Looking to growth hack your business? Here are growth hacking practices that we think will gain popularity and be crucial to your business.
SEO
The traditional SEO model has changed significantly over the past five years. Google has updated its search algorithms to be more intelligent and intuitive making SEO primarily ranked on quality. Google Search algorithms may be advanced, but Larry Page himself has said that it’s all about the content. With this in mind SEO is probably the most accessible tool when it comes to growth hacking. Google search is used as the key strategy for many companies to help grow their user basis and customers.
LinkedIn took advantage of Google’s Search Algorithms to find it’s success as the world’s leading business social working platform. Only a few short years ago, it was almost impossible to find employment backgrounds and resumes.
Now ranking at the top of Google under a person’s name is their LinkedIn profile. Other companies catching up in the people profile search include about.me and Whitepages.com. Imagine, anyone in the world searching for specific person, and linking to their LinkedIn profile. The power of SEO.
Whether it is a method to get your product out more onto Google, creating quality backlinks or targeting users looking for your product or services, SEO is still vital to the company’s growth potential and not going away anytime soon.
GROWTH IS PART OF YOUR JOB DESCRIPTION
Small and large companies alike are moving towards making everyone in the company responsible for growth on some level. Whether it’s marketers growing their followings on social, company evangelists presenting at conferences or human resources finding new talent growth, is is becoming part of everyone’s job for a company to think about growth.
Moral of the story: Get the team behind you!
CONTENT CREATION THAT ADDS VALUE TO CUSTOMERS
Using content creatively and providing value to customers should be the focus of a content marketing plan. Just sending out marketing messages doesn’t cut it in 2016. By creating valuable content you are increasing the worth of your service or product.
Providing guides to how to use your product or service it effectively, promoting user generated content about your product or service or having lines of communication open all the time on social media to support your product. Creating customer surveys that improve your product or service is content that adds value to your customer in the future but still involves them in the improvement process. Their opinion matters, so it improves both communication and the product or service itself.
When content adds value to customers, people will talk about it.
ONGOING USE OF NEW AND CREATIVE IDEAS TO INCREASE GROWTH
What works for a week, might not work next week. Your growth may hit a stand still at any given point. You need to always be thinking about the next idea and the next strategy to grow your product or service. If you are not hitting your head against the wall daily, then you are not doing something right.
Many ideas are NOT going to work, but when you hit the right idea or strategy, the rewards will be well worth it.
Accept it and go with it.
QUALITY BACKLINKING PROGRAMS
Backlinking is still king when it comes to growth hacking. Backlinking to your product, service, content or more from the proper channels can lead to leaps and bounds in growth.
Again, you have to create the strategy that is right for your product or service and you may try 100 strategies first, but don’t give up.
Using creative backlinking strategies is pertinent to hacking your growth.
METRICS AND MORE METRICS
Don’t waste too much time on strategies that don’t work. Use metrics to help guide you and test what does and does not work. A/B testing is one of the key strategies in growth hacking and without metrics it’s useless.
Metrics can tell you so much about your users, their actions, and what does and does not work with them.
GOAL ORIENTED MARKETING
Every strategy should have an end goal or end result.
Having goals can set the framework for how you plan to achieve that growth. Look at what works and does not work based on history and breaks goals down to make them more achievable.
QUALITY OVER QUANTITY
Don’t waste time trying to produce and publish excess amounts of content just to “get it out there”. Instead, fine tune your message, content and goals. Spend more time on crafting the content and finding ways to engage audiences, rather than just publishing content just to get it out there.
Spend extra time on finding new ideas for content production, unique ways to present it and you will grow your engagement factor.
BROAD VS. LONG-TAILED
Many online marketers have steered their SEO keywords towards long-tailed searches (longer searches/more words) to help better target their users. Even Inbound giant Hubspot recommends using this methodology because long-tailed keywords are
FINDING NEW WAYS TO USE EXISTING CHANNELS
So your Twittered out, LinkedIn exhausted. and Facebook burnt. How much can you push and promote on these channels?
Find new and creative ways to use the channels you have grown. For example perhaps you started out on Twitter to gain a huge following and get your brand out there. Now, you have a huge audience and don’t know you can benefit from it.
Find a new way to use it!
There are so many things you can use these channels for, customer service, how to videos and user generated content.
Finding unique ways to use the channels you have already invested so much time into building is an easy growth hack.
Growth hacking is not easy and not for the faint of heart, but with a dedicated and creative strategy, growth hacking could be your secret weapon for success.
