5 Growth Hacking Tips To Boost Your Customer Base
Growth hacking is an awesome method of producing amazing results in a short amount of time. If your goal right now is to rapidly expand your customer base and get your product noticed, this is the ideal way to do it.There are tons of ways that you can achieve your goal, but the following five growth hacking tips are cost-effective, simple to implement, and have a proven track record.
1. Use social proof
Customers don’t come to your website to make a purchase.They come to see who you are, what you do, and whether or not you can be trusted to fulfil their needs. The simplest way for you to demonstrate your capability is to use social proof.At its most basic, this could simply be displaying a selection of brand logos of the clients that you’ve worked with. If you don’t have any notable names on your roster yet, show off all the publications that have written positively about the great things you’re doing with your business and products.Better than that however, are testimonials and case studies. Testimonials are comments from clients or customers telling visitors how you solved their problems. Case studies are much more in depth and will tell a customer or client's story.It’s been proven time and time again, people engage with personal narratives, not statistics. I can tell you that growth hacking allowed Twitter’s marketing team to add as many as 60,000 users in a single day, but it isn’t nearly so fascinating as the story of how they did it.Learn to tell a story, and your users will emotionally connect to your business and your products.
2. Use social media to target specific users
The social media giants that dominate the web house an enormous database of information on their millions of users. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t be utilising these databases to target specific users who could find value in your business and products.On a simpler level, it’s also a brilliant tool for market research.Need to get some rough numbers on people that are interested in both Spotify and video games? How about breaking it down by gender? Age group? Country of origin? The options are nearly endless.By going through the process of creating ads on Facebook and Twitter, for example, you can make sure that your product is being seen by your ideal buyer personas.This is guaranteed to improve conversion numbers and will stop you pouring resources into customers that were never going to be interested in the first place.
3. Learn from your competitors
Competition is healthy. It breeds excellence and the best will always rise to the top.Unless you’re literally the first person in the world to happen upon an idea (in which case, congratulations, that’s no easy feat), you will have competitors.The key is that you have to stop looking at your competitors as mere threats to the success of your business. These businesses are teachers and they will guide your marketing efforts.Their successes, and often their failures, will give you a solid indication of what the most successful marketing strategies are or could be for your business.When you notice levels of interest in them suddenly rise, take a moment to figure out what’s changed. Have they redesigned their website? Started focusing their efforts on a specific social media platform? Or even come up with an especially fun campaign?We would never advocate copying. It’ll never be as good as an original idea and you could find yourself taking some heat from their legal team. What you should be doing is taking inspiration, generating new ideas with your crack team and applying them to your own business.
4. Become a thought leader
Greater than any number of expensive, fancy outbound ads being thrust into your potential customers’ faces is positioning yourself as such an authoritative source on a topic that people will come to you.You might think that this method will take too long.It’s true that inbound marketing is ordinarily a marathon, rather than a sprint, but there are methods of establishing yourself as a thought leader at a rapid pace.The key is to connect all of your original content to other established sources and brands. Every time you spot an opportunity to guest post on a larger businesses blog, take it. Mention brands (positively!) in your content and let them know; they’ll probably share the post on social media. Get involved with events in your industry, and connect with the people who attend.Above all, produce expertly-researched, well-written, easily-digestible content and post it often on a blog attached to your website. If people can read it, connect with it and get value from it, they’ll share it.If you can do all of the above, and do it well, you’ve just got your business in the minds of a huge number of potential customers who now know that you’re seriously well informed and able to solve their problems.
5. Track everything
Growth hacking is all about rapidly switching up your methods and finding what works.You’ll never know how effective your strategies are if you’re not constantly monitoring all the changes in your business.There are so many pieces of software out there now that help you easily assess every facet of your marketing strategy that there’s really no excuse to not be tracking everything.Following these tips will have your business booming before long. It’s time to join the thousands of companies already feeling the benefit of growth hacking.Incisive Edge is proud to be a Community Partner of TechDay London.