Growth Marketing:
10 Tips for a Successful Growth Marketing Campaign
- Growth hacking is a process of rapid experimentation and implementation of marketing and promotional strategies that focus exclusively on efficient and fast business growth. The term was coined in 2010 by GrowthHackers CEO and founder Sean Ellis.
- Before you can start growth hacking, you need to clarify the basics: learn everything about your target audience and the phases of the growth funnel—the journey the customer takes when interacting with your advertising and your product. Try as many growth hacking tactics as possible and evaluate their results. Then plan the corresponding adjustment to your strategy.
Rely on growth software tools.
Inhaltsverzeichnis
- 1 Growth Marketing:
10 Tips for a Successful Growth Marketing Campaign
- 1.1 Before You Begin: Fundamentals for Success
- 1.2 The Growth Funnel
- 1.3 Growth Funnel Loops
- 1.4 Succeeding on Paid Channels
- 1.5 Succeeding on Unpaid Channels
- 1.6 Don’t Focus Only on Paid Acquisition in Growth Hacking
- 1.7 The Minimal Viable Growth Plan
- 1.8 6 Growth Hacking Tips
- 1.9 Conclusion
- 1.10 Top Articles
Before You Begin: Fundamentals for Success
Before you can start hacking the growth of your business, there are a number of fundamentals you need to establish.
Who are your customers? What do they want?
First of all, it’s important to ensure product-market fit. In other words, you must have a fantastic product and make sure it meets your customers’ needs.
To achieve this, you need to understand your customers. That means knowing:
- Their age, gender, education, and other demographic data
- Where, besides your website, they look for information
- What their values are, as well as their goals, challenges, and the problems your product can solve
The Growth Funnel
The growth funnel refers to the journey a customer goes through by interacting with your advertising and your product. These are the steps:
Acquisition > Conversion > Engagement > Revenue > Referral
Although there can be different variations, the principles of growth hacking are more or less the same.
Growth marketers understand how these steps are interconnected. For example, to spend a marketing dollar efficiently, you should optimize the later steps in the funnel first. Consider how every dollar spent on acquisition travels through if engagement performs better.
I. Acquisition
An acquisition channel in growth hacking is a place from which you acquire potential customers. For example, ads, content marketing, and sales are all acquisition channels.
These channels are divided into two main categories:
- Paid channels – Paid channels include advertising, paid sponsorships, and affiliate marketing. “Paid” here means you pay for scalable channel performance. For instance, you pay per click, per impression, or per referred sale.
- Unpaid channels – Unpaid channels include content marketing, offline networking, sales, virality, and PR. “Unpaid” here doesn’t mean they’re free to configure, but that you don’t pay per performance scale. For example, you pay someone to write a blog post, but the resulting SEO traffic doesn’t cost you per visit. That’s great—unpaid channels can yield unlimited benefits!
II. Conversion
When visitors are intrigued by what you offer, either through your website or in person, some of them “convert” into registered users or paying customers. “Conversion events” are the business-critical events along your product’s growth funnel. For example, a website visitor may first convert into a registered user. After using your app for a while, they may then convert into a paying customer.
III. Engagement
So far you’ve acquired users and converted them into registered users. But you also need to keep them engaged if they’re ultimately going to pay you.
Thus, once a visitor becomes a user, retain them through your product experience so they become power users. Educated users are more likely to engage and become repeat purchasers.
IV. Revenue
You can maximize your revenue per customer by lowering your costs through growth hacking, improving your conversion rates, optimizing your pricing, and upselling or cross-selling additional products.
V. Referral
You need to make your product so good that customers sell it for you. It’s the most cost-effective way to scale your business in the long term. Fortunately, you don’t need to be a viral consumer app to achieve this. Many B2B companies grow, albeit slowly, purely through word-of-mouth.
Growth Funnel Loops
The linearity of the growth funnel—from A to Z—doesn’t have to constrain a user’s path to conversion. In practice, their journey can loop repeatedly from A (ads) to F (e.g., in-app engagement) before they reach Z, where the paid conversion happens.
For example, if a user doesn’t engage with your app, you could send them an email with information and ads pointing to your content marketing as a growth hacking strategy. You can repeat this until they receive the right content that pushes them to the next step.
We call this the retargeting loop, which we’ll explain in more detail later. Here’s another loop: the e-commerce repurchase loop. A user goes from A to Z—they purchase your product. Then you email them an enticing coupon to force a repeat purchase. In other words, you get them to repeat steps B through Z, skipping A because they already know who you are.
If you can trigger this loop repeatedly, you have a solid business model. And if you can automate this loop, you essentially have a subscription business.
Key takeaways:
- Your growth hacking activities should consider where each user is in the funnel and what kind of message will best push them to the next step.
- It’s often cost-effective to notify a user repeatedly “in a loop” until your pitch or their life situation finally becomes conducive to conversion.
