5 Powerful Growth Hacking Strategies

Now that’s clear, let’s look at some strategies and tactics to help you build your business.

Generally, “strategies” take a long-term approach to business growth, and don’t change very often. “Tactics” are shorter term implementations of your strategy and can be switched to take account of new information or priorities.

However, you will see the terms used interchangeably.

Growth hacking strategies are often divided into three types:

• Promoting your business with content, or content marketing
• Promoting your product within the product, or product marketing
• Paying for promotion, or advertising.

Now, let’s look at some strategies and tactics that are proven to work.

1. Use Exit Intent to Hack Your Email List Growth

Email Marketing has an amazing ROI. According to email marketing strategies, a $1 investment will bring $44 in revenue. That’s why it’s so important for growth to build your email list.

One reason why email marketing is a great hack is that you don’t have to spend a dime to get started. As you’ll see in the section on growth hacking tools, there’s the software you can use for free until you get large enough to upgrade.

But it can take a while to grow your email list.

That’s where our first growth hack comes in. You can skyrocket your email list with an exit-intent popup linked to a lead magnet. Here’s an example:

A lead magnet is an incentive that you’ll offer your visitors in exchange for sharing their contact information with you. Lead magnets are often downloadable content, such as checklists, worksheets, reports, and ebooks.

Exit Intent detects when visitors are about to leave your site, and shows them your lead magnet campaign just before they do. This type of campaign is proven to get visitors’ attention and convert well.

Here’s how you can use this strategy:

1. Create your own lead magnet, using our list of lead magnet ideas as a starting point.
2. Check out our examples of exit-intent popups you can use as inspiration to create your own.
3. Follow the optin monster guide to growing your list with OptinMonster, and don’t forget to enable exit intent.

In no time at all, you’ll be racking up those subscriber numbers, and will have a successful growth hacking strategy under your belt.

2. Offer Discounts for Social Shares

As a growth hacker, you can’t ignore the potential of the millions of social media users around the globe.

Using your own social networks to let people know about your products and services can help you get new leads and sales via word of mouth and social shares.

But while some people may respond to a simple request, most will be more interested if there’s some payoff for them. Offering a reward for social sharing can give your brand viral potential.

Groupon knows how to nail this strategy. In fact, it’s almost a “carrot and stick” approach. The carrot is a good deal and the stick? Well, those who don’t share may miss out on the deal.

One way to imlement this growth hacking strategy if you’re using Shopify is to use Social Marketing All in One or a similar app. This lets you request a share when customers add products to their cart, and you can reward them with an immediate discount.

See our guides to generating leads on Twitter and increasing traffic from Facebook for more social media growth hack strategies.

3. Make Onboarding a Game

Gamifying onboarding is a great growth hacking tactic that many companies use. There are a couple of ways this can help you grow.

First, you can reward users for successfully using the product, keeping them interested and making it more likely they’ll stick around. Second, you can reward them for getting other users to sign up, which helps your business grow faster.

That’s the strategy Dropbox used, letting users unlock additional storage after completing certain milestones, such as uploading content and sharing on social media to attract new users.

To use this growth hacking strategy for your business, you’ll need to create an onboarding workflow that helps users get to know your product, and encourages them to spread the word. A good tool for gamifying your onboarding is Masskom, which we’ll talk about more in the section on growth hacking tools.

4. Build an Insanely Useful Free Tool

Here’s a growth hacking strategy that is guaranteed to make people check out your website: build an insanely useful tool, and let people use it for free. Here’s an example of this in action.

CoSchedule who provide online editorial calendars, created a Headline Analyzer, used by practically every marketer we know. The only catch? You have to sign up for their email list to use it.

That’s a smart strategy because the tool meets the needs of their core audience, building brand recognition, and goodwill. It also adds the right people to the company’s email list, which means CoSchedule can then promote their paid service.

Our company’s done the same with SupportAlly which collects the information support teams often need on a single landing page. At the bottom of the page, there’s a link to other company products and services.

Not sure what to create? Ask for customer feedback to see what tools would be most helpful for your target audience.

5. Run a Competition

You can’t beat contests as a tool for raising awareness about your company’s products and services. It turns out that they’re seriously effective!

A contest gives you a double win. If you give an account as a prize, you get a new user, plus you get the word out to people who could become customers. You know for sure they’re interested if they’re trying to win a free account.

So, how can you implement this strategy? Here are some ideas to get you started:

• Offer an account as a prize for a Twitter contest in a simple sweepstake. Ensure your contest complies with Twitter’s promotion rules.
• Images work well on Facebook, so share an image relevant to your product or service, and request likes or comments in exchange for contest entries. Be sure to read Facebook’s contest promotion rules
• Use Instagram for a themed content contest, linked to a hashtag, where users tag your Instagram profile.

Want to get even more from this strategy? Let your social media audience and web visitors get multiple contest entries by completing different promotional tasks. Rafflecopter can help you with this.

Want to learn some more successful growth hacks to build your business? Check out my new book on Amazon ''Mark It Digital''