The Essentials of Growth Hacking: An Introduction for Entrepreneurs

There’s a theory called the Kakutani Three Comes that talks about how different people solve problems in different ways. The theory suggests some people are “diamonds” and have a way of understanding the best way to solve a problem no matter what.

Another group of people are hedgehogs. These people don’t know a lot about many things. But they know one big thing really well.

Entrepreneurs are a unique group of people. To start and build a business to the size and value of a Growth Company, entrepreneurs need to know a lot about a lot of different things.

Entrepreneurs must know about providing a great product or service. They must know how to hire great people to sell and help with information. They may even need to know the intricacies of baking working within the accounts payable and accounts receivable aspects of the business.

They need to know a lot.

But the most successful entrepreneurs throughout history have understood a few key areas just a little bit better than their peers.

One of the most difficult things for an entrepreneur to do is to grow. Most entrepreneurs are great at the early stages. But at the “tipping point” is when things get really difficult and most businesses will die.

The best entrepreneurs embrace that challenge. They understand the need to hire the right people and to provide the leadership that encourages the risk taking necessary for growth. And entrepreneurs know how to market a business.

Few marketers are as good as their entrepreneur-growth-company peers. These entrepreneurs know how to attract attention to their business when there is nothing left. They know how to create offers and calls-to-action that bring in traffic and that keep business steady and growing.

It’s a really difficult thing for most entrepreneurs. Most don’t like to “market”. That means “sell” in most people’s minds.

And those beliefs prevent everyone in business from digging deep and coming up with great marketing methods for finding and growing with good customers.

Our goal is to grow this to 100,000 visitors per month. So how do we plan to grow to 100,000 visitors per month?

Learning everything we can about growth hacking is the first step, and this blog will be my ultimate growth hacking resource.

Growth Hacking is a term that you might be tired of hearing by now. And it’s still a relatively new concept.

Or so we might think.

The general concept of the Growth Hacker was popularized by former advisor to 500 Startups, Andrew Chen. In his words, a growth hacker is someone who’s:

“mind is wired in a completely different way than a traditional marketer…with one foot in the engineering department…they weave product, marketing and engineering together, into a comprehensive approach to growing business.”

Put simply, it’s growth above all.

Growth hacking is a process of rapid experimentation across marketing channels and product development to identify the most efficient ways to grow a business. Growth hackers are marketers, engineers and product managers that specifically focus on building and engaging the customer base of a business.

Many early-stage startups, especially those funded by venture capital, use growth hacking techniques and post extensive gains in terms of revenue and market share relative to traditional marketing strategies.

As a whole, growth hackers tend to focus primarily on finding the avenues for exponential growth, making even modest investments reach their full potential.

You’re using growth hacking by making it all the way to this article.

We’re all in the same game of trying to understand how growth hacking can help businesses grow to meet the goals of the business.

If you have big growth goals this kind of marketing approach could help you get there.

Defining Growth Hacking: Beyond Traditional Marketing

Growth hacking is a process of rapid experimentation across marketing channels to identify and deploy the most promising tactics as soon as possible. Because growth hackers are engineers as much as they are marketers, they don’t just experiment with customers, product and design — they’ll also experiment with social media, email marketing, viral marketing, changing e-commerce platforms and product modules. Their main purpose is to learn more about the product so they can help acquire and retain customers and know what they can tweak and optimise to get more people using the product and to ultimately help the business grow.

They don’t just focus on bringing as many new customers to your website as they can because that’s not just how they think. They know it’s important to also hold onto the customers you already have.

However, there’s a slight difference between growth hacking and growth marketing. This difference exists in how they perceive acquisition strategies are ascribed to.

While growth hackers are mainly interested in acquiring users for the product and serving the customers most appropriate for the business, marketers are more customer-centric in serving the marketing funnel as a whole, thereby incorporating every single user or customer like they were equal, which they’re not.

While growth hacking can be perceived from external factors like optimizing the click-through rate on an ad campaign, the process itself seeks to influence growth through customer retention and customer relationship as the retention rate holds as much weightage as customer acquisition.

When considering customer as the hero in a business relationship, growth hacking also implies that the customers themselves have a number of roles to follow to keep them engaged with the product, one of which is an introduction time with a greater emphasis on acquisition improvement.

The Mindset of a Growth Hacker: Thinking Outside the Box

The mindset of a growth hacker is one of the biggest advantages the hacking process stands to benefit. We see experiments as having a final conclusion, but this notion is mostly false except in the rarest and most fringed instances.

Startups, generally weary of their unique market position and mystified of the benefits of growth hacking, will misguidedly rely too much on the process for bringing their marketing efforts forward, familiar with the traditional 4 to 6 week long A/B testing window.

Growth hackers adhere to a completely contrasting methodology alongside their competitors that seek to promote a similar business.

Marketers are comfortable thinking in terms of an entire product involved with the business while growth hackers can and will take a single element of a product—registration, onboarding, referral, retention, or even the about us page—and wok on it until they finally find the right societal trigger.