- After a user converts, think about how to restart their loop—or alternatively, direct them to a complementary growth hacking funnel.
Succeeding on Paid Channels
Most companies never get paid acquisition channels to work. If more companies used growth hacking, more of them would succeed.
Most companies never get paid acquisition channels to work. If more companies used growth hacking, more of them would succeed.
https://www.marketingcharts.com/cross-media-and-traditional/content-marketing-105672
There are many effective channels for marketing content to potential customers. Often, most companies fail to profitably acquire paying users through ad networks like Facebook Ads, Instagram Ads, and Google AdWords. When they get one or more of these channels working through growth hacking, it becomes a holy grail, especially when combined with strong word-of-mouth: paid channels let you scale big and fast, while unpaid referrals lower your average customer acquisition cost.
Why invest in paid channels if they’re hard to get working? Here are the growth hacking criteria that determine success:
- Profit margins – How much profit you make per sale is crucial. Consider how hard it is to acquire an e-commerce customer for under $30 on Facebook or Instagram, which are typically the cheapest ad channels. If you don’t earn at least that amount over the customer lifetime, those channels aren’t viable. Note that SaaS businesses fare worse: it usually costs a few hundred dollars to acquire a customer.
- Addressable market size – Your market size is critical. This is determined not only by how many people want your product, but also by whether they can actually buy it (not geographically restricted), want it now, and can afford it. The resulting target audience is smaller than marketers often estimate. To scale Facebook and Instagram, you ideally need at least a few million people. That’s not required to run successful ads—just ideal.
- Degree of product demand – How strongly does your addressable market want your product? If your product is an uncritical luxury, you’re at a disadvantage compared to someone selling health insurance to people who urgently need it. In short, the more people genuinely need—or already purchase—your product category, the better your pitch sounds.
To succeed with ads in growth hacking, your product must exceed thresholds for all three criteria:
- Profit threshold – You must earn at least as much per customer as it costs to acquire them from that ad channel. You can, however, factor in revenue from customers referred by the paid user.
- Market size threshold – You need an addressable market large enough to be identified en masse through the channel’s targeting. This depends on the channel. Otherwise, you’ll saturate your small audience and can’t scale.
- Product demand threshold – You want a product category people already buy or feel they should instantly buy once they learn about it. To achieve the latter, you need an exceptionally compelling product.
There’s an interesting seminar by Neil Patel on growth hacking strategies that also include unpaid channels:
You won’t know for sure if your product exceeds these thresholds until you’ve spent a statistically significant amount of money on each ad channel.
If you don’t exceed these three thresholds and ad channels aren’t viable, rely on word-of-mouth, content marketing, PR, sales, and other unpaid channels that cost less per customer acquisition for your growth hacking instead.
That’s totally fine. Success in paid acquisition isn’t a necessity; it’s just helpful because it scales easily. And the only other easy scale channel is virality. So if you can’t get either working, you’re in for a longer growth journey.
Succeeding on Unpaid Channels
Here are the growth hacking success criteria for the four most effective unpaid channels:
- Search-optimized content – Is your product something people already search for en masse? Then content marketing is feasible. In fact, your core growth hacking marketing competency should now be content optimization: hire writers instead of ad specialists. Write, write, write, write, write.
- Network effects – Network effects require users to notice and care that they get a significantly better product experience when they invite others. This happens rarely—typically only in social networks like WhatsApp or broad collaboration apps like Slack or Dropbox…
- Word-of-mouth – WOM is growth that happens outside your growth hacking activities. It’s when people voluntarily promote you to others. The success criterion for word-of-mouth is whether your product impresses people. If yes, fantastic—you’ll grow from WOM at no cost, but it might take years for a snowball to become a large user base. To accelerate WOM, make it easy and fun for people to share.
- Sales – The success criterion for sales is whether you can get your ideal customers to talk to you via phone, email, or in person. Note that sales only makes sense for businesses with significantly high profit margins (typically $1,000+), since the labor costs for research, pitching, and negotiation must be offset.
- Everything else – Of the remaining unpaid channels, most are often ineffective. Public relations and social media, for example, usually only work for a handful of trend-exploiting or lifestyle brands.
Don’t Focus Only on Paid Acquisition in Growth Hacking
Even companies that get ad channels working rarely keep them running at scale for more than a few months. Audiences saturate and diminishing returns hurt profitability. So you should plant seeds for other channels to succeed in the long term:
- SEO – From day one, write content for SEO, if relevant. It takes months—often over a year—for content to reach Google’s front page.
- Product quality – Build an amazing product people can’t stop talking about. Then amplify word-of-mouth with referral programs or community building. These programs cost relatively little and can run on autopilot.
- Funnel optimization – The better your growth hacking funnel works, the more you can tolerate declining ad performance. So don’t rely solely on ad optimization to lower your acquisition costs; also have the best-tuned website, onboarding flow, and upsell/cross-sell experience to extract every possible dollar from satisfied users.
