Every online business wants to grow fast, get lots of customers and make profits. However, running such a business, just like other startups, does come with its type of challenges. For online ventures, you will need great planning and legwork to get your venture going. Besides that, you should employ creative strategies to gain massive growth and visibility.
For success, growth hacking strategies come in handy. Coined in 2010, the term “growth hacking” gained immense momentum in the current marketing world. Both online and offline brands are trying to leverage this both conventionally and unconventionally. For your online venture to succeed, consider the following hacks or strategies to boost your growth.
1 Define Brand Goals
Before venting on the various growth hack strategies, you ought to define your online business goals. For sure, without goals, your venture will be shooting in the dark. Short term goals may include boosting traffic, increasing leads and conversions or making a profit. Regardless, define the goals.
Identified goals will act as your base level from which you can evaluate the effectiveness of your growth hack strategies. When setting the goals, make them as realistic as possible. Unrealistic goals won’t define your success.
2 Market Offline
Despite being an online venture, offline marketing can be of great help. Whereas this can be considered a traditional marketing strategy, it has proven effective over time. Contrary to what many people believe, offline marketing can spread quickly.
A good example of an online venture that succeeded immensely with offline marketing is Shazam. As you may know, the app allows users to identify music they hear at various places. Shazam recommends users put their phones close to speakers for easy track identification. As people held their phones in such a way, they were intrigued and couldn’t help but spread the word about the app.
3 Establish Partnerships
Forming partnerships is something that independent investors often fear doing. Well, partnering with other brands in the market is an effective growth hacking strategy. The key to this is identifying brands that use products which complement your products or services.
Partnering with complementing brands will not only improve your sales but also foster interactions. Just to mention a practical example, FitBit coupled with MyFitnessPal forming one of the best online brand partnerships ever since. MyFitnessPal is an app that measures your caloric intake as FitBit estimates the calories burned. With their partnership, it made it easy for users to measure their caloric intake as well as calories burned.
4 Set up referral programs
Referral program is an old yet effective growth hack strategy that has stood the test of time. As the name suggests, you simply need to ask your existing customers to refer other clients to you. The best time to do this is after making a successful sale. You might consider offering an incentive to your customer as an added advantage.
Most online businesses prefer using incentives such as virtual cash, discounts and extra subscriptions in the case a referred customer makes a purchase. The best way to achieve this is to set up a referral program software such as Ambassador, Forewards, Extole and Sweet Tooth. By doing this, you will be gaining new customers as you retain your old ones. Be sure you find strong tools to build your list.
5 Try Guest Blogging
Currently, guest blogging is becoming a common method used by brands to increase traffic in their websites and increase sales. Well, this growth hack can not only increase your website traffic through links but also through well-done SEO. Links included in your guest blog act as backlinks that are easily picked up by Google.
Having backlinks coming from high authority sites helps your website rank highly in Google Search Results. However, note that the site should be within the same niche as yours. To achieve this, begin by identifying such websites. Once you have found them, pitch them following a specific format. For instance, appreciate their work, request for an opportunity to write a guest blog post for them highlighting the various ways it can be of benefit to them.
Your guest blogs should be overly informative with minimal or no promotional content. Writing such an article will give readers the urge to read more informative content, which they can only find in your website. Ideally, you should insert one link with a proper anchor text linking to your website.
6 Use Influencer Marketing
Factually, growth hacking strategies for online businesses should be restricted to doing the work yourself. However, you can give a shot at collaborating with influencers to easily achieve your goals. So to say, a Twitter study revealed that 40% of users made a purchase decision as a result of an influencers’ Tweet.
Just to mention, influencers are social media bigwigs with enormous following. They could be bloggers, celebrities, journalists or social media personalities. Get in touch with social media influencers and pitch them to promote your brand. You can send them some of your products, ask them to try them and review them. Since they are trusted personalities, their endorsement can boost the credibility of your products.
Besides, you can feature the influencer’s review in your testimonials on the website and your social media profiles. The other way to utilize influencer marketing is to try guest posting. You can guest blog on your influencer’s websites or blogs. This can not only generate great exposure but is also a source of valuable backlinks that boosts your rankings.
That aside, finding the right influencer is a daunting task. There are endless fake influencers, making it challenging to get the right one. Nonetheless, apps like Grin can come in handy in finding the right influencers filtered by niches, platforms of choice and location.
7 Leverage Social Media
As an online venture, social media is very useful in growing your business. There are several social media growth hacking marketing strategies you can take advantage of. To fully harness the power of various social media platforms, you should begin by creating a killer profile, completely filled with your information. It is with this that other brands and customers will take you seriously.
Fill in every detail in your profile, upload clear and quality photos and create an interesting bio. This leaves a good impression in your prospects. Regarding followers, follow all the relevant accounts in your niche to establish some brand authenticity. You should be active, posting engaging content regularly.
8 Use retargeting
Retargeting is a great growth hack for online businesses. As the name suggests, it involves targeting people who have previously visited your website but didn’t make a purchase. Target them through adverts that may sway them to your website. Tools like Google Display Network, Facebook ads among others can come in handy. Doing this result in better ROI as you will be targeting people who initially had interest in your brand.
Final Thoughts
Selling online is increasingly becoming tough due to the increasing competition. To compete fairly, being smart shouldn’t be an option. The growth hacks outlined above should help boost your online business performance. For sure, some hacking strategies may be challenging to implement. However, with perfect execution, you can be sure of undoubted success.