A Proven Growth Hacking Framework For Startups

What is Growth Hacking?

Growth hacking refers to a process of blending marketing, product and data strategies and employing rapid experimentation across different marketing channels to pinpoint the most effective ways to drive accelerated and accumulative business growth. Growth hackers focus on testing unconventional techniques to discover scalable and repeatable methods to grow the user base with minimal spend.

A Proven Framework

1. Free Niche Content

Niche content is content created to resonate powerfully with a specific audience in order to drive strong results. Niche content can be a great tool for building a better connection with customers, clients, or readers. It can help qualify leads, improve SEO efforts, and it can also help you stand out amongst competitors.

It is important to remember when publishing free niche content you don't target everyone but rather a small minority who will get the most value from your company/product.

The important steps to take are:

• Ask yourself who get the maximum benefit from our product?
• Describe a real person as best as you can.
• Cater exclusively to this person's needs at the beginning.

2. Use Pirate Metrics

This is a 5-step model for creating a metrics framework for your business & customers, and how to apply it to your product & marketing efforts. The "pirate" part comes from the 5 steps: Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, & Revenue (AARRR!)

• Acquisition: How you get people to know you by name.
• Activation: How to give users a happy first experience while they experience the core value of your product.
• Retention: How you keep customers coming back for more.
• Revenue: How you monetize them.
• Referral: How you get them to tell other people.

3. Figure Out Which Kind Of Growth Hacking Works For Your Product Type

• Viral: Grows through referrals.
• Sticky: An irresistible experience.
• Paid: Spend $30 to acquire a customer who will eventually be worth $300

4. Choose The Right On-boarding Method

A positive on-boarding experience confirms to your customers that they made the right choice. It also, ultimately, helps you retain them. The top two reasons that customers churn are 1) they don’t understand your product, and 2) they don’t obtain any value from it.

Customer on-boarding can solve both of these issues.

Customer on-boarding is the nurturing process that gets new users and customers acquainted and comfortable with your product. An exceptional customer on-boarding program involves step-by-step tutorials, helpful guidance and support, and celebrations when a customer achieves success milestones using your product or service.

The 3 common on-boarding methods are; Self Service, Group Demos and One on One Calls.

5. Retention Through Growth Hacking

Any seasoned business operative will tell you that retaining existing customers is the quickest path to success.

Combining retention marketing tactics has a higher ROI.

Actionable steps you can take:

• Live Chat: Not only will it save your business money but it will increase engagement with your customers. Customers have also reported that live chat is more convenient for them.
• Automation: Automate new messages based on someone's previous site or app behavior. Target location or switch up languages automatically by editing the criteria for when users trigger certain campaigns.

6. Increase Revenue Through Growth Hacking

Take e-commerce for instance, you can test different ideas, measure and repeat until you hit a point of diminishing returns. You can experiment with abandoned cart e-mails, free shipping on orders over $20 vs free shipping on orders over $100.

Compare the costs - rinse and repeat.

7. Increase Referrals Through Growth Hacking:

39% of consumers build trust in a brand from peer-to-peer conversations and view other consumers as 14% more credible than brand employees, banking on attracting potential customers through your sales marketing efforts alone just isn't a sound strategy. You should also be tapping into your existing customer base as a source for referrals.

Ask your customers how likely they are to refer you company to a friend using a scale of 1 - 10.

• Promoters: (score 9 - 10) These are the people who will recommend you to others as proof of your product concept.
• Passive: (score 7 - 8) They are fine with the product but would switch to an alternative if it presented itself.
• Detractors: (score 0 - 6): Unhappy people who will not only churn but will also give very negative reviews about your product.

Pay attention to the middle group (passive). Ideally you want to get in touch and try save them before they leave for another product but ignore them completely for promoter purposes

There is a lot to talk about when it comes to growth hacking/ growth marketing if you prefer, and I have tried my best to compact the information to fit in this rather long article. In my time working with startups, this framework has worked consistently worked for the companies I have worked with.

Remember to iterate, iterate, iterate because even with millions of users it will take your startup years to become profitable.

Thank you for reading today's article of The Lunio Marketing Newsletter. I help brands 3x their revenue in 12 months by enhancing their brand equity through optimizing their digital strategy. Subscribe for more valuable content. Also subscribe to my podcast The Disruptor Journals were I talk about disruptive innovation in Africa.