As all the components of a company’s operational system, Marketing is evolving. At its premises in the 50’, marketing was a kind of evolution state of basic sales principles. Leading to a new era where basic principles appeared enabling people to put detailed segmentation strategies and other concepts enhancing a company’s performance. Nowadays, in the age of super competitiveness and digital playground development, a new concept is born among Silicon Valley’s startups. For performance requirements, a new Marketing growth strategy gets to the edge of the world: Growth Hacking.
All the most successful companies in the world such as Facebook, Airbnb, LinkedIn, Dropbox, and Amazon… use Growth hacking strategies to generate new leads, traffic, and outstanding visibility. To sum up: growth & profit.
What Is Growth Hacking?
We can describe it as a Digital Marketing Strategy allowing startups and companies to considerably accelerate their growth rate with the lowest cost possible. This new powerful tool is however 100% focused on growth, and therefore, doesn’t get stopped on the traditional marketing principles. It may use leverage but the only barrier to imagination and creativity. To set up a strong Growth Hacking strategy, you may consider the AARRR model.
Acquisition
Where do you get your customers? Where do they come from? From which channel? And most importantly, you may consider which channel brings the most traffic, which one gets the best conversion rate, and which one is the most cost-effective per acquisition.
Example: Hotmail
They just added a simple message at the bottom of each mail: “PS: I love you. Get your free email at Hotmail” with a link redirecting users to the company website. Thanks to that, they generated around 3000 users per day. In 6 months they reached 1 million users and 20,000 daily subscriptions.
Activation
This part is more about the quality of the customer experience. What kind of first experience are you going to offer your prospects?
Retention
How many of your clients do you keep and how many do you lose?
Referral
Build a word-of-mouth system. How can you turn customers into your advocates? Try to save money and make your clients work for you.
Example: Dropbox
The King of recommendation. They just decided to offer 500MB storage to all of its users recommending “Dropbox” to their friends. EASY.
Revenue
It does not need much explanation here, you’ll understand it easily. It’s all about making more money.
How Does It Work?
Opening a company is like managing different cycles one after another, and each time you open a new one, the previous one should keep on running. Meaning that it’s a constant job, and everything is constantly in motion.
Your product or CRM can always be improved. Your website can always be optimized, and you’ll always have a way to make more money. From the moment there is a competitive market, there is a growth opportunity. A company planning to perform a growth hacking strategy should play on as many details as possible to enhancing company growth. Everything that may have a chance to work and lead you to reach your goal will be tested.
And as mentioned before, it doesn’t stop at marketing principles. A growth hacker may delve into event organization, psychology, design, content optimization, and more. The essence of growth hacking lies in experimentation. Plus, in today’s fast-paced marketing landscape, sharing your expertise on your YouTube channel is crucial. So, why not head over to Socialgreg’s platform to amp up your visibility?
“The ability to raise funds will no longer help you stand out if you don’t use your money wisely and properly”
— Fan Bing
As introduced by Oussama Ammar, consider the Growth Hacking strategy as following the 3D:
- Design: Everything starts with the product (or service) and is made for the product.
- Data: Everything gets to be measured. And nothing should be done without considering the data.
- Distribution: always keep in mind your end goal, which is getting new leads and converting them into your clients.
What Can It Help You To Achieve?
A growth Hacking strategy will by definition help you to boost your company’s growth. But to get more into details, it can help you to:
- Generate fame
- Build strong customer loyalty
- Lead generation
- Revenue increase
- Trying out new market
Growth Hacking Tips:
Breakdown Your Growth Goal
An action plan responds to a strategy. And a strategy responds to an objective. So, do not forget to set up all your goals in terms of company growth. Is it about traffic increase? Lead generation? Conversion rate? Income?
Hire Professionals
The marketing content quality can have a huge impact on your prospects and should not be underestimated. If you have a sufficient budget, do not hesitate to delegate some work to professionals.
For example, Airbnb decided to hire professional photographers to take a picture of some apartments before uploading them to their website. Which led to a very positive impact on their growth rate.
Cultural Flexibility
You can’t operate in China as you’d do in your home country. China has a very specific culture and people have different behavior and psychological mindset than back home. So, you need to understand your audience when communicating with them. Whether you do it yourself or hire some experts, it’s going to be a important point.
Here’s a basic example just to mind cross-cultural communication: The V fingers. In some countries, it means victory in some other places it means “fuck you”. It may not be planned, but the result will still be there…
Understand The Platforms
In China, you’ll really have to mind the rules of each platform you’re posting on if you want to avoid being banned. Otherwise, like in most of the countries in the world, if hoping for good results, consistency will be important. Don’t post pictures alone, but try to add some text, a description, or something. And last but not least, value hot topics! Probably the best way to touch a wide audience.
Furthermore, as consultants we’ve heard so many times companies saying things such as “We got 2 million followers on Instagram, it should be enough” or “We are so famous on Facebook and Twitter, they gonna love us!”. Well, sorry to disappoint you but they don’t use such platforms over here. You’ll have to start again and focus on these:
- WeChat: the number one APP messenger in China. Great communication tools, perfect to interact with your community.
- Weibo: a bit like Chinese Twitter. Perfect to target a wide audience.
Video Is The New King In China
You may want to do a short vlog or explanation video to talk about your product and spread it online. Videos are getting more and more popular in China, especially among young people.
Use Micro-Influencers & Kol
KOL is a great asset for your company if planning to gain huge visibility! Whether you want them to send a text, picture, videos, or maybe perform live-streaming… be sure that it’ll bring you a lot of new followers.
Web Optimization
Baidu is everything in China, forget about Google. And if you’re a serious company willing to achieve amazing results over here, you’ll have to develop a website in Chinese and optimize it to increase the loading speed. Consider SEO as well as powerful marketing email automation.
Case Study
Airbnb
At the beginning of Airbnb, their booking rate was pretty low… To raise funds and boost their company development, they decided to sell cereal boxes using the image of Obama and McCain in the middle of the presidential campaign, at $40/box. In less than 2 months, they made over $30,000.
Before reaching 100 million monthly users, the company had to fight to gain its first visitors. They started to invest all of their marketing budgets, around $500 at that time, in stickers… And they stuck it everywhere. In parks, cinemas, shops, and schools give it to people during concerts and events, etc. A non-conventional technique that managed to drive a bit of traffic. But unfortunately, their website was at that time clear as water. Completely virgin. No content. This leads as you may imagine to a very bad retention rate. However, they decided to create fake profiles and generate various discussions to make people believe in Reddit as a website having a wide and engaged audience. It worked.
Their first version based on geolocalization barely worked. So, they shifted their APP to photo sharing, made it up in 2 months, and recruited 100 persons for a first trial. From these first 100 people, they managed to reach 25,000 subscriptions on the official opening and an outstanding growth rate due to influence marketing and Key Opinion Leaders.