I’ve been getting interested in the whole idea of growth hacking lately, essentially a set of techniques and best practices used to optimize user growth, primarily online, thought the high level strategy would work in any situation, with some lateral thinking. Its even been called ‘Lean Marketing’ which is a nice phrase! Anyway jump in and make sense of my brain dump..

Essentially you’re breaking down all the stages of creating and maintaining a customer. Its been called the Growth Hacking Funnel and is basically the Pirate AAARRR concept (I add Awareness at the beginning.) Basically the exact definition of each stage is customisable but as a starting point:

  • Awareness – Hears about your product
  • Acquisition – Visits your site, signs up for a newsletter. email commit only, if that
  • Activation – Creates and account/signs up in some extended form.
  • Retention – Becomes and active regular user
  • Referral – Refers your site to friends. Very powerful step..
  • Revenue – They actually buy something!

To kick off, look at ways of improving each of these stages – write a list! Then tick them off, seeing what makes the most difference, and finessing.

When you have the right metrics to cast light on what’s happening at every point in the tunnel, you can then focus on whatever the biggest leak point is and work there.

Some useful stuff:

  • Strong Calls to Action
  • Above the Fold is Gold
  • Benefits not Features
  • Improve site loading times
  • Create dedicated landing pages when testing assumptions
  • Use Video where possible
  • Harness all free promotions!
  • Get Social
  • Think of an idea, implement, test, decide
  • Your opinion is worthless! Quantify and test everything!
  • Email marketing is great, keep in touch with your users!
  • SEO, d’uh
  • Product tweaks
  • Landing Pages
  • PR
  • UX
  • Product Tweaks

The whole idea is to focus on metrics and regularly test assumptions using A/B Testing techniques, and harness every bloody free social networking option, then try and find new angles no-one else has. Basically lots of lateral thinking and testing. Get in touch as possible with your audience. Make things as frictionless as possible for users to get involved. Increase conversions in two primary ways;

  • Keep improving the product and making it easier to use
  • Keep finding ways to increase the motivation of your users to take the next step.

Viral Growth really comes down to a lot of hard work.

Turns out there’s loads of tools worth checking out that help you with A/B, Multivariate, Behavioral, useability and heatmap testing.

REMEMBER:

  • People don’t buy from websites, people buy from people
  • You don’t optimise websites, you optimise thought sequences
  • To optimise thought sequences, you need to enter into a conversation
  • You then guide the conversation to wards a win/win value exchange.

Tool links:

These are some great and cheap tools for growth hacking….

Visual Website Optimizer – www.visualwebsiteoptimiser.com

Unbounce – www.unbounce.com

Click Tale – www.clicktale.com

Kiss Metrics – www.kissmetrics.com

HubSpot – www.hubspot.com

Crazy Egg – www.crazyegg.com

www.mailchimp.com – Free

https://www.intercom.io/ – Free to 250 users, $49pm

http://sendgrid.com/ – Free to 200 emails a day

www.popupdomination.com – $77

http://www.inspectlet.com/ – Free 100 sessions, $40pm

https://www.zopim.com – Free

https://www.google.com/tagmanager – Free

And of course a bunch of YouTube Videos!

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=growth+hacking&oq=growth+hacking