7 Best Growth Hacking Techniques for Startups in 2021
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Many business owners around the world have discovered that the key to success is not just on the merits of the idea or quality of their product but also on their ability to attract customers. If you can't attract your customers, there
With new startups being launched every day people are spinning around to try growth hacking strategies where the companies analyze and evaluate their customer base and then tirelessly pursue growth with that knowledge.
Growth Hacking is an innovative and unorthodox way of getting massive results by eliminating old conventional methods. The ultimate goal of growth hacking techniques is to promote your product without putting additional input of your time and money. But before we start exploring the best growth hacking techniques for your startups, we need to first understand what growth hacking is.
What is Growth Hacking?
7 Best Growth Hacking Techniques For Startups
- Have A Clearly Defined Goal
- Incorporating sharing into its functionality
- Affiliate Marketing Program
- Incorporating Features into the Product to Encourage Sharing
- The Freemium Model
- Piggybacking
- Partner with the existing company
What is Growth Hacking?
Growth hacking is simply a marketing strategy that is based on market research and experiment. It is used to find out the most cost-effective ways to grow your business.
In the process of growth hacking, you have to include different types of metrics such as data, design, development, engineering, analytics, and statistics. The reason why it is called Growth hacking is that this is the best marketing strategy a growth hacker can use to find the most groundbreaking, creative, and fast way to grow a startup.
There are best growth hacking strategies used by Startup growth hackers. Some of them include blogging, guest posts, reverse engineering, A/B Testing, SEO, email marketing, video marketing, viral marketing, and other kinds of content marketing techniques.
The term "Growth Hacking" was officially used by Sean Ellis, the founder of GrowthHackers, in 2010.
He defined a growth hacker as
"A person whose true north is growth. Everything they do is scrutinized by its potential impact on scalable growth".
Most of the time, Growth hackers are a crossbreed of marketers or coders or a person who has a deep knowledge of technology. They are the people who look at the conventional query of "How do I get customers for my product?". They answer with viral factors, landing pages, open graphs, and email deliverability. A growth hacker should have problem-solving skills.
Now you understood what growth hacking is. So let us see some of the ways how you can use it effectively to attract customers. Here we bring you a curated list of the 7 best growth hacking techniques for startups.
7 Best Growth Hacking Techniques to boost your Startup
Listed below are some Growth hacks which, if applied perfectly, can bring you a lot of customers.
Have A Clearly Defined Goal
As a Startup Growth hacker, you need to define your goal first. You have to identify the purpose of implementing business techniques for growth. You will also have to research your target market so that you will be able to know if you are doing everything right or not.
Have a clear unique goal so that it can be further broken down into small achievable micro-goals. For example, goals like, how many customers do you need per week? Or how many leads do you need in a week?
Defining your goal clearly will make it achievable as well as help you to get closer to success.
Ashwini
Incorporating sharing into its functionality
One of the essential business techniques for Growth Hacking is to develop your small startup by incorporating sharing into its functionality. Sharing, here means that your content can be directly linked to social media platforms, granting your users to do the work of marketing for you.
When people support something via social media, they are recommending it to their friends, increasing the chances that someone new will discover and check out your page or product.
One company that implements this growth hacking strategy very successfully is Pinterest. This is an era of online marketing and you can use this as an advantage for your business. If your content is too good and has the power to go viral then you can easily build trust with your audience. This will also increase your social media engagement in long term.
Affiliate Marketing Program
If you want to get traffic to your website with a low budget, you can develop an affiliate section and invite people to register there. Once they register, they will be able to promote their affiliate link with their audience and make some money.
This is one of the most cost-effective ways to grow a business. All you have to do is share a small part of your profit after you have a lead. Many big brands are using this strategy to grow their business like Amazon, Flipkart, Snapdeal, etc.