The Minimal Viable Growth Plan
- Create an amazing product that naturally drives word-of-mouth.
- Kickstart word-of-mouth with paid ad volume, even if temporarily unprofitable.
- Then spend most of your growth hacking marketing resources optimizing your growth funnel: A/B-test every step, conversion on the traffic you pay for.
Once you have a profitable, streamlined funnel, it’s time to scale. Aggressively test every potentially viable channel.
6 Growth Hacking Tips
1. Use Exit Intent to Supercharge Your Email List
Email marketing boasts an amazing ROI. According to email marketing research and statistics, every $1 you invest returns $44 in revenue. That’s why building your email list is so crucial for growth hacking.
One reason email marketing is such a great hack is that you don’t have to spend a dime to get started. As you’ll see in the section on growth hacking tools, there’s software you can use for free until you’re big enough to upgrade.
But it can take a while for your email list to grow.
Here’s where our first growth hacking step comes in. You can skyrocket your email list with an exit-intent popup tied to a lead magnet. Here’s an example:
A lead magnet is an incentive you offer visitors in exchange for their contact information. Lead magnets are often downloadable content such as checklists, worksheets, reports, and e-books.
Exit intent detects when visitors are about to leave your site and shows them your lead magnet campaign just before they go. This type of campaign grabs visitors’ attention and converts well.
Here’s how to use this growth hacking strategy:
- Create your own lead magnet using our list of lead magnet ideas as a starting point.
- Review our popup examples for inspiration to create your own.
- Follow our guide to grow your list with OptinMonster, and don’t forget to enable exit intent.
In no time, you’ll see your subscriber counts explode and have a successful growth hacking strategy.
When you’re growth hacking, you can’t ignore the potential of the millions of social media users worldwide. Leveraging your own social networks to inform people about your products and services can help you gain new leads and sales through word-of-mouth and social contacts.
While some people respond to a simple ask, most will be more interested if there’s some payoff for them. By offering a reward for social sharing, you can add viral potential to your brand.
Food delivery service Seamless uses a SWYN link in this email so subscribers can share a discount code with their network. When subscribers click one of the share buttons, they’re taken to a pre-filled message they can personalize and share in seconds.
3. Gamify Your Onboarding
Gamified onboarding is a great growth hacking tactic used by many companies. It can help you grow in a couple of ways. First, you can reward users for successfully using the product, engaging them and increasing the likelihood they stick around. Second, you can reward them for referring other users, which helps your company grow faster.
This is Dropbox’s strategy, where users unlock additional storage space by completing certain milestones like uploading content and sharing on social media to attract new users.
To use this growth hacking strategy for your business, create an onboarding workflow that helps users learn your product and encourages them to spread the word.
4. Build an Insanely Useful Free Tool
Here’s a growth hacking strategy guaranteed to drive people to your site: build an insanely useful tool and let people use it for free. Here’s an example in action. CoSchedule, which offers online editorial calendars, developed a Headline Analyzer used by practically every marketer we know. The only catch? You have to sign up for their email list to use it.
It’s a smart strategy because the growth hacking tool meets your audience’s needs, builds brand awareness and credibility, and captures the right people on your email list so CoSchedule can then market their paid service. Not sure what to build? Ask for customer feedback to see which tools would be most helpful to your audience.
5. Run a Contest
You can’t beat contests as a tool for raising awareness of your company’s products and services. It turns out they’re really effective!
A contest gives you a double win. If you give away an account as a prize, you get a new user, and you spread the word to people who could become customers. You know they’re interested if they try to win a free account.
So how can you implement this strategy? Here are some ideas to get you started:
- Offer an account as a prize in a Twitter contest with a simple giveaway. Make sure your contest complies with Twitter’s promotion rules.
- Images work well on Facebook, so share an image relevant to your product or service and ask for likes or comments in exchange for contest entries. Be sure to read Facebook’s rules for promotions.
- Use Instagram for a themed content contest tied to a hashtag and have users tag your Instagram profile.
Want to get even more from this growth hacking strategy? Let your social media audience and site visitors earn multiple contest entries by completing various promotional tasks. Rafflecopter can help you do this.
6. Know and Use Growth Software Tools
Here are a few growth hacking marketing software/tools:
- Social tools – Buffer: increase your social engagement by scheduling recurring tweets. Narrow.io: grow your audience through automated likes and follows.
- Lead capture – Sumo: creative CTAs for capturing blog subscribers.
- Engagement tools –
- Appcues: better engage your customers with in-app experiences.
- Olark: give your users a personal touch with live chat support integrated into your application.
Vero: email your customers based on the actions they take (or don’t take) in your app.
- Analytics tools — MixPanel: get actionable product and usage data from your app.
