About 20% of startups fail within their first year of launch and 50% fail by the fifth, as per estimates. That’s an alarming failure rate. One efficient way to ensure that yours doesn’t is by growth hacking. It helps entrepreneurs to effectively market their product and expand their reach. This blog will discuss several growth hacking and marketing strategies to propel your growth in 2022.
Before we get into the growth hacking and marketing strategies, let’s get down to the basics.
What is growth hacking?
Growth hacking involves trying different design, engineering, development, and marketing processes to determine the most effective ways for growing a company through experimentation. Rather than following the traditional tactics, marketers involved in growth hacking think like hackers to come up with quick, novel, and cost-effective methods to grow their business. That’s why they are referred to as growth hackers.
Growth hackers often experiment around with a variety of marketing strategies, advertising techniques, and more in a cost-effective manner to identify the ones that will convert leads and bring in sales quickly. Growth hacking tactics can be categorized into the following three divisions:
- Content marketing
- Product marketing
- Advertising
7 Best Growth Hacking and Marketing Strategies for Startup in 2022
We’ve picked out seven of the best performing growth hacking and marketing strategies for your startup to try and benefit from.
1. Optimise your online presence
Online presence is crucial for the recognition and subsequent success of a brand or business today. No matter how great or unique your product/service is, it’d be of no value to you if people aren’t able to find you online. Here are some useful tactics for establishing your business’ solid online presence.
- Design and develop an appealing website for your business.
- Work on your site’s search engine optimization to improve its ranking in SERPs.
- Have a solid content strategy for your site and social media platforms.
- Build your brand awareness through paid ads.
- Get active on those platforms wherever your audience is active.
2. Go for Product and Platform Integration
It can be a lot of time taking to build your user base from scratch. One way to do it quickly is to utilize those platforms where people are looking for a similar product or service. This can help attract a highly targeted audience.
For instance, if you create a platform that offers cleaning services but you haven’t got any clients yet, announce your brand and its services on platforms that already have a flow of users.
Some such platforms are Youtube, Justdial, Sulekha, Quikr, etc. These platforms already have a lot of visitors looking for such services. When they find you offering your services there, they’ll click-through into your website.
This is known as product/platform integration growth hacking. This helps in leveraging other platforms to build your user base until you gain a name for itself in your niche.
3. Have an Effective Content Marketing Strategy
Another important growth hacking and marketing strategy that you should use is effective content marketing. A vital part of this is User Generated Content (UGC). People read your previous/existing customers’ feedback, ratings, reviews, testimonials, and other UGC Customer feedback to determine whether or not to do business with you. So, encourage your buyers to post UGC.
Other than UGC, you should also regularly post other highly engaging content. These can take the shape of blogs, articles, videos, infographics, e-books, email newsletters, podcasts, how-to guides, social media posts, case studies, and webinars.
Irrespective of the type of content you publish, make sure that they are consistent, regular, and targeted towards attracting the right audience and gaining their brand affinity.
4. Repurpose content
Creating content for your brand or business requires a significant amount of time, effort, and money. This is where repurposing content or “content recycling” can help.
It involves reusing all or part of a piece of content that you already have published to widen the content’s reach. You can adapt an existing piece of material to fulfill a range of new requirements.
Typically, repurposed content is marketed in a new format (for instance, converting an article into an infographic, video, or podcast).
Therefore, any fresh piece of content may serve as the basis for a lot of other content pieces. So, do go for content repurposing. Besides saving time and resources, content repurposing allows businesses to scale their content quite easily.
5. Make use of Q/A Sites and Communities
Get active on Q/A Sites and communities in your niche. Users there usually pose queries containing long-tail keywords, which gives more accurate and pertinent results on search engines.
So, answer the relevant questions asked, participate in discussions, and share your thoughts on these forums. And whenever you do, leave your brand’s contact details at the end. This will help attract attention to your product/service.
Actively participating on these platforms can help your startup in establishing itself as a leader in your industry. It can also help bring traffic to their website, and appear credible to your audience. If done well, it can even serve as a viral marketing technique.
6. Get on social media
Many startups fail to make use of social media effectively in the early stages of their launch. However, it shouldn’t be so as social media is an integral part of today’s digital landscape. Promote your brand and its offerings uniquely and authentically. Also, make efforts to connect with your audience and collaborate with the audiences of other related industries.
Here is how you market yourself effectively on social media-
- Find those platforms that are underutilized by your competitors. This will allow you to differentiate your following and get more competitive.
- Partner with someone who has become an influencer. This will help you gain their loyal audience and following to promote your brand to.
- Create a range of content that interest your audiences.
- Use social media scheduling tools to regularly distribute your content to different social media networks at the right time.
- Partner with a complementary business to share audiences.
7. Employ Referral Marketing
Word-of-mouth promotion is a sure-fire growth hacking strategy. Your customers keep doing business with you because they know your strengths. So, they can be your best brand ambassadors. By running a referral program or brand ambassador program and incentivizing referrers, you can tap into this potential. For, reports say that people tend to trust in the recommendations from their friends, family, and even strangers more than they trust brand promotions.
To get your customers to refer their circle to you, you need to incentivize them. If you can afford it, provide a double-sided incentive. That is, reward both the referrer and the referred. And make sure that you offer a reward that the receivers would value. It can be cash, discounts, additional features, free products, free subscriptions, or something else.
Conclusion
Growth hacking and marketing strategies are vital for kick-starting the growth of your startup and increasing its customer base enormously. For, these help you gain brand recognition, establish credibility in your niche, and sell your products or services. This blog has discussed 7 effective strategies for you to try.
Do consistently experiment with different strategies to identify ones that work best at any particular time for your brand and industry.
You will be amazed how even subtle modifications in your business processes and marketing strategy can have an astounding impact on your bottom line.
About Author:
Shivani Goyal
The author is a content writer at InviteReferrals, which provides referral software that allows businesses to attract new customers from existing customers through referral campaigns.
