When you have a new company, it’s easy to get stuck in the daily routine and forget about the future. So what can a small team do to get ahead of the curve? How can a startup grow at an exponential rate?
Growth hacking is exactly what it sounds like: hacking your company in order to grow it at an even faster rate. Growth hacking works by taking one of your company’s biggest weaknesses and turning it into its greatest strength.
It’s not something that every business needs, but for startups that need to grow quickly, growth hacking is the perfect solution. In this article, you’ll learn everything you need to know about growing a startup by 10X through growth hacking strategies.
1. Define a Clear Goal
Before you can figure out how to get to 10X, you first have to define what it is you’re trying to get to. For example, are you trying to get to 1 million customers? 5 million? 10 million?
The clearer you are about your goal, the more successful your growth hacking efforts will be. Another tip for defining your goal is to talk to your customers.
You can start with a survey via Jotform or Google Forms, or you can just have one-on-one conversations with your potential customers. As you define your goal, also think about what your competitors are doing. If you know what a competitor is trying to do, you can use that knowledge to help you get to your goal even faster.
2. Build A Measurement Framework
With a clear goal in mind, it’s time to build a framework to help you track your progress. The best way to do this is to create a measurement framework that includes a number of different metrics. A good framework will include metrics for your sales process, marketing effectiveness, customer engagement, and more.
When you have a good measurement framework in place, you can start to build out a set of KPIs — key performance indicators — that you can use to track your progress. It’s important to remember that KPIs are only useful if you have a measurement framework behind them.
If you don’t have metrics behind your KPIs, then they’re just a bunch of numbers that don’t mean much. For example, if your growth hacking efforts are focused on increasing signups, then you could set your KPIs to include things like new signups and customer retention rates.
However, these KPIs don’t mean much if you don’t have a clear measurement framework behind them. To make these KPIs more useful, you could add metrics such as how long it takes new customers to activate their accounts and how long it takes new customers to make their first purchase.
3. Use email marketing Aggressively
Email marketing is one of the best ways to grow a business. But it can be challenging to build a large and active email list. One of the ways to get more active email subscribers is to use email marketing actively.
Email marketing is a powerful marketing tool that allows you to build relationships with your existing customers and find new ones. An advanced yet user-friendly tool like Active Campaign could help you to implement email marketing.
If you aren’t using email marketing on a daily basis, you are missing out on one of the best growth hacking strategies for startups.
4. Add Another Step to the Sales Process
One of the biggest challenges that companies face when trying to grow is that they’re trying to grow without actually knowing how to grow.
One of the best ways to get started with growth hacking is to add an extra step to your sales process. And the best way to add an extra step to your sales process is to start with a one-on-one meeting with your customers.
During this meeting, you and your customer can discuss your product and go over your customers’ needs. The best part about starting with a one-on-one meeting is that you can use this time to get to know your customers better. And with better understanding, you can tailor your product towards your customer’s needs.
5. Experiment and iterate constantly
While building your measurement framework is a great way to start, the best way to grow your company is through experimentation.
At the end of the day, the best way to find new growth strategies is by trying new things. If you can’t come up with a growth hacking strategy that you love, then change your strategy.
Keep in mind that growth hacking is a long-term strategy — one that isn’t always going to work. It’s okay to try a few things and then switch to something new.
6. Nurture your validated channel(s)
As you experiment with new growth strategies, you’ll want to pay close attention to which ones work. For example, if you’re trying to get new customers through social media ads and influencer marketing, but you aren’t seeing any results, then switch gears and focus on your sales process instead.
To find the right channels for your business, you need to look at a few different factors. The first factor to consider is your customer type, because different customers prefer different marketing channels.
Next, you need to look at your market and how your product lines up against your competitors. Is there a particular channel where your product is stronger than your competitors?
7. Invest in influencers
Many companies think that their growth hacking strategy ends when they start emailing bloggers for reviews. However, the best way to keep your growth hacking efforts going is to keep investing in your influencers.
If you’ve chosen the right growth hacking strategies for your business, then you’ll start to see your growth hacking efforts pay off. And when that happens, you’ll want to keep investing in your influencers because you’ll know that it’s working.
Think about it like this: an influencer who posts a couple of times per month isn’t worth as much as an influencer who gets featured once per week. And when you’re thinking about how to keep your growth hacking efforts going, think about what it would look like if you were to double the amount of posts from your influencers.
8. Measure what matters most
As you start to experiment with new growth strategies, it’s important to remember that growth hacking is a long-term strategy. This means that you’ll want to focus on growing your company at an even pace instead of trying to rush the growth process.
There are a few ways to ensure that you don’t rush the growth process. The first way is to make sure you keep all of your growth initiatives separate from one another.
Secondly, you need to make sure that your initiatives are all focused on growing your business at an even pace. Finally, you need to make sure that your initiatives are all focused on helping your business grow at an even pace.
9. Use Data to Find Where Growth Stops
At some point, your growth is going to hit a wall — or perhaps it has already. At that point, you want to make sure to find the specific channel where your growth has stopped and pivot your strategy.
For example, if your channel for growth is social media ads, but your growth has slowed down, then you have to stop spending on that channel and start focusing on a different channel.
When you find the specific channel where your growth has stopped, then you need to make sure that you pivot your strategy to focus on that channel instead.
10. Expand your reach with special events
As you continue to build out your growth hacking strategy, don’t forget about special events. For example, what if you wanted to host a large-scale event to bring your community together?
A town hall meeting is a great way to do this, because it allows your community to ask you questions and get to know you better. Furthermore, a town hall meeting is a great way to connect with your community, which can help you keep your growth hacking efforts going.
To make sure that you’re leveraging events to expand your reach, you need to make sure that you’re hosting events that will help your business grow. Events such as a product launch, hackathon, or hack day can do just that.
Conclusion
Whether you’re new to the game, or you’ve been in the business for a while, you can quickly and easily grow your business by 10X. The secret to growing fast is to identify and turn your weaknesses into strengths. Using email marketing, building an effective workflow and turning customers into advocates will allow you to increase your growth rate by 10X. If you want to grow your business by 10X, you’ll need to start hacking your growth rate. Let’s get to it!
