Since growth hacking is still a relatively new concept, there is still a lot of misconception and confusion regarding it. Simply put, growth hacking is the process of rapidly experimenting with different marketing and product development techniques with the intention of quickly “pivoting” based on quick results and potentially lucrative opportunities. Since growth hacking steps out of the box of traditional experimentation, there are no rules, tools, or guidelines that companies need to follow. Rather, growth hacking combines marketing, development, design, engineering, data, and analytics in an experiment-driven technique to determine the most effective way to grow a business.
Over time, growth hacking has become a significant way for startups and companies of various sizes to set themselves apart from the competition. For this reason, PR agencies have leveraged their expertise in public relations to help startups to boost their growth and reach wider audiences.
For example, with Pressfarm‘s help, businesses can increase their online visibility, heighten their brand awareness to potential customers and investors, and amplify their social reach. The team at Pressfarm is skilled at helping companies create newsworthy quality content from email pitches, press releases, guest posts, and media kits. Ultimately, Pressfarm has what it takes to help your startup generate the buzz it truly deserves.
What is Growth Hacking?
As mentioned previously, there is no rigid set of rigid guidelines to follow if you want to succeed with growth hacking and attain overall success for your business. Growth hacking truly depends on your company’s ability to scale its marketing and product development processes and generate results rapidly. When going into any growth-hacking campaign, the most critical requirement is to understand and feel comfortable with the concept of spending time on an initiative that might not pay off.
Growth hacking is the perfect way to train companies to accept failure, rapidly pivot, and try something new. It has become an essential tactic that startups and entrepreneurs use due to their limited budget to invest in paid social and paid search, endless marketing tools, and other cost-prohibitive measures. Growth hacking has eliminated the need to spend tons of money instead of using innovation and creativity as primary tools to scale a business.
While there is some skepticism because these techniques have the potential for failure, growth hacking works by focusing primarily on growth as a metric for a business to move quickly through virality, customer acquisition and retention, web traffic, and social media activity.
Let us look at some significant benefits of growth hacking:
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Market Disruption
When there is a disruption in the market, consumers go through significant changes in how they think, resolve problems, and buy products. During this time, you can either fall short or disrupt the current market by introducing consumers to new ways of doing and buying things.
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Speed & Agility
Growth hacking is all about being ahead of the game. Many companies and entrepreneurs know that if they take too long to bring a product or service to market, they risk their competition beating them out of the market, which can be bad for their business and reputation. Speed and agility remain crucial if you want to conquer the market in your specific industry. Growth hacking has eliminated a company’s need to restrict themselves to a particular marketing strategy and allows them to move quickly on potentially profitable campaigns.
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Data
Due to the current business landscape, data and metrics play a huge role in the success of companies. Data from social media engagements to web traffic is what provides the foundation for any business decision. Growth hacking has allowed companies to gather data faster without having to blow their budget unnecessarily. Through analytics, companies can realize faster what type of content they need to share and how they can relate to their audiences in different ways.
The Growth Hacking AAARRR Funnel
In order to effectively growth hack, you need to understand that the traditional sales funnel just won’t cut it anymore. Before you decide to go down the unconventional path, you need to figure out what goals you want to achieve. This could be increasing traffic, producing more conversions, or increasing sales. From there, you can create a custom funnel and use those strategies to stimulate maximum growth.
Also known as “pirate metrics,” the AAARRR Funnel is the framework that has helped many businesses grow and remain successful over time. Since its development in 1992, it is still considered one of the best business tools and an excellent starting point for companies building their growth plan. The funnel stages include; awareness, acquisition, activation, revenue, retention, and referral.
1) Awareness
The ultimate goal of awareness is to increase the volume of people that a company can reach. Generally, it is the first natural step in the product life cycle because it brings more users and customers through the marketing funnel. The first goal is to build up a brand and introduce it to the market because with awareness, companies can easily track impressions, website visits, and Google searches with the brand name.
