As a startup, growing your customer base can be very taxing. Without the support of a recognized brand or flowing finances, your options to expand your market share may seem limited. With growth hacking, you can use non-traditional, creative and strategic maneuvers to acquire and retain your customers.
What is a growth hack?
A growth hack is simply an innovative, economic and scalable route to expediting your results. You create a growth hack by analyzing your problem points and designing a creative solution to fix them. One of the easiest ways to do this is by identifying successful approaches applied by similar companies, and replicating them for your company.
For instance, Airbnb hacked its growth by piggybacking on Craigslist. Though the startup clearly stood apart for its unique and personal feel, Craigslist had what it lacked: a massive user base. Airbnb built an integration with Craigslist to drive interest its way. To date, this is one of the most popular growth hacks used by software-as-a-service startups.
The market for startup growth hacks has provided a number of unique solutions. You can use these tools below to hack your growth, with ease.
SimilarWeb
The more traffic you have on your website, the more opportunity you have to convert leads and expand your business.
SimilarWeb is a website traffic analysis tool that helps you understand where your traffic is coming from and who it consists of. It also helps you identify new channels through which you can direct visits to your website. The tool does this by analyzing your competition and giving you insights into their traffic sources and growth strategies. You can compare and audit multiple competitors on SimilarWeb and craft your strategies based on what works for your industry.
Additionally, the tool also helps you understand the interests of people visiting your site. You can use this data to optimize your website for conversions. The tool also helps you define your target audience and identify the target groups that you should be targeting.
Fiverr
In today’s market, content is king, and you need to post fresh content regularly to increase your exposure and capture more of your target audience. Using Fiverr, you can get content created swiftly and economically. The basic services cost $5, with upgrades and add-ons available at an additional cost.
Use can use Fiverr to order blog posts, content for websites, video-scripts, infographics, videos, podcasts and voice-overs. You can even have writers talk about you on top publications or place articles that you have written on them. If your product is an app, you can have testers check them for you on Fiverr.
The platform may not give you the best quality possible, but you can get a considerable amount of work done at barely any cost.
Related: Growth Hacks For Dominating the Blogosphere
DrumUp
If you look at the top traffic sources of any website, social media is sure to be on every list. DrumUp is a content marketing and social media management tool that helps you manage your social presence with ease.
You can connect your Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter pages to DrumUp and easily schedule posts across all of them. To be seen as “active” on social, you need to post multiple times a day, and as a startup, creating that content can be a daunting task. DrumUp also lets you source industry-specific content by setting keywords and/or attaching RSS feeds of your favorite blogs. The tool also has a content library that you can use to store content to post at a future date.
Finally, the tool tracks social media engagement and click-throughs for your social media pages. The data can help you identify the best of your strategies so you can maximize your exposure on social media and drive more traffic to your website.
Brand24
Sometimes, social media conversations provide you with unique opportunities to increase your brand visibility and build invaluable relationships with people.
Since you can’t catch all of them by manually monitoring your social community, you can use a social media listening tool like Brand24 to do it for you.
Brand24 captures all mentions of keywords that you set, and reports them to you. The tool also performs “sentiment analysis” and sorts mentions as positive, negative and neutral so you can prioritize and tend to them accordingly. You can also use the tool to print visual reports of brand mentions to show investors or teammates.
SumoMe
Until now, we have spoken about increasing website traffic, but to make the most of the traffic that you drive to your pages, you need a lead capture tool like SumoMe.
You can set up a SumoMe dialogue box on your home page or blog pages and prompt website visitors to leave their email addresses so you can provide them with more value. The tool allows you to A/B test lead capture forms and analyze how your visitors reacted with them, so you can optimize lead capture.
Additionally, the tool offers social share plug-ins that you can easily install on your web or blog pages to encourage visitors to share and in turn improve your visibility.
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GetResponse
What do you do with the leads that you capture? You could introduce them into a lead nurturing program and convert them over time.
GetResponse is an email marketing and automation platform that can make lead nurturing easy for you. The platform hosts a large number of pre-designed templates that you can use to create professional looking email newsletters and campaigns.
The platform also monitors important metrics like open-rates and click-through rates so you can identify your better performing emails. You can also A/B test emails and optimize them for open-rates and click-throughs. If you have time-constraints and can’t respond to every email, you can also set up auto-responders to keep your contacts engaged.
With the right set of tools and an automated workflow in place, you can optimize your growth without investing too much of your time in making it happen.
