Growth Hacking: Is the Game Worth the Candle?


Growth Hacking: Is the Game Worth the Candle?
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Growth hacking tends to be one of the best marketing strategies that skyrocket business. 

However, here is a question – is growth hacking still as actionable as it was a decade ago?

To get a detailed answer to this question, you need to know everything about growth hacking. 

In this guide, you will get familiar with growth hacking and find out whether it works these days. 

Let’s start!

Growth Hacking Basics

Growth marketing or growth hacking is a marketing strategy that applies tactics to help the site grow in a blink of an eye. 

This type of marketing includes competitor analysis to figure out the most actionable and resultative ways for your business. The main idea is to save the budget and time. 

You might wonder whether growth hacking words today. 

It depends on your creativity. In other words, if you can come up with approaches to promote your business and attract people – it would work. 

By the way, growth marketing reminds of old-fashioned guerrilla marketing. Guerrilla marketing focuses on drawing people’s attention to business using creative tactics. 

The advertising company of the movie “Minions” with the help of McDonald’s is a great example of guerrilla marketing.

In the case of growth marketing, the essence of the strategy is the same. 

Besides, the majority of growth marketing strategies are outdated. Therefore, it makes no sense to use them in practice. Especially, if you have just launched a startup. 

You might wonder – what is the point then? Are there other ways that could help promote your business? 

Keep on reading and you’ll find out! 

Brand-Building as a Solution

Growth marketing promises quick wins. It’s true. But if you want to play the long game, you should work on brand-building. And the very first thing to do is to build an integrated marketing communications strategy. 

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IMC strategy helps create an inclusive brand message that you could use across all social media channels and reach your target audience. 

This strategy combines growth marketing and brand-building tactics. Hence, you will be able to achieve quick results with a long-term perspective. 

By the way, there is business research from Peter Field and Les Bennet. It states that marketers should take a 60/40 split approach in their activity. The idea behind this approach is the following: 

  • 60% of the advertising budget goes on brand-building
  • 40% goes on increasing the level of sales

Here is an example of how it works. Assume that your marketing budget is $2,000. According to a “60/40” scheme, you should spend $800 on paid ads (short-term sales) and $1200 on brand-building. 

Brand-building activities may include sponsorships, guest blogging, communication with the audience, running a YouTube channel, podcasting, live streaming, etc. Workflow automation will help you embrace the entire process easier. 

You may ask yourself – what activity is worth investing in the most? 

Marketing funnel will answer this question.

You are aware of the marketing funnel stages – awareness, interest, consideration, and conversion. Here is what happens at each stage:

  • Awareness (focus on attracting target audience)
  • Interest (raise the problem and suggest your product as a solution)
  • Consideration (convince potential customers that your product is the only solution to the problem)
  • Conversion (motivate people to become your customers)

Now, let’s review four channels you can use instead of growth hacking. 

Marketing channels that do duty for growth marketing

Assume that you have already built a brand. It has gotten some recognition in the market. Nevertheless, you must move ahead and promote it further. 

The next four marketing channels will help you with this. Let’s review each channel in detail. 

  1. PPC
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PPC is the first channel that comes to mind when you need rapid growth for the brand. Specifically, running ads on Google. 

However, you shouldn’t expect a high ROI because Google ads are not cheap. Despite this fact, this type of ad drives website traffic and brings sales. 

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To run ads on Google, you need to explore target keywords – what people search online to buy from you. And here is a growth hack that will help you a lot. 

Analyze keywords your competitors spend their money on. Review these keywords and use some of them for your Google ads. To figure out keywords, go to the Site Explorer tool from Ahrefs. Paste the competitor’s site URL and review the “Paid keywords” report. 

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Thanks to this report, you can see the list of keywords your competitors bid on. Plus, the estimated monthly traffic each keyword drives. 

Collect the most lucrative keywords and create your ads on Google. 

  1. SEO

Search engine optimization isn’t about rapid growth. If you want to rank high in the SERP, then it will take 12 months of work on average. Likely, this channel promises to acquire customers organically regularly. 

SEO allows you to target keywords for every stage of the marketing funnel. 

What is the growth hack of SEO?

Yes, SEO is an ongoing process but you can speed it up by building links. 

Backlinks are one of the ranking signals Google takes into account. The more backlinks a page has, the higher it will rank in the SERP. 

To conclude, focus on link building that you can steal from competitors. How to do this?

Grab the competitor’s site and analyze it with Site Explorer again. Review the report “Backlinks” to see what new backlinks your competitor has acquired.

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Skim through the report and build links from trusted resources only. 

  1. CRO

Conversion rate optimization stands behind experimenting with the site’s landing page. The goal is to find the best option for landing pages that will help increase the percentage of conversions

CRO practice includes brainstorming CTAs, color choices for landing pages, content, etc. 

The growth hack is to improve landing pages by analyzing them via Google Analytics. Review the offers landing pages have and change CTAs accordingly. 

  1. Email marketing

One more channel is under your control – email. Email marketing allows you to reach out to your subscribers whenever you want. And this channel embraces all stages of the marketing funnel. 

There are a number of ways you can add people to your email list. Offer discounts, free courses, trials, etc. What’s more important, you can attract potential email list subscribers from product review sites. 

Work with a product review blogger who would write and post reviews of your products across such sites. These reviews should include a call to action to subscribe to your email list. 

The email marketing growth hack is about content updating. By updating content you will have some new information to offer. And you can ask people to share their email in return for a fresh content update. 

To Sum Up

Even though growth hacking is outdated it still works these days. Moreover, there is nothing better than using creativity to grow your business. 

Blend growth hacking with brand-building and use marketing channels. It will help you rip the benefits in a long-term game. 

If you think the post lacks more tips, feel free to share your ideas in the comments. 


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Sikander Zaman
writing is my profession, doing this from long time. writing for many online websites one of them is scoopearth