Awareness can be considered the easiest part of the funnel because establishing a brand presence tends to be the most creative aspect of any business’s growth journey. To effectively growth hack awareness, companies need to understand; who and what the brand is, how the brand resonates with its existing audience, and who its target customer base is.
2) Acquisition
The acquisition stage is exactly what it sounds like; companies gather information from their leads, including demographic details like names, emails, and geographic locations. The information obtained from this stage can be taken once a user is identified adequately through interactions with the company’s website. This information can then be used to send the user email newsletters and promos. By gathering this information, companies can create ideal buyer personas. These personas help them know how they should be positioned in the target market and guide actual buyers through the buyer’s journey.
How people find your company and transform into customers relies heavily on what you provide them, whether through email or social media. These are tried and true methods for finding the right people to resonate with the brand.
3) Activation
An essential part of this equation is your brand’s solution to your potential customer’s problem or need. To effectively use this stage, your company’s solution and the potential consumer’s needs need to match up. Activation can be anything from a lead spending time on a brand’s website when they use a promo code or use a free trial from your company. You can track activation by tracking event actions and increasing your website’s user-friendliness and user experience.
Activation and acquisition tend to overlap because both focus on getting existing and potential customers to interact with a brand. While activation focuses on the first experience that customers have with the actual product or service, both are essential. For example, acquisition is getting customers to download an app; activation is getting them to not delete it after using it only once.
4) Retention
Once your company gains new customers, the next consideration is your ability to retain them. Through growth hacking, retaining customers has become the most inexpensive but essential part of the retention step. To accomplish this, you need to keep your leads as close as possible once they have made an initial purchase or signed up for emails. The best way to keep customers generally involves sending email alerts for new products, events, and time-restricted sales of features. Along with that, updating social media platforms and blog content is key to retention.
The retention stage measures how many customers you can keep around and how many are leaving.
5) Referral
Word-of-mouth marketing remains an important concept, especially in the digital age. It is very helpful and can be a long-term tool for getting leads and getting existing customers to act as brand ambassadors. They can refer products or services to other potential customers, which can be massively beneficial to your business. This step provides free marketing and proof that your company has established its brand presence tangibly and respectably. Companies can encourage these referrals by encouraging customers who have had previous positive experiences with the brand to talk about the brand through referral programs or social media campaigns.
A company’s growth happens when people are talking about their products and recommending them to the people who trust them. This is why it is still considered the most underrated but essential aspect of any AAARR funnel.
6) Revenue
Finally, revenue is a way of describing the money that companies obtain after the customer acquisition costs. Companies also define CAC as advertising, sales, and other relevant expenses to bring a customer’s attention. By understanding how customers are moving through the funnel and providing detailed information about it, companies can understand how to increase their lifetime value and lessen their CAC.
Revenue is considered to be the final step of the funnel. You need to evaluate all previous actions individually to grow revenue and compare your LTV against their CAC effectively.
Growth Hacking Strategies
Since there is no solid set of rules that companies need to follow when growth hacking, it can be difficult to find unique strategies, especially given how many companies are adopting growth hacking. Currently, there are articles out there that list dozens of techniques that may or may not be related to effective growth hacking strategies. Let us look at some that will work for companies at the moment and in the foreseeable future.
1) Be Data-Driven
Growth hacking is driven primarily by data, and data-driven marketing tactics have proven to increase revenue. As mentioned previously, growth hacking has taken the non-traditional route to market because it allows you to follow your path through trial and error and then exploit it for all it’s worth.
You need to consider all marketing channels before diving into any marketing campaign to growth hack effectively. Even if you’ve started with zero data, there are multiple frameworks to determine your best marketing channels. For example, you can use analytical, inexpensive, creative, and innovative methods to grow your customer base when you have no data to start with. Before you start trying to make sense of their data, you need to identify your company’s primary metrics or key performance indicators (KPIs). Marketing metrics and KPIs are measurable values that you use to demonstrate the effectiveness of your campaign across all marketing channels. Some of the top KPIs measured include; marketing qualified leads, funnel conversion rates, sales qualified leads, customer engagement, return on investment, customer lifetime value, and customer acquisition cost.