Growth hackers need to be involved with data to affect the output and results of their efforts on customer retention and product engagement. They’ll only act on proven results that benefit the customer in the long run, activating their own trigger in their mind to come back to the business to continue on with enjoying the user experience. Today, 44% marketers analyze and execute the data generated by the business, which falls short according to a report by DataBright, shown below.

They’ll do whatever they have to in order to invite customers into a new marketing channel. And they’ll analyze the resulting data within that specific channel to understand what aspects of the product and the customer compelled them into using an entirely different channel. This could be social media marketing or bpm’ online, for instance.

Growth hackers are constantly identifying the channels that move the needle of the business and are maximising the impact of marketing tactics before customers feel the effects of said impact.

Key Components of a Successful Growth Hacking Strategy

Define Required Contacts

In the GetB2BLeads’ report, John Reeves, co-founder of OutboundMakrets.com emphasizes focusing on the right target market in your customer contact database. This is contingent on having a niche base of customers you need to serve to grow the business, which most B2B niche businesses already have established:

“Companies are typically looking for the ‘high quantity, high quality’ leads. For us, we find that it’s better to determine your target market first. Are you looking to sell to Fortune 500s? Energy companies? Marketing agencies? It’s better to have a group that you’re targeted and a real message to that group. Otherwise, random prospecting becomes too much and the company runs out of money quickly and they need to go get a job.”

To build customer loyalty and grow from the existing customer database, you need to treat the existing customers you already serve like royalty, according to Fernando Aguirre Fernandez, Lead Customer Advocate of Teamdeck:

“Normally companies focus primarily on lead generation, content and marketing. That’s fine up to a point, but if you think about it, if you’d give more attention to current customers, take good care of them so they see you appreciate and take them seriously, they’ll be happy to buy from you again. Also, if they are truly happy customers, they will gladly recommend you to other potential users.”

Identify Target Clients and Avoid Negative Signals

When you segment your target database base, you’re clearly outlining the customers you need to serve to drive grace into your database, including both leads and prospects. By avoiding negative signals, you can keep your list clean with accurate customer data.

Lite14’s report showcases Foamspace, a U.K. based ISP serving business customers with affordable and cutting-edge “internet services,” which will be the most important term involved with the servicing aspect of their perceived customer value. To blast a “free, VoIP call saving” campaign, they wanted to get a list of businesses with a VoIP/voice-like need as part of their initial marketing nurturing campaign.

Their campaign presented a simple question: “are you looking to make call savings?”]

If they can find the answer to that simple question from their potential customers, they’ll be able to add the positive sign of the nurturing equation while disengaging customers who might find no interest in enjoying the benefits of their cheapest way of making a free international call.

To help present the campaign to the right audience with the right question, Foamspace bought phone numbers of a number of customers that enjoyed experiencing a voip call and quickly added the customer data into their system phone system

Sounds good and easy in practice.

You get the granting of bad data.

The end.

And the effect.

**Implement Tracking Mechanisms to Automate Your Reporting **

Alongside tracking and recording user experience between different marketing channels, growth hackers need to find the right tools to help ease their interest checks with the time and resources the business has available.

The most time-intensive activity you’re accountable for—before commencing on the nurturing campaign itself—is creating the assets to help further automate the reporting process. Fortunately, this should be a drop in the bucket with tracking hubs like Hubspot or Marketo providing the integration with Google Analytics an over sophisticated user experience to digest more data your human brain could possibly assimilate.

Hubspot is probably the simplest platform you can add to your current business.

It keeps track of everything for you with automation friendly reports.

Instead of pouring over hundreds if not thousands of potentially beneficial data before taking action, as a good marketer would do, Hubspot streamlines the tedious effort for you so you can work on the tasks you need to work on to grow your business with a content engine trying to drive you to success.

For growth hacking to really take off, you should try to use as many tools as possible including the different communication, app, and integration hubs you see available.

Dismiss Earlier Mistakes When Your Marketing Campaign Stalls

In all the information we spoon fed you, we must first admit that no part of this is ever going to be easy or convenient to your interests to dabble with. Surely we can all think of ourselves as marketers and hack our way through the different content efforts we work on. I mean, how difficult is it to add hundreds of industry influencers, adjust their data in a big customer workflow cycle, and finish off the day and night the end of a successful campaign?

Unfortunately, the tiresome day and night of conceiving a lead nurturing campaign will rarely play to your favor, but that’s okay because they’re immensely wasteful from a growth hacking perspective. In the end, it’s all about growing the content community to keep your business treading steadily forward to the next campaign; but these stumbling blocks between moving up another space on Google Search will require you too back track and make sure everything technically went according to your plan.

Here are some of the common problems your small business might face with growth hacking and the lead nurturing process. Some of these might be applicable if you’re a freelance marketer that tries to oversee your business’ growth hacking techniques.

Content Duplicates

When introducing a successful lead nurturing campaign in your funnel, many small businesses will often overlook the different ways to get the nurturing right the first time. Since many businesses manage separate WordPress sites, most of the content you create can easily pull information from one or multiple websites by their RSS feed or other content syndication feeds, which brings up the unfortunate problem of managing multiple content feeds whenever you opt to use the different cleansing features of Hubspot.

