Startup Marketing Made Perfect With Ranky

Growing your business is the dream of any entrepreneur, yet at times, it can be easier said than done. With fierce competition and market trends, the “slow and steady” approach can be limiting. If you wish to stand out from the crowd, then unlocking rapid growth is your answer - and that’s where growth hacking comes into effect. 

Have you ever heard of it? It may sound like just another buzzword sweeping across the marketing world. But, it’s not, and we’re about to spell everything out for you. 

So to start, Sean Ellis, Growth Hacking’s creator describes it as: 

“An area whose objective is true growth. Everything that is done must be examined for its potential impact on scalable growth.”

In other words, growth hacking is an unconventional approach to marketing. Growth hacking focuses on one thing at a time, unlike other conventional marketing strategies. It combines analytics, creativity, and innovation to unlock growth. The results are then analyzed and documented before proceeding to the next strategy. 

Let’s take a look at some of the growth hacking techniques that’ll get you the highest return on your investment. 

What’s the key ingredient to success? 

As mentioned above, growth hackers focus on one tactic at a time. Therefore, by following a specific strategy, hackers are able to identify, adjust, repeat, and eventually scale their business. 

Step 1: Conduct extensive research! Discover what avenues will work for your business, where you can access audiences, how your hacking strategies will fit into your budget, and so on. 

Step 2: audit your current campaigns to reveal gaps that you can exploit and understand which channels are most effective, then start plugging in those gaps with fresh tactics.

Step 3: set S.M.A.R.T goals. These are crucial for the success of any marketing campaign, not to mention help you understand how to measure your success. 

Step 4: now, start running your experiments - one at a time - as this way you’ll be able to carefully track your growth, see what is effective, and what isn’t. 

Step 5: document and analyze your results. 

It goes without saying that all your growth hacking tactics should take into account the stage of the buyers’ journey that your audience is in, as well as personalization. After all, these two factors are extremely important in this competitive age. 

Leverage 3rd Party Platforms and Audiences 

Did you know that on average, businesses who use media outlets, influencers, personas, and other partnerships to access larger audiences see a 6-to-1 return on investment (ROI)? 

Just take a look at Facebook, Airbnb, and Uber as examples. Each one of these companies exploded to prominence by relying on established networks:

• Facebook used Harvard’s network of students,
• Airbnb used Craigslist as a pool of potential customers,
• Uber tapped into the power of accessible smartphones.

So, like the companies above, use other people’s networks to build an audience and acquire customers. 

If you’re thinking, where do I even start? Then remember; other people’s networks are everywhere, from email to Amazon to Google, Craigslist, social media platforms, and more. 

Depending on your company, you can utilize these networks in different ways. For example: 

• Use 3rd party platforms such as social media groups, and ads, to drive your target audience into action, which in turn, helps you build a mailing list. Then send out blasts to hundreds of people. 
• List your products on amazon to increase your awareness and visibility (if you’re an eCommerce company)
• Conduct research using tools such as Ahrefs, Buzzsumo, and more, to discover what people are searching for on social media and Google, and create high-quality content that satisfies that demand 
• Find complementary companies, and reach out to them to try and form a partnership to reach their larger audience.

But, before you start, it’s important to note that while utilizing others networks is useful, it isn’t the only tactic you should focus on. Hand-in-hand with this, you should also work on building your own network using guerilla marketing techniques. 

Platforms such as Reddit, Quora, and even LinkedIn for outreach will provide you with an opportunity to conduct extensive research, utilize personas, and build a name for yourself. So, don’t skip out on this when trying to extend your growth and reach. 

Create E-A-T For Your Brand

Once you have nailed down your audience, your next focus should be enhancing your expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (E-A-T) - and one way to do this, is by focusing on sharing informative content on your website. 

Using your established audience, third-party audiences, buyer personas, extensive research, and data analysis you can work on building topic clusters on key topics that touch upon your audience's pain points. Once your clusters have been formed, you should focus on creating a pillar page for this topic, as well as subpages. 

Always remember, in today’s digital marketing world it’s extremely important to build content in a way that would help you gain more links, mentions, and naturally, high-quality traffic. 

So, these clusters must touch upon all areas of the buyer's journey, to ensure you’re able to help guide your potential customers along the sales funnel, and demonstrate that you’re the company that can solve their problems. 

Create Page-Specific Content 

Now that you’ve found your audience, you need to do all in your power to meet their needs and convert them. And, there’s no better way to do that than by tapping into the power of content - after all, content is king.

But, it’s not any type of content that we’re talking about, rather page-specific content (also known as content upgrades.) 

You can increase conversions by more than 500% if you offer audiences content that is specific to the page on your website that they are currently on. 

Just think about it, with all the competition on the market, why would your potential customers stay on your site if you’re not repeatedly offering them content that keeps them intrigued and answers their concerns?

We’ll give you an example:

Let’s say we wanted to add page-specific content to one of our articles on Why You Should Enhance and Repurpose Your Old Content. We could include:

• An infographic summarizing the post
• A related case study conducted on a trusted brand
• Further examples of repurposed content

All of the proposed content upgrades above are related to the topic of the blog post. As the more specific you can get, the better. 

Always remember, the type of page-specific content you add should depend on the stage in the sales funnel your reader is at, their pain point, and the information that is included on the page.

Retargeting Ads

Retargeting ads are an extremely effective way of getting purchases you may have missed out on. Don’t believe us, well did you know retargeting ads can increase brand searches by up to 1,000% and website visits by 720% after 4 weeks? 

What’s more, the average customer visits a site nine times before making a purchase. Therefore, if you’re not doing all in your power to remain at the forefront of their mind, you’ll miss out to the competition. 

Simply by running retargeting ads, you’ll be able to bring visitors back to your website after they leave, and hopefully close the deal. 

Use Your Data to Test What Works Best

Naturally, it’s wise to take a step back and determine what areas are falling flat, where you could improve engagement, and what’s resonating the most, and ensure you retain customers. 

And you can do so with A/B testing! Experimenting will quickly and easily uncover anything that isn’t working and quick fixes that need to happen, thereby leading you to BIG results. And to accomplish this, you must dig deep into your data. 

For example, you could A/B test:

• Your homepage content to see what resonates
• Test out different email subject lines
• Try out a range of visuals
• Which headlines garner the most attention
• Evaluate your long forms 
• Or anything else that relates to the growth hacking strategy you are focusing on. 

If you don’t know where to start, HubSpot has a great A/B testing kit to provide you with everything you need to start running effective tests. 

Wrapping Up

There is no “one size fits all” when it comes to growth hacking. Growth hacking strategies take resilience and some risk - naturally, not every experiment will work out as planned. However, don’t let any failures deter you from your goal, rather use them to propel you forward. 

At the end of the day, smart growth hackers follow strategies that test, measure, and repeat… which is exactly what we excel at. 

Contact us today for a free consultation call with one of our experts to discover how we can hack your growth.