2) Prepare an Email Waiting List & Pre-Launch
To have a robust growth hacking strategy, you should create an email list to gain new leads and enable conversation. Building an email list helps you gather customer data and reach your audience ahead of time.
However, simply building the email list is not enough since its success depends on how well your company can interact with its target audience. By pre-launching your product to the public and gaining insight into how well customers like it before the company plans to officially launch, you can ensure that the product will generate enough attention before you even send the first email. You can display your products to a universal audience and gain ideas from their feedback to further refine your product and features. The success of your official launch depends on the favorable reception of the brand and its products. The objective of this strategy is to reach out to niche consumer bases and attract more customers.
3) Run Viral Contests Online
Going viral has become attractive to companies that want to gain more followers or increase sales. Contests or reward-based campaigns have the natural ability to go viral and open up the opportunity for lots of innovative ideas for the rewards, prizes, and incentives that a company decides to offer.
There is no one way to go viral. Nevertheless, viral advocacy has been and always will be the most effective way to establish growth for your product, brand, or cause. This is due to word-of-mouth marketing, authentic evangelism, and community activism.
4) Leverage social media
Growth hacking and social media work together when you need to achieve fast and massive growth on a small budget. It can also help you attract more users to your social media accounts. Through increased traffic across multiple channels, you can gain more subscribers and followers. This will result in generating more leads and increasing conversions.
It can be a challenging task for brands to dominate popular social media platforms because of the sheer amount of information and competition that exists at the moment. To successfully gain visibility, you need to devise a distribution strategy that can help cut through the noise and present your content in front of relevant audiences at all times. When you can growth hack a platform to get optimal results, it can lead your brand into a better financial position and the highest traffic from your site to your desired social platform.
If you can learn to captivate users’ emotions through your branded content, then you are likely to get high engagement. You can also use growth hacking tools to optimize your social media marketing campaigns and create a buzz around the brand’s offerings. When you add growth hacking to your lead generation process, you will see a collaborative relationship between buyers and sellers. To see that, you need to optimize your organic search, SEO, email advertising, and content marketing using lead generation growth hacking. A few hacks that you can employ can include allowing logins using Facebook and Gmail, offering special coupons, investing in customers through referral programs, integrating live chats and chatbots, and using pop-ups effectively.
5) Get Influencers to Review Products
Influencer marketing can positively impact your company when done correctly. The main thing is finding and engaging with the right influencers. Social media influencers have become essential individuals to get the word out there about a product or service. For this reason, many companies have added using influencers to their growth hacking plan. By offering a free account in exchange for reviews, you can reach an even larger audience and establish brand loyalty. In addition to getting influencers to review products or services, you can also invite people and actual consumers to be brand ambassadors and contribute to your content in exchange for items. This is a great way to not only get quality content but also free promotion.
6) Run Retargeting Campaigns
It is possible that a campaign may not be successful the first time that it launches. So, to test whether or not it will work, you can consider retargeting your campaigns to new audiences. Even so, retargeting a user who bounces immediately from a company’s owned media can be a waste of money and annoying. So, you need to consider exactly who you want to reach and how you are going to retarget your audiences.
7) Take Advantage of Chatbots ASAP
Chatbots are one of the many growth hacks that have become essential growth hacking tools. If you have a website, a chatbot will significantly increase engagement and open rates, and provide end-to-end automation.
9) Do guest posting/blogging
Guest posting is an effective strategy for your company to get your product some free publicity. This can help your brand to gain a bigger audience for additional exposure and establish a reputation as a thought leader. You should try and contact websites and bloggers that already have authority in their industry and are trusted by their multiple followers. Ultimately, bloggers are interested in publishing high-quality content from their blogs to attract new readers and retain their current ones. Guest posting is a win-win situation for both your brand and the bloggers you partner with because you both want to rank higher in search engines, generate excellent online visibility and attract more readers.