Having duplicate content will always be a strong part of the growth process no matter what scalable efforts you plan on implementing in your business. As an influential marketer, you need to weigh the good parts of duplicate content and the bad parts, which we’ve drafted a basic template for you to vet out either of those efforts ready in just a short second:

• Head over to your copy and paste or HTML feed you use in conjunction with the different platforms you use while trying to move the scale bar [*]
• Select all the different marketing techniques excelling in lead nurturing and plop it into the duplicated content ranking report template, sharing it to the different editors (if any) that’s been curating the blog content with you
• Copy that note and integrate the pull marketing efforts you’ve moved through via your custom fedrgbd forms . That includes those notes written in the process, SEO techniques made, off-page SEO campaigns scheduled, different social media sites used, syndicated content libraries, RSS feeds
• Write a note of your own conclusion and what (if any) actionable insights you can glean about the basic assumption of your gated copy forms from the start

By doing so, you can voluntarily diminish the error effect of when these problems eventuate and attribute to the long-term growth of your nurturing business. We know that your business is committed to seeing those declarations through until the very end, but we still feel the need to stress the instructions in step three above.

Understanding Your Audience: The First Step to Growth

The only place to start with your growth hacking effort is with your customers and your audience. It seems simple, but many entrepreneurs are too keen on looking at the competition and seeing what is working for similar companies. That’s good and it’s useful, but you can’t copy those companies. Your best bet when it comes to making leaps and bounds when it comes to growing your business is looking internally, with your company and service as a base you need to defend and the industry which you are in a position to defend yourselves–and your customers—against the competition.

Understanding the customer base is all about effectively dissecting the divisors that make the product such a great benefit for your customers.

Most entrepreneurs in industries that are extremely competitive are less interested in analyzing their own offers in favor of quickly identifying elements of other offers you can incorporate to increase your profits and decrease your customer acquisition costs.

Again, no matter how many different programs growth hackers introduce to you,

the most important part of a successful growth hacking effort is getting to know your customers better than you ever have before

Understanding the Real Benefits

Many customers won’t realize the complete benefits of it and choosing your company as the best one using calls-to-action in marketing. They’re simply positioned and made to promote your company, and you as the company leader, the benefits of choosing your company over the competition.

Alright?

Wrong, Many of these configurations need to evolve and take on new life of their own: positioning, for example should promote the benefits of the opportunity, not the products that bring said opportunity to life.

For example, if you’re selling a product that allows business owners to give key employees the opportunity to work for that company instead of the competition, your employees see the opportunity not your product. Which means it’s totally stupid to position your workforce as your product or members when they are actually seeing a totally beneficial control the way around from your competition by working as an employee instead of running a startup that inherently gives them their measure of success

The business case is the exact same one you bring to them week in and week out, but it’s emphasized from a very different starting point the immediate concern of the business leader and whether or not the way will bring forth the benefits they promised to company employees when they suggested the good idea they’ve been dreaming about and simply couldn’t do by themselves.

One of the top of the best ways to understand the motivation of potential and new customers is to find the different ways they realized their measure of success from other alternative marketing channels and funneling your message back through the marketing and sales funnels.

Monitor and Track Customer Behavior for Immediate Growth

While your entire growth engine, or the collection of elements that makes up your business’ growth story, will entail of a number of different campaigns, funnels, and platforms, you can use call-to-action and on-page HTML modules that encourage users to further improve their action right now after reading the social media marketing methods you post on the expert round tables or reading the introductory pillar pages.

If you see visitors that are only interested in finding out how to pay you, other visitors that potentially might be interested and won’t last in a long-term lead nurturing or email campaign funnel due to a customer pain, and other self-educating visitors in your industry.

Personalize Your Marketing Messages

This is something “copyhackers” coined in the industry made popular be a now white label email marketing company.

The phrase originated from the concept the good marketers talk to their customers the words they want to hear to get the information they search the easiest and fastest ways ways possible.

That’s totally fine, but personalising your message is much more than just the words you put into the email or into that little on-premises space on your blog. and the subject lines, for that matter.

Understanding who your customers are — their motivations, questions they typically ask throughout the nurturing campaign, and the obstacles they need your exact help of your unique offering to overcome, you can talk directly to them, their interested visitors, and even other people trying to align their future interests with your brand, which is okay, too.

In fact, it’s one of the key benefits, from a growth hacking perspective, of talking to all the different kinds of people and addressing all the different points of view in the personalized copy.

Many of these people are looking for the necessary resources to give to their customer to get the free or lower-priced marketing services from you automatically, their customer. That’s very different than just selling a free trial or $10.00 then a free trial or all the way up until your team can step in and help them save some money no what point of their relationship with your brand.

By understanding their unique customer motivations, sticks, habiliments, challenges, and generally speaking their daily life, growth hackers can feel like the whole copy gives the company—the startup—the competitive advantage of helping its customer move from one high measurable point to another a contrasting measuring point.