Whether you are a new business looking to increase revenue and gain awareness, or an old business thats tired of corny advertisements and wants new customers – then look no further than growth hacking! Growth hacking is an alternative marketing strategy that utilizes many different marketing techniques until the most efficient channel of revenue is found. There are many different ways to growth hack your business, and figuring out which one is right for you may take a few trial and errors but, you can start with these five different ways you watch your business grow!
Implement A Customer Loyalty Program
When talking about growth hacking, the primary focus is talking about not only how to grow your business, but also how to increase the lifetime value of your customers. Taking a business to the next level is all about finding loyal customers to repeat their purchases with your business, if not – you will be wasting a lot of time and energy alway having to find new customers.
A simple way to generate customer loyalty is through a customer loyalty program. According to a study in University of Southern California, loyalty cards resulted in 178% more repeated business.
If you are an online store, you can implement this strategy by rewarding your customers with a free prize after their second purchase, or give them 10$ off for signing up to receive your newsletter! Rewarding your customers is the best way to keep them around for the long run.
Make Your Brand Exclusive
You would think this old trick wouldn’t work in this day and age, but miraculously yet unsurprisingly – it does. Humans want what we can’t have. If you are an emerging business, putting a simple “Sign Up to Be Notified” or “Sign Up To Access Exclusive Content (or product, membership, etc)” on your landing page and it will immediately make your potential customers’ curiosity strike. If they feel so inclined, they’ll give you their email and then you can send out newsletters with coupons and special content for your exclusive members.
This strategy is similar to what Gmail did when they were first emerging. The only way to get a Gmail account before Gmail emerged, was if you got an invitation. So, people who didn’t receive invites were so giddy with anticipation, they couldn’t hardly wait until to sign up once it was accessible to everyone.
Use FOMO to Create a Sign Up Frenzy
Much like exclusivity, scarcity creates an overwhelming sense of fear of missing out on something great. A great way to implement this strategy for online shop owners is to create a banner on your home page or product page saying something like “Sale Ends Soon” or “Limited Supply” or “Supplies Are Running Out”. The scarcity of your product will generate conversation and make the people who were thinking of buying your product, buy it immediately. This is a classic strategy that can be used amongst businesses of all sizes.
Another way to use this tactic is opening up the registration to your website only on certain times out of the year, for a restricted amount of time. Once the registration hours close, the people who missed the time slot will then be put onto a waiting list. So, everytime your registration opens, you will have plenty of curious, consumers eagerly waiting to see what’s beyond the landing page and spend some money.
Find a Distribution Channel to Spread the Word
A distribution channel is a place where the customer you are targeting is already going to find what they need. The most successful story of this strategy was with AirBnb. When Airbnb had first launched, they researched the number one site where people go to find temporary housing, and that was: Craigslist. After receiving this information, AirBnb started highly encouraging their new users to cross post their listing on Craigslist with a link to their AirBnb page, then if the person was interested in the home, they would sign up for the site in order to contact the poster. And just like that, they tapped into thousands and thousands of more users. A genius way to generate free traffic. This tactic alone saved Airbnb thousands and thousands of dollars on advertising costs.
But, growth hacking isn’t always this easy. Airbnb went through many tactics to generate traffic through Craigslist. Airbnb even hired people to reach out to craigslist posters to ask them to start using Airbnb instead. Even though this is a blatant form of spam,it did end up working out for the common good because now we all save money on lodging when we travel!
Growth hacking is the reason why we all know these big companies as big companies. They all tried many, many different types of growth hacks before finding the one that truly took their business to the next level. The most important thing to remember when growing your business is that growth hacking is more of a mentality to master rather than a skill to adapt. It is about analyzing your market and always asking yourself if your company is reaching its highest potential and widest audience. And then, finding alternative ways to generate income that isn’t paying thousands of dollars for advertisements. For new businesses, growth hacking strategies and the right amount of determination will certainly take you to your company to the next level.