- Contest Factory
- November 19, 2019
The words hack, hacking, or hacker usually bring up a negative connotation when one hears a reference to them. Until recently, the word hack has only been associated with an unknown person breaking into your computer system to steal private information and using it in a nefarious manner. But hack, or hacking, is now also defined as a positive shortcut that can help make our lives easier. For example, 10 cooking hacks, or cleaning hacks – shortcuts, tips, and suggestions making the chore at hand faster and easier. But what is growth hacking and how does it relate to business?
Why Growth Hacking?
This is the first in a series to help B2B marketers understand growth hacking and how to apply it to their business. Growth hacking is a data-driven science tool. It functions to increase your audience base, conversion rates, retention, referral, and revenue in a short amount of time without spending a large amount of money.
With growth hacking, you’ll learn valuable information about your audience and their buying behaviors, which will help you measure the efficacy of the company’s current marketing strategy. Growth hacking utilizes several methods to improve traffic and improve your online visibility. For instance, Google becomes smarter every day, thanks to the continuous improvement of AI (Artificial Intelligence) capabilities, and Google can now give your site a boost in its rankings based on topics not solely dependent on keyword matching.
So how can your business grow and increase revenue? Let’s begin with the Top 5 Best Growth Hacking tips!
Tip #1: Growth Hacking Tools
One of the first steps is to implement a growth hacking tool. These tools help measure your success, understand your audience, and adjust strategies accordingly. Advances in technology have enabled B2B companies to enhance customer experiences, analyze their customers’ buying behaviors, build nurturing campaigns, and understand what factors influence their purchase decisions.
There are automation tools such as Reply.io that help with business development, account management, inbound/outbound sales, email drip campaigns, and numerous CRM integrations.
Another great tool is Buzzsumo.com. This tool helps find specific keywords, relevant topics, and content that is more likely to engage your customers and encourage them to share your content on their social media platforms. Buzzsumo also allows you to search your competitors to gain insights into what content is working for them and can locate key influencers in your industry that your business can target.
If you are looking for an affiliate program or partner management tool, PartnerStack.com has everything needed to increase traction on reseller and partner marketing programs.
Tip #2: Swap “Contact Us” with Pertinent and Shareable Content
If your B2B business is like most, you probably have a website where customers can research what types of products are offered, the history of your business, and a place to contact you. But is your web traffic being amply converted to qualified leads? If the answer is no, the following tip might help.
Replace the “contact us” fillable form with content from a whitepaper, a case study or data sheet. Content is more enticing than just filling out a generic form. Your customers are likely to have multiple questions. They want to know how your products will enrich their lives, what the benefits are, and why they should buy them. Place this content on your landing page instead of a simple “contact us” form.
Tip #3: Building a Facebook Audience with LinkedIn
Facebook ads are often a key driver for new sign-ups. But how do you attract and build a focused audience to your brand and product? This tactic gives you access to an audience your competitors don’t have on Facebook.
- Use your LinkedIn profile to start connecting with people in your industry.
- Download and contact your connections from LinkedIn to create a Facebook page customized to that audience by tapping highly targeted content and ads.
Tip #4: Try Before You Buy – The Power of a Freemium
Most customers love a try before you buy, or freemium model. This is an excellent way to entice your customers to try a product or service before they decide to purchase. When implementing a freemium, be sure the offer has enough number of features that the potential customer can consider the benefits of the product and what they stand to gain by purchasing an upgrade to the full product.
Dropbox, the online storage company, is a great example of this try before you buy model. First-time users get the basic service free of charge with the option to upgrade to their premium service for a monthly/yearly fee.
Tip #5: Plan Your Next Campaign with Source Data
Most marketing campaigns are strategically planned and implemented well, but there are some that fall flat when trying to convert leads to revenue. What will benefit your next campaign is using source data to look at which social media channels have the highest conversion rates. With this knowledge, you will know when and on which social channels to promote to. Tools like HubSpot, Marketo, and Google Analytics track and report the channels that have higher conversion rates, making this information valuable for your next marketing campaign.
In Conclusion
In order to grow your B2B company, you need not only online traffic, but more importantly, you need qualified leads to increase conversion, revenue, retention, and referrals. Remember that growth hacking isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution, so you will need to test and retest to analyze which tactics work to help grow your business best.