In this process, you don't have to worry about the traffic or audience because the affiliate marketer will promote your site to their audience. There are so many tools available that will help you to track the sale of each affiliate marketer and automate the distribution of commission. Some of the best Affiliate Management tools you can use are:
- Everflow.io
- AffTrack
- Post Affiliate Pro
- ImpactRadius
- Refersion
- LeadDyno
Yash Raj Srivastava
Incorporating Features into the Product to Encourage Sharing
Incorporating CTAs into the product or content will serve as a physical reminder for existing customers to spread the word about your product, and this will naturally attract potential customers.
If your company makes a certain product, one great way to aid in spreading its popularity is to incorporate a mechanism into the product to encourage them to share it or to create a companion product that encourages distribution.
You can also offer rewards to your existing customers who share your content or refer your product with their friends. This way you can double the sale in lesser time. This method of marketing is called referral marketing and it is one of the most rapid methods of growth hacking that helps you to grow your business in a very short period of time.
The Freemium Model
One of the foremost ways to convert a potential customer into a paying customer is to offer free services or products and then market your main product through the free product.
The free and paid products you offer should go well together with each other so that when people sign up or receive your free product or service, they also want to pay for the priced product or service.
For example, Grammarly lets people use its app or extension for free but it keeps reminding the user that they can pay for their premium service to get an extra feature.
This business model is called a Freemium model in which a company has both, a free and a premium product for the user. You can also offer a product at a lower cost to your target audience and then market your main product with the help of the first product.
You now know that person is using your product, so he/she may get interested in your main product too. This is a method that is used by many Digital Marketers.
The best thing about it is that it helps to get a large amount of traffic to your product or service. Once the sale is done, you can up-sell a high-ticket product. It is the best practice to take feedback from your users and make it the best product available in the market. it will help you to build trust among your audience.
Piggybacking
One of the innovative ways to grow your customer base quickly and easily is to piggyback on a company that already has tons of users. Piggyback marketing is to deal with a non-competing brand and advertise both the brands with the same piece of content or using other brand's audiences to generate leads.
If you are a new startup and you don't have any target audience or customer base, you can piggyback on a company that is related to your business but is not your competitor. Piggyback is a marketing strategy used by some of the popular brands to get the adherence of the audience.
One of the best examples of Piggybacking is PayPal. After piggybacking on eBay, PayPal got the attention of the users.
Partner with the existing company
If you are not in the favour of getting a piggyback ride with the other company then an easy way out is to make partners with an existing company advertise your brand.
Partnering with a company will give you free marketing to the group of customers that they attract. In exchange, you will have to market their product or service to your audience.
There can be some financial bonus involved in partnering with a company. These schemes will ensure that your company grows and reaches the perfect category of audience.
Conclusion
These were some of the Growth hacking techniques which companies use frequently to boost their sales. A startup can easily apply the same to market and grow their business.
Growth hacking is a long-term process. So, even if you don't see any solid results in the first few days, be patient, because if you have done it right, they will surely show some results.
FAQs
What is a growth strategy?
A growth strategy is a plan of action that allows you to achieve a higher level of market share than you currently have and expanding your current user base.
What does a growth marketer do?
A growth marketer runs constant, iterative tests throughout the funnel, and uses the results to craft data-driven strategy updates that lift key performance metrics of the company.
What are the four major growth strategies?
There are four basic growth strategies you can employ to expand your business are:
- Market penetration
- Product development
- Market expansion
- Diversification
What are the best growth hacking techniques for startups in 2021?
The best growth hacking techniques for startups in 2021 are:
- Have a clearly defined goal
- Incorporating sharing into its functionality
- Affiliate marketing program
- Incorporating features into the product to encourage sharing
- The Freemium Model
- Piggybacking
- Partner with the existing company
What are growth hacking tools?
Best growth hacking tools are:
- Expandi.io
- GrowthBar
- Landbot.io
- Zapier
- CrystalKnows
- Airtable
Must have tools for startups - Recommended by StartupTalky
- Convert Visitors into Leads- SeizeLead
- Payment Gateway- Razorpay
- Spy on your Competitors- Adspyder
- Manage your business smoothly- Google Workspace
