Growth Hacking: How Do You Control Your Online Business Growth?

Do you want to have a bigger, better, more successful business? Growth Hacking is a new marketing strategy for making your business grow. And it has nothing to do with “hacking” as you know it.

A growth hacker is someone who is focusing only on growing your business. It is not better than a marketer, it’s just different.

Every initiative, strategy, action, and plan made by a growth hacker has only one purpose: business growth. When you focus on doing one thing, and one thing only, it’s suddenly easier to achieve your goals because you become more efficient in working towards accomplishing your goals.

Set a clear goal

It is highly important to set one goal at a time. One single goal offers a clear image of how to run things.

Imagine you have to cook something at home: at first, you decide the dish you want to make. Knowing the dish, you write a grocery list, then you go shopping. Then you wash, cut, pour, and shake the ingredients. Finally, you put them together in a pot and you can see how the dish starts to come alive.

If you have one clear goal you can split it into several little goals that need to be achieved. Day by day, customers by customer, email by email, meeting by meeting, and the list keeps going until you have reached your goal.

Go for the things that don’t scale

The things that don’t scale are the things you will need to do over and over and they can’t be automatic. For example, when Tinder was trying to attract people to use their app, they used to organise parties at US colleges having one rule: They had to download the Tinder app.

Now, we’re not saying you should start throwing parties to your business’ detriment. Just think that during your business road to success, you might need to do some things that don’t bring you an immediate profit.

Already have people interested in your product/service? Use it to your advantage

Having people who already like your products gives you an advantage: they might like your next product/service. So, the smart thing to do is to reach out to your existing users and let them know first about your new product developments. Sending them an email with a powerful Call To Action is just the first part of the story:

Create the type of product that you would buy too

People really love and appreciate quality. So, if you want to get new customers you need to create an amazing product. Even if it is redesigning a product that everybody uses, it must bring quality and an extra advantage to the question “Why should I be interested in using this new product when I already have that old product I love?”.

Take as an example Tesla Motors. Their excellence in crafting their products makes the products sell themselves. And that’s not all. Besides the products’ exceptional features, Tesla cars are electric vehicles, so their added advantage is an environmentally friendly product.

Get the right partners

The right partners not only help you in growing the business but finding partners that your target audience also trusts will make your prospects look at your brand from a new perspective. It’s the same thing as when you are choosing your friends: Tell me who you hang out with so I can tell you who you are.

Launch on a Tuesday

It is proven that traffic on most websites decreases on weekends. On Friday people are too excited about the weekend and on Mondays, they are still recovering from the weekend. So, Tuesday is the most efficient day of the week to organise a product launch.

Choose Exclusivity

Exclusivity makes people think that they are a part of something important and special. You can use this to your business advantage. Sending exclusive invitations is a wonderful growth hacking strategy. Think about Pinterest. When it was launched you could get access to it only if you had an invitation. It made you feel like you were part of something really special, an exclusive community that not a lot of people have access to.

Pinterest also sent emails to inform their potential users that the waiting list is quite long, reassuring them that they are doing everything in their power to allow everyone to join. This situation created buzz and everyone wanted to be on Pinterest. In just 3 years, Pinterest reached over 70 million users; they started with just 10,000.

Use branding as leverage (Powered By)

Branding is something that you can use to your advantage in growing your business. For example, you can co-brand an embeddable product or widget.

– Did you know…? Words like “Powered By…” attract 30% more people to sign up. Basically, here you have a free marketing strategy.

Include your company name as part of your real name

If you are leaving comments on blogs or posting something in communities, you should consider including your brand’s name as a part of your name. This way, every time you post, people will remember your company’s name too.

It all sounds like a rather simple thing to do, but getting customers is really not an easy job. One of the hardest things to do is go from the prelaunch strategy for your new product to getting customers. This means that you need to build a product or service that has a powerful market requirement. The good news is that you don’t need to get everything done at the same time. The process is like building a house: brick by brick.