were you, I’d tell it like this.

A 20-year-old female who is beauty conscious, lives in Colombo, is skinny, just after her higher studies, and spends most of her time online.

You should be this much detailed or maybe more than this to find your ideal customer.

Then only you can address the real needs of your customer’s. Then these ideal target customers will do one of the most important things in marketing: Word of mouth.

In the digital world, word of mouth can be in the form of sharing the good name of your product.

So without actually spending 1000 USD (maybe more) for advertising, you have got free positive side advertising.

This is the spirit of Growth hacking.

Then again we can talk about ways to talk to our ideal customers about the customized product. I will talk about it in the next article.

2. Create a product/service that people tend to buy as an actual need

In short, create something that customers actually want. Or create the need for real.

Sometimes you may have to invest a huge amount of money and in return, you may get nothing. The reason behind mostly for this is, users do not need that product.

Eg:

• New Coke
• Crystal Pepsi

Both products were launched with a higher advertising budget and ended up failing. They couldn’t even recover the expense.

The reason behind these failures was the very same we spoke earlier. Users did not actually want those and the old products were restored with the old glam.

Of course, you should not want this ill fate for you to happen. To avoid this, always try to understand your customer. Try to understand what they actually want. Word of mouth matters in this case also. Say your product is bad, the news travels fast and almost everybody knows that.

What can I do ?

You do not have this 3rd eye to know the exact feeling of the customers. But you can always take feedback so the 3rd eye can be awakened.

Always take feedback. Say you have this awesome idea for a product. Before starting to build it, start asking and answering questions regarding it. Then take feedback right away.

If the status is good, start building it, but in this one point, take feedback again.

You want to take a few feedback rounds before you release the final outcome.

This final outcome with constant feedback rounds is armed with fewer defects rather than an average outcome.

Finally, a prudent and worthy product can be released. After the grand release, updates can be added with constant feedback par with customer needs.

Apple, Uber, Instagram, SiteGround are few of the famous companies that treat feedback as an important part of their business.

There is another side of this section.

Create the need for your product.

Well, actually this is for bigger companies but still, startups can practise to do it by small steps.

Eg: Apple created the wireless charging feature for the latest iPhones, but they did not send any on their default pack. So iPhone users need to buy this wireless charger separately which costs nearly 50 USD. This is one of the best examples for creating the need for the product.

All these points we were talking about are for the products or ideas that you already have.

But say you do not have any specific idea. That doesn’t matter. Start for free.

Take the use of your social media. Create a personal blog or a YouTube channel. Target the main niche you thought your business would be. Then share your contents and valuable posts through those.

This will definitely give you the idea of the user’s preferences. You can get a broad idea of what they like and dislike. This is gaining feedback. You have now collected your first round of feedback. You can build a strong list of followers through this process which will help you to market your product. I will talk about this section separately.

So as you see this is a hassle-free and risk-free method for a StartUp. A Growth hacker should equip this tip in his toolbox with a mark — important.

Now we have validated the product and have targeted the audience, what’s next?

Next, we can actually start to work. Before this, I want to bring up an acronym AARRR.

We can execute the primary beginning along with the stages of the AARRR funnel.

This was originated by Dave McClure who was a marketing director at PayPal and also started a few companies like 500Startups etc.

The funnel stages can be drawn as;

1. Acquisition: How you get people to know you by name.
2. Activation: How to give users a happy first experience.
3. Retention: How you keep them coming back for more.
4. Revenue: How you monetize them.
5. Referral: How you get them to tell other people.

This is AARRR also known as Pirate metrics.

3. Acquisition

As I have mentioned earlier, after you have an idea and targeted your crowd, now it’s your time to act. Take your validated idea into the market.

This is where SEO, paid advertising, word of mouth, public relations come up.

SEO is the most successful way in this quest. Let’s round up a detailed trip in SEO in another article.

Use traffic of the new site or mobile app to analyse the stats. This is a proven success method.

Tip: Keep in mind to keep a simple budget. Spending 1000 USD on paid advertising and receiving lower traffic or got a higher bounce rate means either the target audience was a wrong one or their expectation is somewhat different.

So make sure you spend the right amount for the right thing. This is good practise for a growth hacker as he is dealing with a startup which is an infant in deals.

This acquisition can be done in 3 different ways.

1. Referral traffic — Your friends, family or others who know you can refer your product/service to their circles.
2. Sticky traffic– Create a powerful experience which keeps them stick to your product / Service as long as you can.
3. Paid — Pay less to gain a lot. A paid advertised campaign can bring you many more customers worth than the whole campaign.

