30 Growth Hacks That Work

Growth hacks are all about keeping your spend small while expanding your consumer base.

Here are 30 growth hacking strategies I've learned from growing my company – Fantastic Services – from nothing to a £40 million worth-of-services company in the past 10 years:

1. Don't be shy

You are your business. You need to talk about it whenever you have the opportunity – and often when you have to make the opportunity to talk about it too!

If people don't see you and they don't hear about you, they can't find you and they won't use you.

You need to get word about your business out there.

2. Get on all social media platforms

Make sure you're on all of the social media channels you possibly can be.

You won't need to stay on all of them forever. But some will work for you and some won't. You need to be ready to put your efforts into those that do.

Plus, what's “hot” right now in terms of platform often changes. You need to have several channels available in case any of them hits a road bump.

Imagine if you'd put all of your eggs in the Google+ channel a few years ago...

3. Know your audience

One of the best business growth hacks of 2019 hasn't changed since businesses first became a thing:

Know your audience. You should be constantly collecting data on them...

• Run surveys and questionnaires.
• Get your frontline team to ask questions and report back.
• Analyse all of the data you're collecting from all of your marketing channels – online and offline.

If you don't know your audience, you won't know the ways you can grow which they will support.

4. Speak to your audience

You need to communicate with your audience in a way they understand:

Make your message clear and aim to appeal to what your research shows you their wants are.

Doing this visually is the best way. Long, wordy messages about how good you are don't tend to hold people's attention for long.

Focus on what your customer gets, gets, gets. Keep it clear. Make it visual.

5. Disrupt where clients are looking for your product or service

The oldest hack in the book (literally) was listing your business in the Yellow Pages as Aaaaaaaa11111.

The same sort of approach is applicable elsewhere today. It's the reason why there's a glut of companies named “service name + city” these days.

Those are the keywords people search for.

6. Forget your pride in the beginning

If you work hard, you will grow. One day you will have the ability to turn down offers and the like.

However, that day is not today. When you are starting out, you can't let pride get in the way of making your company profitable.

7. Don’t aim for perfect – aim for best fit

Taking the time needed to absolutely perfect something before launching it is wasting time.

That's time you could be making money. More importantly, it's time in which you could be testing whatever you were intellectually perfecting in the real world.

From the very first day you start running your business, you need to be doing exactly that – running your business.

Don't waste the time creating the perfect UVP or the best slogan. Aim for the best fit and worry about testing and testing to perfection later.

8. Make friends with the media

Reach out. Talk. Ask. Be grateful.

This is one of those occasions when you need to avoid being shy:

Reach out to the media and talk about what you do. Ask them what they're interested in and tell them why that's you.

When they feature you, say thank you.

9. Find influencers and share

Linked to the above is finding influencers who you think will benefit your brand.

Again, being shy will not serve you well here. Nor will getting hung up on your pride.

You need to reach out to those influencers and rave about your brand to convince them to get on board with you and start talking about what it is that you offer.

10. Document your journey and share it

Nothing speaks more clearly than documentaries which show the journey you are taking.

Whether it's the reality TV effect or just part of the human psyche, people like “behind the scenes” information.

They love details about your business which add up to a story in which they can see a beginning, middle and end.

11. Become the best communicator you can be

The success of your business is going to rest on you and – largely – your ability to communicate.

This is true internally, of course. You need to figure out how to lead without being the domineering “boss” of yesteryear.

Externally, you need to know how to reach out to those influencers and media people and know that you are getting your message across clearly.

12. Speak with authenticity and gain influence

Although it might not seem like it in politics at the moment, people do tend to respond better to authenticity.

When you can speak confidently and knowledgeably about your niche, you start the journey towards becoming being known as an influencer yourself.

13. Study results and then go for what works

Likes. Followers. These numbers might sound good. But they're just vanity.

How do they translate into the actual sales and bookings you're getting?

You need to study the results you get from every business action you take. Then you need to analyse to see what went right and what went wrong.

Then you need to put effort into pushing what the numbers show you actually works.

14. Cut the meetings and go straight to the point

Everyone hates meetings. Yet, somehow, long pointless discussions still seem to be the way many companies operate.

Think of all that wasted time! Again, that's time when you could be out there running your business.

Why not cut those meetings?

Stop beating around the bush and get straight to the point.

15. Hand out flyers – one every commute and while you walk too

Flyers still work. You should have a high-quality stack of them on you at all times in the beginning.

You want people to find out about your business. Get out there and tell them about it! Remember – you can't get hung up on pride in the beginning and you need to be able to communicate with people.