The main goal is to find sites that are relevant to your niche or industry. The content on the blog needs to be focused on the niche, and the readers of the blog should be interested in the industry. Beyond that, the blog needs to have an engaged readership, and the owner of the blog should also be active on social media. There are many ways to find the ideal blog, but search engines are the best bet.
Keyword searches are the best way to find blogs, and the searches should lead companies to a blog’s guest post guidelines page, a submission page, or actual guest posts written by people. Other ways to search include: looking for prolific guest bloggers, searching for competitor backlinks, social searches, and more. Pressfarm can help with this too. With a network of quality blogs, the team at Pressfarm can not only identify the best blogs for your articles but also write engaging guest posts for your brand.
Examples of Successful Growth Hacking
Facebook’s growth hacks have helped the social media network grow to the billions. It’s true that it’s not possible to credit one growth hack for the humongous growth experienced by the network. However, when the company first started, it used a specific growth hack to reach millions of users.
That growth hack was creating a closed network. When Facebook began, it closed its network to users outside of Harvard University. Initially, it was used by students within the university to communicate with each other. When other students outside the university or from other schools heard about it, they wanted to join. But it was closed and they couldn’t. Slowly, Zuckerberg opened up the network to people outside the university, but only around their town. Soon enough, the social network went viral around the United States. Facebook had created a notion of demand, and people were joining in the millions soon after. The network now has 1.59 billion people and is valued at $642.84 billion.
By creating a feel of the closed network, the company created the need for it. A limited supply of something great leads to unlimited demand. Facebook still benefits from this growth hack to date.
WhatsApp’s growth hacking technique and approach were inexpensive and effective by focusing on creating the services people needed. The application was efficient; it was tailored for convenience with features that bring a new dimension to effective communication.
The pervasiveness of the app was promoted mainly by word-of-mouth publicity which is the most credible form of viral promotion. The key to WhatsApp’s success hinged on creating a product that was functional, effective, and productive.
When Facebook announced its acquisition of WhatsApp in February 2014, it became by far Facebook’s largest acquisition and one of the biggest that Silicon Valley had ever seen. WhatsApp helped fuel Facebook’s growth in developing markets where internet connectivity was sparse, where WhatsApp was widely used. Facebook was then able to gain access to those mobile user bases. This also boosted the company’s Internet.org initiative – their plan to implement internet access to parts of the world that were not yet online.
Quora
When Quora began, the idea was to be a platform where people engage in quality conversations. While it might be easy to compare Quora to other forums, Quora is nothing like any of them. And that was precisely why the founders came up with the website; to be different.
The most effective growth hack was the earning of credits when your answers get upvoted. You can, in turn, use these credits to ask somebody who you are following – like Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales – to answer a question. How awesome is that? People, therefore, struggle to answer other users’ questions correctly just to earn the credits. If you have many credits, you can ask several thought leaders to answer your question so that you can get varied opinions to learn from.
Airbnb
This is a case of a startup that used an established business to grow its company. Airbnb realized that many people were posting their houses for rent on Craigslist. Given that this was their target market, Airbnb approached the same people and asked them to post duplicate listings on their platform. Since they knew that all they needed was to earn money from their vacant houses, these users were okay with posting Airbnb places. Within no time, the company was getting hundreds of new listings every day. As people shared their listings on social media, the company grew to hundreds of millions of dollars.
If you joined Twitter when it started, you are probably no longer on the platform. That was the case for the millions of users who joined Twitter in the very first weeks. Twitter realized that they experienced spikes in traffic when they launched with many people creating accounts. However, some people abandoned their accounts after signing up. In response, Twitter had to devise ways to make the new users stick and continue to use their accounts.
The growth hack that helped them achieve this was the suggestions of people to follow after you sign up. This enabled people to follow at least ten active accounts within their areas of interest. When they first signed up, the new users got people to interact with off the bat. This gave them more reasons to return. This growth hack allowed Twitter to retain many of its users, growing to 300 million active monthly users to date.
LinkedIn had many difficulties getting new users until they allowed people to create public profiles that are indexed by search engines and shown to users who search for you online. Today, if you are on LinkedIn and somebody needs to find you, your LinkedIn profile appears when they’re searching for your name on Google.
