Ten Growth Marketing Hacks

Growth Hack 6: LinkedIn prioritises SEO

With 93% of all online interactions starting with a search engine, it is obvious that your site’s SEO shouldn’t be neglected. While meta descriptions and canonical URLs can be difficult to grasp, tackling your site’s SEO offers invaluable benefits.

LinkedIn is an example of a company at the forefront of site optimisation. Through a simple change; allowing users to create public profiles that show up organically in search engine results, LinkedIn completely changes the rules of the SEO game.

Before our extensive social media presence, valid search results, when searching a name, company or title, were few and far between. LinkedIn, therefore, had some valuable search-result real-estate, and as a result, were able to create a multi-million dollar viral loop in the business.

Growth Hack 7: YouTube makes it easy to share

From the earliest of days, word-of-mouth is naturally one most powerful marketing tools available. Customer awareness is one of the most difficult stages of the marketing funnel to crack, and any effort to increase awareness puts companies in good stead.

The key to YouTube’s success was to focus on making it easy to share videos and create a community. YouTube presents you with an embed code to easily share on your social media channels, website, or blog. Video suggestions that show up encourage further engagement, making a user more likely to share another video suggested to them.

Sharing Tip: Employ tools like Share Link Generator to encourage people to share your content and expand your outreach. As a personal recommendation carries more social proof than any paid marketing effort, build your brand’s reputation from the bottom up by people that we trust most — our peers.  

Growth Hack 8: Twitter optimises their signup process

For most products, only less than 16% of the market can be classified as an early adopter or innovator and it can be challenging for businesses to get their product in front of the majority.

Twitter experienced the same situation and was able to solve this problem. When Twitter first launched there was a lot of interest and people signed up and shared Twitter across social networks by the thousands. But Twitter hit a roadblock when new users starting dropping off and disengaging.

By thoroughly exploring the key factors that led to the continued use of Twitter, they identified that people were more likely to stick around if they had the following conditions:

• They followed at least 5-10 people
• They had selected interests
• They had created a network

Twitter shaped their sign-up process around this, encouraging users to invest in their account. This dramatically increased engagement.

Growth Hack 9: Tinder thinks outside-the-building

While stepping outside of the building isn’t a growth hack per se, a number of companies have capitalised on growth opportunities with a physical presence.

Tinder swiped their way to success by using offline, in-person strategies to grow user interaction with their app. By identifying their target market, Tinder uncovered that universities were a great place to reach their ideal persona. Through a number of free organised university parties, Tinder significantly increased their customer awareness and acquisition, with only one requirement to attend — that you created an account.

Growth Hack 10: Whatsapp built a great product

The heart of any successful growth hack is to simply build a great product. It may sound cliche but having a great product is a straightforward way of securing user acquisition.

Whatsapp employed clever strategies to enable them to gain 400 million users without spending a dollar on user acquisition. Understanding and delivering key value is the momentum they needed to lead Facebook into buying them out in 2014 for $22 billion. How did they do it? Put simply, they had a great product.

Whatsapp did their research, understood their users’ needs, and continued to iterate until they perfected their product. Nothing else was needed, and they spread like wildfire now with over 450 million daily users in 2018.

Creating a great product tip:  Uncovering what your users want may seem like a monstrous task. Research methods such as developing user personas will uncover who you’re solving for and what their functional, social, emotional, and personal drivers are.

From the outside, it’s hard to tease out what these different examples have in common. The main takeaway should be that no one principle, technique, or offer will suit every business type. The key to growth hacking within any business is to complete thorough testing to determine the approach that will work, and then creatively tackle challenges based on your insights.

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