Referral traffic

This is in the sense, going viral. You can either provide free value-added service or something that your product goes viral. People tend to share these types of products with promotions.

Take the advantage of social media at this point and also take advantage of quality backlinks.

But if something goes wrong and the expected outcome couldn’t meet, make sure to change the strategy quickly and do not stay on the same strategy too long.

Eg:

WordPress: They do offer their services in a free package, but with the domain name wordpress.sitename.com. So everyone who visits these sites knows it is made with WordPress. WordPress users bring referral traffic to WordPress even without knowing that.

Facebook: They offer the facility to use their Facebook logo anywhere to say that they are on Facebook. People can share their FB accounts with the Facebook logo anytime. This truly falls into referral traffic as we are referring facebook to others unintentionally.

Sticky traffic

Give the best user experience ever as possible. Facebook as an example uses this strategy very powerfully. Facebook users use it as they have glued into it and all the strategic ways have become so successful in Facebook.

You can always come up with a simple nice idea to keep your customers in yours as long as you can. This increased session duration and number of sessions will definitely be an advantage.

Paid Traffic

Paid traffic can be used for products such as hardware or other services rather than software products. Paid advertising is the main factor here. But what to keep in mind is to decrease cost while increasing profit.

Spending unnecessary amounts of money are something to avoid in startups.

4. Activation

Giving a happy first user experience is the key to Activation. This can be easily measured in Google Analytics by looking at the session duration.

When a person spends a longer period than a minute navigating through site pages or in an app, we can say that there is something for him to stay longer. This time impacts SEO.

But we do not know what that ‘something’ is. We know that he has made his choice to stay longer, but still, we have no clue whether he finds it useful or not.

This is what a growth hacker should do. Use feedback and other strategies appropriately to know this, which is the turning point.

Then again use strategies as easier SignUps, logins as users do not want to stay too long on these processes.

If you can avoid taking very personal information like credit card details, that is an advantage as many users do not want to reveal that private info.

Make those forms or processes easy and simple as much as possible which make the user stay on or login without hesitation.

Then only the Happy experience will be made out of the first visit.

This is why most apps and software use their pre-logged details for their login forms. Users always like to use single tap processes and this makes life easier.

Not only in Sign in processes but also in other processes of your product use this kind of hassle-free strategy to interact with users.

People do not have time to waste to check every nook and corner of an app or in software. They need to do their work faster and accurately. So make the steps easier for them. Make sure that they get to understand how to benefit from those things. This will take time. So make your strategy accordingly.

Don’t forget as far as you make them happy and satisfied, a successful sale is around the corner.

But huge traffic with a higher bounce rate or abandoned process is not a successful Activation. What’s the use of leaving the process after your tiresome dedication to bringing them up?

Tip: So better to gain natural traffic rather than having laid off users.

5. Retention

So now you have gained some users, and gave them a happy first experience. What’s the next step?

You have to persuade them to come back again or try again as returning customers tend to spend money more likely than a first time user.

These repeating customers or we can address them as loyal customers tend to buy more compared to others.

This is a common fact in SaaS companies and to other companies as well.

Even Though this fact remains unharmed for years, most companies do not follow this. They spent the majority of their budgets to gain new customers, but not to these retaining customers.

As a Growth Hacker you should definitely make a set of loyal/ retaining customer base and also do not forget to focus on them and focus on their demands as they are more likely in the buying behaviour and this is a worthy shot.

A recent study by Google shows that a customer goes around from channel to channel and device to device before actually buying something.

Google calls this the Zero Moment of Truth, which describes how customers interact with your brand before you even realize it.

Here’s a more vivid picture of Zero moment of truth.

These customers visit different sites and consult different sources before they make their buying decision.

Think of you buying something online. You look in eBay first. Then in AliExpress. Then in Amazon. Then, at last, you look in local online shoppers like Daraz, Wasi etc.

That’s why it often takes at least five ‘touches’ before customers will give you the time of day.

So to reduce these kinds of incidents, you can always use your own strategies.

One for Eg: Emails. How will you use Emails to user retention and attract users at once?

Facebook, AliExpress, LinkedIn and many other reputed companies use this tactic. When you can’t log in these accounts for some time they send you attractive Emails of what you have missed with a loving message that they missed you, come back soon.

Isn’t this clever?

Live chat with online customers is also another engaging campaign for users to stay and to come back. Use tactics like bots if you cannot actually attend to the live chats as users trust these live chats. Do not break that trust by not responding to them if you have already established a live chat on your website.