LinkedIn makes it impossible for people to create fake accounts of themselves. By showing the user’s public profile on search engines, LinkedIn grew its users to hundreds of millions. Before then, finding people was so tricky unless those people were celebrities. Now, thanks to that LinkedIn hack, if you create a LinkedIn profile, and I’m looking for you, I will find you.
YouTube
When YouTube started, they didn’t like the idea of people watching videos uploaded to their platform from other websites, mainly because they needed to keep more users on their site. Soon after, they realized their growth numbers weren’t that impressive and decided to test the embed option. A few days later, everyone who owned a website, from bloggers to publishing companies like The Washington Post, was embedding videos from YouTube onto their posts. People could head over to YouTube to watch more videos or create accounts and upload their videos. The growth was immense, and this is the growth hack that launched today’s video giant.
Dropbox
Dropbox discovered that the cost of acquiring new users in a field where both Microsoft and Google were competing was very high. The only way was to growth hack their way through the competition. That’s precisely what they did by deciding to give 2 GB of cloud space away for free to every user who joins. However, that wasn’t the growth hack. The real hack was when they said that by inviting new users to join, you get an extra 650 MB of space per user who signs up.
This was an excellent onboarding technique because Dropbox slowly went from a few users to over a hundred million users about two years later. More people invited their friends to join just to get more space. This worked as a win-win for both Dropbox and the users.
The second hack was the creation of shared folders. If anything, they were the first company to create share folders. A team in a company can now work off the same folder from different locations. This growth hack invited more businesses, both large and small, to purchase a Dropbox subscription, leading the company to profitability.
Spotify
Spotify is a music and video streaming service with features and functionalities that are pretty robust. To create awareness and increase users, they were able to grow their platform in the early days by leveraging the popularity of Facebook. They designed the service in a way that allows users to post songs on the platform. They let their early users share the music they were listening to on Facebook by integrating both platforms. Facebook slowly became Spotify’s new source of new users who joined in millions of numbers. In turn, these people shared their music on Facebook with their friends, inviting more users. That is how the company became a household name in the music industry.
Instagram allowed its users to share their photos on other social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr, Foursquare, and more. They implemented this feature when Facebook and Twitter were growing. However, both of these media giants had not quite figured out the handling of people’s photos. Instagram experienced especially impressive growth on Facebook because people integrated their Facebook and Instagram profiles, allowing images to appear on both platforms.
As the giant it is, Facebook sent lots of traffic to Instagram, allowing it to garner 300 million monthly users. Since Facebook purchased Instagram, the photo-sharing company has become the second-largest social media network. In fact, Instagram has actually dethroned Twitter from that position.
The Instagram Algorithm is interesting because it is organized by interest, relationship, and timeliness. It serves users based on their past interactions with similar content. It also prioritizes posts from accounts they interact with regularly through likes and comments. Recent posts are also prioritized on top of the feed. Some growth hacks that the platform has used include; creating visual content, using influencer marketing, setting up shoppable posts, running ads, utilizing conversions to drive more sales, using story highlights, and more.
Tinder
Launched in 2012, Tinder is a dating app that has established itself as one of the powerhouses in the new dating landscape. Its success comes down to its focus on four primary growth strategies which include word-of-mouth marketing, ease of use, gamification, and experiential marketing. Tinder has managed to expand its operations in more than 190 countries and has more than 55 million active users. The dating app matches users to other people based on geographic proximity. Users just need to swipe right to “like” someone or left to “pass on them” through its simple interface.
From the beginning, the founders were confident of the product’s capabilities. With clarity and a strong vision, they foresaw massive customer acquisition through word-of-mouth marketing. This is despite the fact that there were no genuine buyers or suppliers for the app unless users decided to get more exclusive features. Their ability to understand that having women on the platform was very important to trigger men’s participation was what garnered their success. Ex-VP of marketing, Whitney Wolfe-Herd, launched the attempt to reach women by going to college campuses and making exciting pitches to the company’s target demographics.
