The digital market is a tough one, and businesses are hustling to survive. Small businesses are using every trick in the book to hit their goals and bring in more revenue.
*Updated 7/22/2024
But the main challenge at hand is customer retention. How do you keep the customers you've worked so hard to get?
Increasing customer retention by 5% can increase profits by 25-95%.
Your business won’t grow if your customer base doesn't, and the best way to expand your new customer base is to successfully retain customers while implementing new digital marketing strategies.
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What is Growth Hacking, and How Does It Work?
Growth hacking is a marketing practice where companies will solely focus on the company's overall growth in a vertical and horizontal direction -- meaning the company is attempting to grow the customer base, gross revenue, media outreach, and market share simultaneously.
Growth hackers infiltrate the existing startup market and implement strategies to divert traffic to the business website and help retain customers.
Although it is not easy, with practice, some tactful ideas, and proper knowledge about market outreach and trends, growth hacking can become successful.
Growth Hacking vs. Growth Marketing
Often people believe that growth hacking is just like any other marketing technique.
However, that’s not entirely true because both have their subtle differences that significantly impact the business as a whole.
If you hire marketers, the regular ones, to implement growth hacking strategies, they will use traditional marketing knowledge, which won’t yield fruitful results.
Therefore, it is crucial to understand these two concepts' differences before hiring dedicated developers to process the growth hacking process.
In the below section, we have discussed the significant differences between traditional marketing and growth hacking.
- Growth hackers are more concerned with devising strategies for the next growth phase of the business vs. marketers who shift their focus to regular branding and marketing results.
- Growth hackers pay attention to ways customers can be acquired and retained for a long time to grow the business’s base vs. marketers consider generating leads and selling products or services.
- Growth hackers integrate strategies at every step of the marketing funnel, vs. marketers who are more concerned with the initial stages of the customer journey.
- Growth hackers run small, quick experiments vs. marketers who run projects that are usually long-term.
- Growth hackers need the latest market data and information to devise strategies vs. marketers who do not need to entirely depend on data.
Best Ways to Use Growth Hacking
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Tap into the social media pool
Social media platforms are the best and cheapest ways to implement growth hacking. There are obviously many to choose from, but it's advised you only use the channels where your potential customers meet and interact.
If you're ideal customer is Gen Z, for example, TikTok marketing makes a lot of sense. If you are targeting Gen X, your time and money would be better spent on X (formerly Twitter) or Facebook.
Trying to build a new social media customer base on more than two platforms at once will be very costly and not as effective as if you devote your efforts to one or two that have a history of high performance.
Check out SocialPilot for an easy way to schedule social content in seconds, plan campaigns, collaborate with your teams, and measure the performance.
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Collaborate with other companies
To acquire new customers, you can collaborate with other companies offering services that can boost your business growth, which exposes you to an already established market.
Therefore, you won’t have to waste so much money and time getting new customers. People who opt for your business through the parent company will also try your options again.
You can also try content marketing by collaborating with other companies. The state of content marketing shows it is one of the most beneficial options for businesses.
Try Narrato to ideate, create, and publish content with the help from AI all in one place.
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Giveaways pay off
As a startup business, it might be difficult for you to give something for free. But if you can get $100,000 in exchange for $1000, don’t you think it will kickstart your business and help it grow?
It will, and that's where growth hacking comes into the picture.
Here, you can issue something accessible to the customers and get more. Customers always love to stay with businesses that wish to understand their desires.
Therefore, you can quickly become successful in your customer retention strategies.
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Implement referral strategies
Another exceptional growth hacking strategy that you can implement is referral programs. You can give cash back, coupons, discounts, and other such awards to customers who will refer your business to others.
A good way to do that is to use a discount popup on your website. As site visitors enter, they are greeted with a discount or coupon in exchange for their email address. It's a win win!
If you get more customers through this technique, your giving away process will become fruitful. Just ensure to organize the best referral campaign.
For this, you can hire dedicated developers with more experience using tools to build the campaign.
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Schedule A/B testing
You should pay attention to the performance of your website, whether it is the load time or the bounce rate. It is impossible to wait for the customer's responsibility to fix the issue.
So, you should ensure A/B testing is arranged so you can know about the website’s performance and implement strategies on time to help the business grow.
Still, at times the loading time speed problem gets complex and affects the website's performance, so we advise you to hire dedicated developers who are proficient in this field and can help you get a better outcome.
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Understand market pain points
Lastly, you need to understand the pain point of the market and the best way to do this is by creating an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP).
Without this, there is no way you can penetrate a new market. Take advantage of the situation and implement the strategy that the customers want.
For example, check if the consumers want a free subscription or are happy with the freemium packages offered by your competitors.
Conclusion
Growth hacking is prevalent amongst top companies and startups. The risks are great, but so are the rewards.
The chances of success are far greater when you follow other viral growth hacking strategies and make them your own.
You can further refer to POWR to know more about other strategies to grow your startup, gain more revenues, and easily retain customers.
Author Bio
Harikrishna Kundariya is the Co-Founder, Director, & Marketer of eSparkBiz Technologies, a software development company. With 12+ years of experience, Harikrishna has been creating digital innovations for startups and enterprises.
