15 Powerful Growth Hacking Strategies You Should Try

Brands are using growth hacking for a reason, and that reason hasn’t changed.

Growth hacking, with all of the noise out there, is one of the proven ways to grow your user base, increase sales, and gain brand visibility online.

Are you aware that Instagram hacked its way to one million active users in just 2 months? Imagine copying and tweaking Instagram’s strategy and then applying it to your business.

Growth hacking is the technique of using marketing channels, product, and other business processes to devise cost-effective and innovative growth techniques for your business.

It uses marketing, data, analytics, reports, experimentation, engineering, automation, and much more.

The outcome is a magical growth strategy.

So how can you develop and implement a growth hack strategy that works for you?

Here are 15 powerful growth hacking strategies that have been used and tested multiple times by different brands. It’s now your turn to use one (or maybe more) of these techniques for your startup.

 

1. Hack More Followers on Twitter

Most businesses use Twitter, so how is this a “hack?”

Don’t be in a hurry. I’ll explain. This technique comes from Austin Allred. The idea is to use Twitter for growth hacking.

From this chart, 56% millennials use Twitter. Therefore if used appropriately, you can bring the right people in the right number to your business.

Here’s how to use Twitter as a growth hack tool:

• Follow the followers of your competitors. They are more likely to follow you back.
• Use hashtags to find people who are interested in your product/services. Then follow them and interact with them.
• Find and follow people who are interested in similar products.

 

2. Leverage on “Refer a Friend” Strategy

Do not take ‘refer a friend’ strategy lightly. Dropbox used it to increase its signups by 60%.

Dropbox created a win-win strategy for both the new and the existing customers. Both get 500MB free storage. This particular growth hack is used intensively by startups and even established businesses to attract new customers.

Find a way to reward your existing users. If you’re a SaaS startup, you could reward users with 1-month free subscription, if they refer 2 valid users to sign up. Just create an excitement. People will flock around!

 

3. Use Transparency to Win a New Audience

Be transparent. Share everything with your audience. It’s the number one way to acquire new customers.

Share everything with your customers and let them see the real picture. It can help you retaining existing customers.

It will improve your personal brand and trust quickly

“Transparency” may not seem like an advanced growth hack, but don’t be deceived by the fancy term. As long as the tactics is strategic, and primarily focused on “growth” it’s a growth hack nonetheless.

Neil Patel says transparency is the new marketing, and it works in all the industries ranging from food to travel to ecommerce.

For example, Moz shares its revenue details with its readers every year. They share everything including revenue, losses, investment details, and much more.

Result?

Moz is the second most recognized marketing brand after Google.

 

4. Acquire

Acquiring competitors, suppliers, and non-related businesses will help you reach new heights. Ever wondered why brands acquire other businesses?

Acquiring a business adds another feather to your cap. In addition to getting a new business, you also get access to new customers – you find new partners.

For example, Buffer purchased Digg Digg and right after the acquisition, the Buffer button is added on the social share bar.

Buffer was visible to more than 60K users of the plugin and to the audience of all those website and blogs. I think this is super cool!

 

5. Develop a Community

Develop an online community and engage your customers. This doesn’t just let you attract new customers, but it’s a great tool for building trust.

An online community allows the people to discuss and contribute content. They will recognized and important. People can interact with the business as well as with others through the community.

Fiverr has an active community for its buyers and sellers where they post queries, help each other, and share stories. This doesn’t help Fiverr only, but it’s more helpful for the buyers and sellers.

 

6. Empower Your Customers

There’s a hidden potential in your customers. You should harness it. How? Instead of telling their customers about the fabric, trouser types, jackets, etc. Suitopia allows its customers design their own suits.

They have an easy-to-use interface where anyone can design a custom dress in a few minutes.

Trust me, when customers are allowed to go their own way, they will stick to your brand. They don’t get bored as it provides them with a fun way to test the actual product.

It boosts customer engagement and revenue.

 

7. Use Instagram-Style Growth Hack

Do you use Instagram for your business?

If you do, then I’m certain that you haven’t used it like this.

There is a nice Instagram hack that will result in followers, likes, and new customers.

Here is how it works:

1. Discover the most appropriate hashtags for your business and products.
2. Use these hashtags to search pictures on Instagram.
3. Like all the pictures and follow all the accounts that shared those pictures.
4. Use the same hashtags in the pictures that you post.
5. You will start getting likes and followers which will grow every day.

Consequently, you will gain new customers.

 

8. Launch on Tuesday

This is rather a funny but effective growth hack strategy. Are you planning to launch a new business or a startup or a new product?