Thanks to that strategy, Tinder’s user base went from less than 5000 users to almost 15000 with just one college visit. Secondly, Tinder provided ease of use for its users who had previously shied away from using dating apps because of how time-consuming it was to create the right profile and the existing gaps in the digital dating world that ranged from spam messages to fear of rejection.
The easy setup of connecting a Facebook account or logging in through a mobile phone made it quick and easy to launch the user into the world of dating. Additionally, it got rid of the fear of rejection because the only action that needed to be taken was either swiping left or right, and Tinder keeps it a secret if a user did not swipe right on another. Thirdly, the dating app provides many potential matches that a user could choose from. This gamifies the whole process by creating elements that can also be considered as rewards to the user. Its simple gamified approach made it so users can continuously swipe on potential matches.
Through its variable rewards component, the desire for users to swipe successfully became the underlying factor of success.
Tinder’s experiential marketing
Tinder also implemented experiential marketing or “engagement marketing” to invite audiences to interact with the business in a real-world situation. The campaigns that they created for experiential marketing include: Tinder and Domino’s collaboration: Pizza is love. Here, they launched a campaign that allowed men and women to swipe for the chance to get free pizza and discounts; Fox Entertainment and Tinder also collaborated with their show The Mindy Project where characters were presented as Tinder users to promote the show. Lastly, they launched Tinder Plus, a paid subscription on the app, through their Air Experience. Through the campaign, Tinder attracted over 1,000 decision-makers, media moguls, and celebrities to Los Angeles’ Hanger 8. This increased media exposure with more than 170 million impressions and event coverage from major media publications.
Slack
Slack is one of the fastest-growing B2B SaaS businesses currently on the market. The founder wanted to create a solution for poor productivity and increased stress due to poor communication. Slack provided a solution that combined a freemium model and word-of-mouth marketing for its users. This tactic worked, and Slack grew to over 500,000 daily active users in just one year.
Though Slack was not the first office chat app, it experienced the most impressive early growth. One of the critical factors of their success was a market where, despite having quite a number of competitors, a solution didn’t really exist. Along with providing a solution, another critical factor was their attention to detail when creating a genuinely useful, high-quality product. They ensured that it was easy to set up, easy to use, compatible with a wide range of other services, and reliable across devices.
When it came to gaining its initial users, the team knew that they didn’t just need to use the product themselves.They also needed to observe how it worked in the outside world. They asked 6-10 companies to observe how they functioned for teams of different needs and sizes. The process continued, and they shared Slack with progressively larger groups and made changes and improvements. They also employed user feedback to listen to, learn from, and respond to feedback from a customer satisfaction perspective and product development purposes.
OptinMonster
OptinMonster used one of the most famous growth hacking strategies to be successful. The “Powered By” growth hack is an excellent way for companies to deploy their brand identity within any embedded content or widgets that consumers see on their site.
This strategy has worked so well because it gives users the option of whether to enable or disable the links in their settings, providing a positive user experience.
The company wanted to create a solution for businesses struggling to collect emails because tools were not easy to use or were far too expensive. As a result, they decided to build powerful enterprise-level technology to help businesses grow their customer base and revenue. Since their launch, they have been improving conversations for small independent businesses and Fortune 500 companies. They have been considered thought leaders in their industry because of their ability for rapid growth and innovation. Whatever the marketing conditions or current trends, companies will always rate OptinMonster as the best choice to help the startup gain a competitive business advantage and stay ahead of the curve.
Robinhood
The zero-commission stock trading app used the “waiting list/limited availability” growth hack to drive brand awareness and create an air of excitement around the app. Their landing page had a sign-up that included gaining priority access to the app with a few simple social shares. Using this growth hack, they had a waiting list of 1 million people within just one year.
By creating a level of exclusivity for the app, they collected email addresses. They notified their followers and users of everything new that was happening with the company and their official launch date. That is the best way to handle an influx of traffic that a company is not yet ready to serve is to build up a feeling of exclusivity. It also brings in FOMO for users because rather than just saying “Sign Up to Be Notified When Registration Opens,” companies can say “membership closing soon,” “apply to join the community,” and so on.
