Guide to Implementing a Growth Hacking Strategy for 2023

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Do you want to achieve great growth experiences in your business? Or learn how some common growth hacking mistakes can actually help your business to skyrocket?

YES! 🚀

Check out our ultimate guide to implementing a successful growth hacking strategy for your business:

Growth hacking — what is it and why do we need it?
Why does growth hacking work?
5 Growth hacking strategies to maximize growth
How to utilize growth hacking mistakes to maximize growth
Growth hacking inspiration from top companies

GROWTH HACKING — WHAT IS IT?

Even if you’re not completely sure what growth hacking is, you’ve probably heard about it. The term has been used a lot in digital marketing during the last few years, and now it has gained its position as a popular buzzword in the business environment.

In this context, hacking doesn’t mean anything illegal; it refers to activity that aims to reach desired goals quickly and cost-effectively by using creative or out-of-the-box methods. Simply put, growth hacking describes the continuous work and improvements that aim to increase the company growth in cost-friendly ways. This includes continuously searching for new opportunities, data analyzing, and testing and optimizing strategies. HubSpot summarizes the main growth hacking phases as follows:

Evaluate marketing initiatives – When starting to look for new opportunities, be aware of your best sources of traffic, engagements and leads. Consider the ideas, campaigns, and solutions that answer your current problems.

Set clear goals – Determine what you want to accomplish through growth hacking. Establish goals that are specific and achievable, and then prioritize them by answering this question: Where should my business improve the most right now?

Plan growth experiments – Every well-planned growth experiment offers valuable information, so a meticulous setup is vital to finding meaningful results. Successful tests should include the following three components to measure the impact of experimental strategies: results to be measured (like engagement or conversion rates), variables to test, and a default for comparison.

Run experiments – Keep running and optimizing the experiments until you get significant results, and, most importantly, you’re happy with the results!

Share results – Once you have the winning results, document them and share them with your team.

Growth hacking results from a natural lack of resources, which forces companies to think outside the box. So, in a nutshell it’s innovative marketing with a small budget.

WHY DOES GROWTH HACKING WORK? 🔥

At first, growth hacking was mainly used by startups because they were looking for rapid growth on a small budget. Nowadays, it’s normal for companies of all sizes to use growth hacking strategies.

Ultimately, growth hacking is about understanding of the needs of customers, which is the only way that leads to successful marketing. Growth marketing allows companies to identify the best marketing tactics and offer individual and budget-friendly growth solutions for their customers. For growth hackers that means doing activities such as SEO, online advertising and digital marketing on a daily basis.

Traditional marketing tends to focus on acquiring a large audience, but growth hacking aims to attract the right audience with cost-efficient marketing. Because people are spending a lot of their time on the Internet, it is convenient for marketers to deliver advertising through digital channels. Those digital channels, such as social media and Google ads, allow companies to measure and analyze data effectively and quickly.

Growth hacking is effective because experimental and data-driven work guides marketers in the direction their marketing should take. It even helps businesses thrive on a small marketing budget. The keys to growth hacking's success involve targeting carefully defined audiences and continuously adjusting marketing strategies based on measured results from testing and optimization.

Growth hacking works when it’s done right. That’s why businesses need a clear structure that supports their growth objectives. A simple growth hacking framework involves 5 steps:

1. IDEATE – Look for inspiration and develop ideas or hypotheses to test while enhancing your growth mentality. Find out what works and what doesn’t and then find answers to why. Information is your best friend when you’re trying to figure out what works the best to gain growth in leads, customers, revenue, or anything else that helps your business to succeed.

2. PRIORITIZE – Determine priorities based on what is the most important goal you want to achieve through growth hacking. Once you have a list of things you want to test, narrow it down based on the expected impact each growth experiment would bring.

3. TEST – Once the final list of ideas and hypotheses is complete, it’s time to start testing them. Execute the strategy as planned and solve any possible problems along the way together with your team. The most important thing is to keep moving forward and gather information while running the experiments.

4. ANALYZE – When you finally achieve a significant outcome, measure and analyze the results and the impact of your growth strategy. Store the information and use it to implement your future strategies. Keep using your findings until you are able to determine the winning growth marketing strategy, and then move on to the next step.

5. IMPLEMENT – The goal is to provide better and improved experiences to your target audience. There are multiple tools available, such as automation tools and landing page builders, to manage implementation and to find the most creative and effective ways to do your promotion.

GROWTH HACKING STRATEGIES TO MAXIMIZE GROWTH

Are you more convinced now and ready to achieve great growth experiences? Take a look at the following top growth hacking strategies used by growth marketers of our industry to take your business to the next level. 😎

⭐️ BUILD AN EMAIL LIST

Email marketing is a great way to get people interested in your products, services or events beforehand. A good email strategy results in a gain in the number of visitors on your website and increased conversion rate. It’s a great way to offer valuable content to attract potential leads and create awareness.