There are many more strategies like this and you may create your own ones when you go ahead with the business.

6. Revenue

This is the main point in startups and in every business. For startups, the revenue-generating model is really important. That can be static or varied and subject to change when it comes to startups.

You may want to have a team with a good front office in future but at first, you may get stuck with negative cash flow and frustrated. That is natural for a startup.

Use the mentioned strategies and anything good you can think of to overcome the situation. Special campaigns, Giveaways, Email campaigns, reducing shipping charges etc will change your days.

Every big company was once a startup and most of them have faced the same situation less or more. They have used these marketing strategies to its finest to overcome these issues. Then their frustration has switched to revenue.

Hanging on for a while with the difficulties will reward you later then.

Now you can see a simple Email or a simple nice text message will change the fate of your business. This is what Growth Hackers actually should do in a startup. The tactics may change or mixed up upon the business strategy and the business level, but more important thing is to apply these appropriately and to track and analyse them accordingly.

Set the idea, validate it, test it, measure it and repeat until you reach your target. Growth Hackers should know the way of doing this.

7. Referrals

Many companies hire the best marketers and best analysers to create complex strategies, processes and many other plans for attracting customers. They spent millions of dollars just to advertise their products.

But startups cannot do this or even if they can, they shouldn’t do this as per our discussion earlier.

So what startups can do to have quality referrals or backlinks?

Well, just a simple question would do the trick.

“Would you recommend this company to a friend?”

This neat trick was originally published in Frederick F. Reichheld’s “The One Number You Need to Know to Grow” in the December 2003 issue of Harvard Business Review.

He applied this to a variety of industries and found similarly-strong results which might even surprise you. This simple question has done a lot.

This can be presented in many ways when the sale is on board. Maybe as a question with Y / N answers or maybe as a scale or maybe star rating etc.

Net promoter score is a layout that many companies use these days to make their referral score a plus.

In this scale,

• if the score is 9–10: They will recommend you to others once they come across the chance.
• if the score is 7–8: They are fine with your product but would switch to another alternative if available
• if the score is 0–6: They are unhappy with the product and will talk badly about it whenever they get the chance.

So you can get a clear idea of the types of customers you have and can act accordingly.

If the customers belong to the middle type, you need to pay extra attention to them so that you can save them before going to some other product.

When it comes to Net Promoter analysis, you have to make the calculation (see the image) and see which way you are heading. Then act accordingly.

Other than the extra-loyal customers, other customers will leave the product as soon as a cheaper or easier alternative shows up. So you have to pay good attention to your product’s quality as well as your customer’s behaviour.

8. Continuous improvements

This is a very critical stage. Most startups omit this step once they have met their target.

But this would be the starting point of their destruction. People will find better alternatives if you do not improve time to time.

Now you have good referrals also and you have good revenue and you are doing really great, So continue the guidelines or steps you just followed with some experiments to improve.

Otherwise if the product remains the same for some time, users would find more advanced ones from outside par with their daily changing needs.

Say you have marketed the product and sent Emails and did many other strategies to attract users. But you forgot to add the step guide anywhere or couldn’t Email the guidelines.

User would feel that he is abandoned and might leave the product because of this.

But if you took care of it continues even after the sale, you could have saved the customer by either sending him the guidelines or updating the product with a step guide.

This is why feedback is important.

Almost all the companies in the world practise this improvement iterations and this is a MUST for a startup.

Eg: When Uber started in Sri Lanka what they did was transportation only. But after careful consideration of the Sri Lankan market, they started Uber eats. This was a deluxe idea and the service rocketed high. Now almost every smartphone user in the Colombo area uses this Uber eats app for their convenience.

This is how they improve their product. They did not stop at transportation. Their transportation service also works really well because now we generally speak “I took an Uber” instead “I took a taxi”.

They have grown super fast in this sector but they didn’t stop. They might now be planning something new again with Sri Lankan market trends while they do execute these things for the foreign market.

• Uber Ice Cream on demand
• Roses for Valentine’s day on demand
• Barbecue in Texas on demand
• Rides in a DeLorean in San Francisco
• Uber CHOPPER helicopter rides to the Hamptons
• Partnership with the NFL to promote safe rides for NFL players

As you can see, this is the growth we are talking about. This is the target. Do practise this improvement step and I guarantee that you will get 100% success as customer satisfaction is the key to success.

Hope this would encourage you to learn and practise Growth hacking or else this would give a tiny to the startup owners out there.

See you soon with another article on “Secret Hacks of Growth Hacking”.