Launch it on Tuesday. Why?

Because Tuesday is the best day to launch any business for maximum attention, conversion, and penetration.

Tuesdays give your business the most time to stay active and in front of your target audience. You should expect to reach maximum potential customers.

 

9. Appear Large

You may not want to do this. But it works. Generally, small businesses and tiny startups don’t get as much attention as the large ones. What will you do if you have a small business?

“Fake to appear larger.”

Make your website credible. In your footer, add links to your About, Team, Investors, Jobs, and of course, services.

Pipetop, for example, has listed four different phone numbers from four different countries to appear as a large business.

This technique can help you get noticed. Customers will trust you if they perceive your business to be a large entity.

You can use contact numbers, multiple addresses, social follower count, team experience, etc., to magnify your business.

 

10. Content Creation For Buyer Journey

Some 61% people are of the view that they are more likely to buy from a company that publishes content that answers their product and non-product related queries.

This calls for creating content around buyer journey. Answer the questions that your customers might have based on their stage in the sales funnel.

Start by highlighting how your product is better than your competitor’s. Publish case studies, how-to articles, buying guides, customer testimonials, and product-specific posts on your blog.

This will convert existing customers into repeat buyers, build trust, and reduce customer support load. It will help your target audience in understanding your products and business better.

 

11. Use Social Proofs

Social proof is the informational social influence. People tend to trust and believe the actions taken by others to be true, and do the same. In fact, 79% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations.

Add social proofs on your website and blog to attract new customers and to improve your trust level. The most common types of social proofs include:

• Testimonials
• Customer reviews
• Case studies
• brand logos
• Customer statistics

Use one or more of these on your website to drive traffic, build engagement, and increase conversion rate. Ramit Sethi uses brand logos on his website as a social proof.

 

12. Host Contests

AppSumo successfully added 140K new subscribers in 10 months with the help of giveaways and contests.

Facebook contests are great for brand awareness, building email lists, getting the word out, and to gain new customers.

Over 30% of the marketers use Facebook contests to increase customer loyalty and 82.4% marketers are happy with the contests that it delivered great results.

You can run contests on your blog or other social networks (like Twitter or Instagram). Better yet, you can partner with an influencer to get better results.

 

13. Tactically Reduce Cart Abandonment

There couldn’t be any easier growth hacking technique that yields staggering results than reducing cart abandonment.

There are several reasons why a potential buyer can leave your website/store without buying.

High shipping cost is the major reason why 44% of buyers abandon carts. Why not offer free shipping or clearly state the shipping cost up front, so that your buyers can make informed decisions and prepare mentally about the shipping cost.

For better results, you can use exit-intent technology powered pop-ups to collect the email addresses of the visitors. Reclaim sales by sending targeted emails.

Andrew Youderian, the owner of Ecommerce Fuel, was able to achieve a recovery rate of up to 11% a month by sending emails to the abandoned visitors.

 

14. Build The “Right” Landing Page

Your competitor’s landing page style or aesthetics may not work for you. Because your audience may not be entirely the same as theirs. Trust me, relevance trumps creativity as far as landing page is concerned.

That’s why you need the “right” landing page.

At the end of the day, it all comes down to growing your business. A poor landing page can’t convert visitors into subscribers and customers.

Here’s a perfect anatomy of how a high-converting landing page should be.

Create a landing page with a catchy headline, CTA, perfect color combination, social proof, etc. to make sure it keeps visitors hooked and converts them. But you’re not limited to the structure/format above.

Bottom line: Get to know your audience and what they prefer. Stripe has a unique approach to landing page design. And they have been using this for years.

There’s acceptable way of building a landing page.

To be sure of what works in your business, and for your customers, test your landing page elements.

 

15. Reverse Engineer a Technique

Follow your competitors and see what they are doing, how they do it, and how successful they are with their strategies. Use tools like SpyFu and Compete to monitor your competitors.

Stop hating your customers for they “push you to achieve more.”

Reverse engineer your competitor’s best growth techniques. If it’s worked for them, it will work for you too.

If it’s a growth hack technique that your competitor has used for growth, you can tweak the same technique, make it better, and get 2x the results of your competitor.

 

Conclusion

To an extent, growth hacking requires you to be creative.

Of course copying these strategies as they’re can help you achieve “growth,” but you should try and come up with customized growth hack strategies for your business.

Nothing beats the custom-built business strategy.

Since you know your audience than me, you can build a invent a new “hack” that will drive new customers to your business, retain existing customers, and put some money into your bank account. How about that?