⭐️ USE REFERRAL MARKETING

It’s highly beneficial to use your customers, or people you know, to acquire new potential customers. The so-called ambassador marketing is a low-cost way to show your brand is trustworthy. Using WoM (word-of-mouth) is considered an effective long-term tool to increase the number of leads. Establish referral programs and social media campaigns to encourage your customers to share their positive experience with your brand to an external audience.

⭐️ BUILD A COMMUNITY

Having a community, especially online, helps your business to build your network and gain knowledge. Social media is a great channel to promote your brand, gather feedback and engage with new contacts. Communities are worth the time it takes to create valuable content, and to cut down other resources, it’s good to use social media channels and their marketing tools as part of your growth plan. For example, workspace Notion uses community building as their main growth strategy.

⭐️ WORK WITH INFLUENCERS

Influencer marketing has experienced extreme growth in the last decade and its trends are expected to have great potential in 2023. Even for small businesses that can’t compete with bigger companies, it’s a great method to use influencers to make your brand look more authentic and trustworthy. Having public personalities talking about your product or service will create immediate attention of people you want to reach.

Influencer marketing works well for B2B as well because 91% of B2B sales involve some sorts of word of mouth. As an example, Microsoft and American Express have succeeded with their influencer marketing campaigns to gain and retain customers, increase awareness and expand their market reach.

⭐️ GENERATE INTEREST WITH GAMIFICATION AND FREEBIES

Gamification means using game elements to improve user engagement in a fun way. The method increases customer commitment and loyalty when implemented correctly. As an example, Nike used gamification to gather customer data by offering a personalized app for customers to track their activity and compete against other app users.

Another effective way to attract customers is to utilize freemium techniques. It introduces your brand to potential customers, and creates buzz and encourages customers to try your product or service. Good examples of freemium are offering a free version of your product with limited benefits, free trial with a time limit, or offering free samples.

⭐️ CREATE BULLETPROOF CONTENT MARKETING STRATEGY

You need an aggressive content marketing strategy that helps your audience to interact with your brand. Written content helps to drive more leads to your landing page, while videos and podcasts provide a popular way to engage with your audience.

Keep in mind that the content you create should be engaging and shareable. Also, repurposing your best content supports SEO, allows you to run growth experiments, and saves you a lot of time and money.

HOW TO UTILIZE GROWTH HACKING MISTAKES TO MAXIMIZE GROWTH

Now that you have hopefully gained new information and ideas regarding growth hacking strategies, we want to tackle a couple of myths and problems regarding growth marketing. GrowthMentor podcast “It’s not so complicated: Growth experiments for startups” points out things that growth marketers don’t know to make their growth experiments even successful.

First issue is that marketers typically focus on thinking about the best case scenarios when running growth experiments. However, experiments are rarely as good as the best scenario. Flipping this mentality around, marketers should focus on thinking about worst case scenarios and how those could help to plan and deal with the experiment results better.

Another problem is that marketers typically look at their graphs and build future experiments based on quantitative data. Instead, having conversations with customers is more impactful than making conclusions based on data alone.

Maybe the biggest myth related to growth experiments is that companies, even the biggest ones, have it all figured out. It’s easy to see the outside where it looks like everything goes smoothly according to a plan. Also, some marketers say that in order to grow you need to run ads – in reality growth is much more. It’s about sustainability and putting the growth hacking framework into action.

GROWTH HACKING INSPIRATION FROM TOP COMPANIES

Last but not least, we want to provide you a better understanding of how a well-planned growth hacking strategy works in practice. 💪

One example is Slack, a popular business communication and management channel, that generates great results and innovative approaches to collaborate and work as a team. Slack was created to solve common communication issues businesses had, and one of their most successful growth hacking stories is when they reached their current popularity by using word-of-mouth strategy. They combined freemium techniques with it, and now as a result, they have around 9 million weekly users around the world.

Another example is Harvest Snaps, a company with a mission to offer healthy snacks for the whole family. They got creative by using gamification and working with influencers as their growth tactics. In addition, they created a loyalty program for email subscribers. Within a few years, the company experienced whopping growth.

CONCLUSION

Businesses of all sizes who are aiming for growth should also sustain growth. To implement the most fitting growth hacking strategy for your business, you need to discover the best growth hacking strategies by continuous growth experiments.

Don’t be hasty to kick off any growth strategy. Instead, invest a good amount of time brainstorming the goals you want to achieve. Making the goals align with the needs of your target audience will help you to make clear moves later on.

All businesses are different, so using strategies that have worked for other companies doesn’t mean they will work for your company. Also, all audiences are different so keep learning from them and your customers when planning growth hacking activities. That is why continuous testing and experimenting is super important.

Milla Vuojolahti

Growth Marketer

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