Whether you're walking to the shops or you are on your daily commute, hand out a flyer or two. Especially if you see someone doing something linked to your goods or services.

In fact, this is part of a larger point...

16. Don’t ignore offline and traditional marketing methods

Don't make the mistake of thinking that online marketing has killed off traditional marketing methods.

We've already touched on flyers. But letter drops, business cards, cold calling and all of the other age-old methods still work – if you do them right.

17. Reuse and improve content 

When it comes to the online space, your old content doesn't need to be dead and gone content.

You can reuse it – the best growth hacks are all about using what you have. Just be sure to make it better and update it to make it relevant each time.

18. Continue to learn and study

Your business's success rests on you. It can't be said enough.

In order to succeed, you need to know the answers to a whole lot of questions. Every moment you're sitting on your commute, or you have a few minutes while you wait for something to happen, is time you could be learning those answers.

Personally, I'm a big fan of audiobooks. Starting out, I couldn't get enough of them. I still can't.

Learn from the masters and study what you don't know how to do from experience. It's the only way to figure out how to be better at running your business.

19. Make your product oversubscribed

You can't put a price on exclusivity. Well, actually you can – and it's a big one.

The Fear Of Missing Out (FOMO) is a big driving force when it comes to sales. As a rule, you will want to try to be oversubscribed rather than undersubscribed.

20. Try new things – and play with them

If you've thought of a new idea, try it out. How else are you going to know whether it works?

You can run all kinds of “focus groups” and develop and develop the idea endlessly...

But it's only once it's in the real world and you can test it and play with it and test it some more that you get to see how well it actually works.

21. Get referrals

Referrals are a key driver of business in your early days – perhaps for all of your days!

You need to make it as easy as humanly possible for someone to refer someone to you.

22. Make your products and services simple

Your products and services need to be simple, easy to book and easy to use.

If you put anything even resembling a stumbling block in the path of a potential customer, you can bet that some of them will fall over it.

Make it easy for someone to understand what your product is and how to get it.

23. Upgrades are important

Everyone wants to have that aura of exclusivity. Adding more value to the goods and services you offer is the way to get there.

You can't just launch a service or product and think that that's the best it's ever going to be:

If you've been smart and launched with your best fit rather than the impossible “perfect” service, you should have at least some room for improvement.

Test the results you're getting. Iterate. Test again. Keep on upgrading.

24. Rank higher than anyone else

Offline and traditional marketing isn't dead. But you really do need to own your online space.

If you're not an SEO expert, this is one of those occasions when you need to learn and study until you know what you're doing. You can get whole books on SEO growth hacks these days.

If you're bootstrapping, you might not have the funds to go another way. If you do have some funds, making a little investment in boosting your online ranking will pay dividends.

25. Make all interactions simple

Online as well as offline, you will want to simplify all of the interactions your clients can possibly have with you.

Any level of complexity will put people off.

26. Use exit tactics on closing

When people are about to exit your site, that's when you want to grab them.

Exit-intent pop-ups are a great way to gain new email addresses and contacts – and encourage people to buy from you too.

A popular approach is to offer a money-off coupon in exchange for their email address or ready for their next purchase.

Closing doesn't need to mean goodbye forever.

27. Make sharing rewarding

Likes and followers might be vanity numbers. But incentivising sharing can still serve a fantastic purpose when it comes to growing your business.

Offer little competitions where people can win freebies and money-off vouchers in return for sharing your content.

There's a reason why those “like and share to win a prize” competitions are so popular.

28. Create real value (and make things free)

Those constant service upgrades you're making should be adding real value for your clients. A ballooning service price should not be an end result of this!

Your customer should feel like those improvements to the service they are getting from you are coming to them for free:

“Wow – this service just keeps getting better and better!”

29. Find low-hanging fruits

Having done all of that work talking to your customers, it's worth listening to what they have to say.

Can you see any low-hanging fruit in there?

Perhaps the greatest growth hack of all time is to expand in the ways your customers tell you they “want” you to expand.

Early on at Fantastic Services, for example, our customers told us they were looking for home maintenance as well as cleaning. So we expanded that way.

Low and behold, those customers booked the new services.

30. Make a truly fantastic service

It's reliable, repeatable quality and simple booking processes which really make a fantastic service.

Make your services fantastic and you'll keep your customers coming back for the simple reason that you are the best in the business.

Have you got your own business growth hacks? I could talk about this all day.

Let's chat. Comment below and tell me about the growth hacking strategies you've used in your own business.