Growth hacking is a term that is widely used within the marketing industry, but one which can be difficult to understand.
I often get asked what growth hacking actually means, and exactly how to hack growth.
Before I share with you an in-depth checklist, I first want to share with you the meaning of growth hacking.
Growth hacking is “a process of rapid experimentation across marketing channels and product development to identify the most efficient ways to grow a business.”
We have just a few short weeks until we enter a brand new year and I want to make sure you start 2018 off the right way.
I was inspired to write this piece of content about growth hacking after coming across a great infographic on Visual.ly by Click Convert Sell.
This inspired me to go into more detail around growth-hacking based on my experience, and a checklist that will help you grow your business online, especially as we move into 2018.
Five Key Questions For You To Answer
Before we go through the rest of the checklist, I have five questions I would like you to answer and think about before reading further;
- How are you going to acquire new customers?
- Are you offering a great first experience online?
- How are you retaining repeat customers?
- Are you making enough money to sustain and grow your business?
- Are you building brand advocates and generating referrals?
Business Checklist
When it comes to growth hacking, it can be a difficult and long process. To help you with this, I have created a simple yet extensive checklist based on powerful ways you can manage your businesses success. You may be doing some of the below, but think about everything I share with you.
- Tracking your sales
- Using dashboards to save time
- Listening to what is being said about your brand online
- Understanding your brand positioning and your key competitors
- Promoting your business (I will talk more about this below)
- Offering a seamless customer purchasing experience
- Multi-channel marketing
- Customer loyalty program
- Analysing your sales process
- Pricing and product/service upsells based on a customers wants and needs
Defining Your Business & Target Customer
The above checklist may be quite overwhelming, but running a business is no easy feat. I now want to take you through the importance of defining your business, and target customer in this growth hacking process.
I talk about this in great detail in my book; Think #Digital First, so I will just give you a brief overview of what you need to consider when defining your business and target customer.
- Identifying your target market based on demographics, behaviours and characteristics
- Creating a breakdown of your competitors and their target audience
- Understanding and defining your USP (unique selling proposition)
- Creating an elevator pitch, and mission statement for your business
- Identifying the problems, frustrations and needs in your industry, and for your target customer
- Identifying where you target customers most like to hang out
- Understanding the process in which your audience will go through when purchasing a product/service.
Marketing Checklist
In the infographic created by Click Convert Sell, they detail 41 different “marketing weapons” as part of their checklist. I want to highlight a selection of these, and the ones that I feel are the most important.
#1: Identifying the customer’s pain: as I mentioned above, understanding the problems your customers are facing, and the reasons “why” your product/service is solving their pain is key
#2: Repurposing content: as you will be spending your time and money creating content, you want to get as much engagement and traffic as possible, so repurposing your content is important.
#3: Guest blogging: I speak a lot about guest blogging because I have personally generated thousands of leads, and website hits from writing content on influential sites in my industry.
#4: Email automation: having email automation set up based on products/services you offer is a great way to further upsell what you are offering.
#5: Create downloadable content: I have various free guides and resources that are available to download, but in turn I ask for a name and email address. I do this so that I can continue the nurturing process through email marketing
#6: Case studies/recommendations: both case studies and recommendations will give your business social proof. This will help you build authority and trust online
#7: Website pop-ups: I use a great tool called Optinmonster that allows me to create website pop-ups at different times e.g. within 30 seconds of someone landing on my website, and when someone is about to leave my website.
#8: Webinars: running a webinar is a great way to position yourself as a thought leader in your industry, and gives you a great piece of content that can generate future leads.
#9: Discounts and offers: I generated thousands of pounds over the Black Friday/Cyber Monday weekend because I offered a large discount on all of my products and services. It cost me next to nothing to do this, and the outcome was extremely successful.
#10: Engage with influencers: during my journey to becoming an influencer in my industry, I engaged regularly with, and built relationships with experts in my industry.
There is a section in the infographic called Niche Domination Engine which lists a number of things you should consider when it comes to niche marketing. This is a very specific checklist, so if you would like to see what is included in this, click here
Measuring Your Goals
Measuring your success is going to be a huge part of your growth hacking strategy. Without knowing how well something is performing you won’t be able to maximise your efforts. This can be broken down into five sections.
#1: Opt Ins
If, like me, you actively use opt-ins for email marketing purposes, this is something you must be tracking. When I use OptinMonster, I will always analyse the outcome based on visitors to that opt-in/pop-up, leads generated and click-through rate.
#2: Conversion Rate Optimisation
Do you know how each product/service you offer is converting based on your marketing efforts? You need to be analysing your conversion rate so that you can optimise your strategy to get the best results.
#3: Referral Program
Do you have a program in place whereby you have partners or customers who talk about your business, and generate leads for you? If this is part of your business model, you should have a referral program in place to cater for this.
#4: Pirate Metrics
Pirate metrics was created by Dave McClure. It is a customer-lifecycle framework that you can use to determine where you should focus on optimising your marketing funnel, to stay as time efficient as possible.
#5: Incentives
If you are successful in your growth hacking, you will have a large database of customers that you want to turn into repeat customers. Think about ways you can incentivise your customers to spend more money with you.
Become An Influencer
This article is not just about starting 2018 off the right way, it’s about building a business that is successful in more than five years time. One of the best ways to sustain success, is to become an influencer.
This does take time. Becoming an influencer is not an overnight thing, and it does mean you have to be consistent. Here are a number of actions you can take to help you become an influencer.
- Run live-streams
- Hold webinars, and promote this online
- Write articles on a consistent basis
- Share press releases when you have a new product/service
- Engage actively on Social Media
- Create and share great infographics
- Focus on a specific niche
- Create videos to promote your business
- Speak at industry-specific events
Automation
The final thing I want to talk to your about is automation.
With the use of automation, sales will happen automatically, and because everything is setup and running without any human interference, your time can be spent elsewhere. This is something I have focused heavily on this year, and have found it to be extremely effective.
#1: Email Marketing (Mailchimp, ActiveCampaign or Infusionsoft are great tools to use)
#2: Landing Pages (Clickfunnels, Thrive and Instapage are good options)
#3: Lead Generation (I use OptinMonster and PushCrew for my website)
#4: Social Media Marketing (Hootsuite is the best scheduling tool for Social Media)
The above are the four key parts of my automation, and the tools I used to help me save time.
I hope that this article on the ultimate growth hacking checklist will help you start 2018 off the right way, and build your business online!
If you want to get more active with your digital marketing, why not sign up to join my 30-day Digital Marketing Challenge beginning on the 1st Jan, 2018.
It’s completely free of charge, and can be done so below!