The power of the freemium model
Additionally, Robinhood did not charge a commission for standard trades, working on a freemium model. Where customers were only charged for margin lending, customers felt that Robinhood was revolutionary because they could trade for free. According to co-founders Baiju Bhatt and Vladimir Tenev, the 2008 financial crisis, followed by the Occupy Wall Street movement, was the source of inspiration to create Robinhood. In addition, people started losing faith in the financial system, only hedge fund insiders had access to tools and resources that other people did not have. As a result, the team was inspired to build something meaningful that empowers consumers. They saw the opportunity to provide a product that made investing accessible, is mobile-first, and dramatically reduced cost.
Fortnite
Fortnite’s growth hacking strategy altered the way marketing happens in the gaming industry. In the past, every gaming company’s default strategy was to make a game, spend millions of dollars promoting the game, and then launch it to gain revenue. However, Epic Games did something completely unheard of in the industry, and they made their game completely free.
The game was not even popular in its first year of existence, but it found ways to retain its existing customers because its tactics were utterly different from what gamers were used to. By making the game completely free and constantly providing huge in-game updates, they could create hype. The availability of VPNs for Fortnite gave players a sense of security. They also launched limited-time game mods to create FOMO among their users. This tactic encouraged gamers to keep coming back so that they would not miss out on the experience. They were also able to monetize the game by selling in-game items like characters and weapons, skins as well as dance moves.
Dollar Shave Club
While picking a fight with other companies within the same industry is not the best idea, choosing a solid argument can be a deadly and effective growth hacking strategy. Dollar Shave Club used video marketing to declare “war’ on other razor industry giants by just asking whether consumers like spending an obscene amount of money on a brand named razor. They also asked whether consumers really needed the additional features of expensive razors. Their video marketing proved successful because the video went viral and got about 26M views. Companies need to think of a problem in their industry and use content marketing to show how their product can solve them. Furthermore, video marketing is an effective way to show a brand’s personality and deliver its message.
PayPal
The genius part about today’s tech is that you can create bots online to do anything yourself. That was the case with PayPal, launched in 1998. It leveraged eBay’s popularity as a distribution platform to grow into a powerhouse in the finance industry. PayPal created bots that would buy items on eBay using Paypal as a payment method.
Sellers on eBay realized that PayPal was appearing so frequently as a payment method and decided to add it to the payment methods on their listings to avoid missing out on sales. As they continued to offer this payment method, more people on eBay joined PayPal and realized that the platform offered a straightforward way of buying goods online.
Eventually, eBay added PayPal as a payment method. eBay later went on to buy PayPal for billions of dollars several years later after becoming a required payment method for eBay buyers and sellers.
Pinterest’s growth hack was inspired by Facebook. When Pinterest first launched, you couldn’t just create an account if you wanted to. You had to receive an invitation to the platform first. This method got them a lot of press. With that publicity and the limited supply of invitations, several people were eager to join the social media network. They created a feeling of scarcity, which led to rising demand. Eventually, when they opened the platform to everyone, the platform grew fast. It’s only about three years now, but they are already approaching 50 million users fast.
Another growth hack employed by Pinterest was the infinite scroll, removing the need for pages to load. That cleared the issues that include website speed, and multiple reloads as you move from one page to another. Consequently, the time people spend pinning stuff on Pinterest increased, allowing them to keep most of their users for long periods.
Growth hacking shouldn’t be complicated. With these tips and examples, you can develop the right growth hacking strategy and catapult your brand to success.
How Pressfarm can help
For an entrepreneur, the brand image you create can determine your success or failure. At Pressfarm, we help companies define the right narrative in the media for their brand – either to improve their credibility or resolve a PR crisis. If you are an entrepreneur wondering how to improve your company’s publicity, get in touch with us. We can help you to craft and distribute your press releases, develop compelling guest posts and design eye-catching media kits for your brand.
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