6 Easy and Simple Growth Hacks for Startups
Strategy, Innovation, and Leadership. Recently, I have been asked about my role in helping to establish Praxie.com as a website that hosts hundreds of digital templates and tools that are best practices using growth hacking. It’s hard to break through the clutter and create a brand, website, or business model that stands out in today’s competitive environment.
Here’s how we build a brand, and drove tens of thousands of visitors each month to our website, without making any marketing investments. Anyone who is focused, methodical, and willing to take the time can achieve this.
6 Easy and Simple Growth Hacks for Startups
1. Create Expert Content
Content is king. You can either create the content yourself, or you can provide a platform to encourage users to contribute as part of your model. Content is what drives the brand, and it engages the customers. Google and other search engine index and prioritize pages with solid content, so your web pages that have noteworthy content will see an increase in traffic and SEO rankings over time. Content can take many forms, including articles, blogs, lists, white papers, and templates.
Also read: 5 Link Building Strategies Every Small Business Owner Must Know
2. Syndicate Content to Grow Backlinks
SEO is based on backlinks. The higher your ranking in search engines will be the more reputable websites that link back to your site (or specific subpages). The higher you rank, the greater the number of organic visitors that will come to your site. Position yourself as an expert in whatever you do or provide as part of your company. You can become a source of information and insight to the media, be interviewed on podcasts, or write articles for websites. This strategy will also help you build your brand.
3. Become a Video Star
The written word isn’t the only way to create content. YouTube is the second largest search engine on the planet, just behind Google. Your expertise is highlighted by video content. Video content is shared. It can also drive traffic to your site, which could lead to subscriptions to your newsletter, product purchases, or other conversions. Include keywords in your titles and descriptions. Include a link at the end of your video to where viewers can find out more information (e.g. on your website). Use your videos to reinforce your expertise on social media. You can also embed them into your website.
4. Create Email Relationships
When someone gives you an email address (opting in), they are essentially giving permission to connect with you. Email is a more personal form of connecting than social media. Email is similar to pinning up a flyer on someone’s door as opposed to hoping that they will see it posted on a corner telephone pole.
Create easy ways to subscribe to your newsletter. Connect with other LinkedIn users, as most profiles contain email addresses. Focus on building your list and providing high-value communications using expert content in order to connect with your audiences, rather than just trying to sell your product. Mailchimp, Constant Contact, and other inexpensive or free tools are great to get you started.
Also read: 7 Startups Business Loans for Your Small Business
5. Measure Everything With Dashboards
Only by measuring progress can you gauge your progress. Google Analytics can be used to track important metrics like visitors, landing pages, and conversion rates. Benchmark yourself against your competition using free tools such as those offered by Moz or Similarweb.
Connect social media metrics with advertising to create a dashboard that provides an overall picture of your business. Don’t waste too much time putting together the data. Keep it simple to get an instant read on your performance while spending the majority of your time working on things that will grow your business.
6. Test, Retest and Test Again
Google has recently released a new tool called Optimize. You can quickly test your website or even individual pages. You can learn what works by creating an A/B test that shows different page headings and product prices.
You can track which market positioning statements lead to the most signups for your newsletter or which pricing model generates the highest revenue. Testing should be a continuous activity. This means that you take the winning formula of your A/B tests and run another A/B test using it as a baseline. Connect your test results to your analytics data to see what’s working (and not) over time.
The majority of small businesses don’t have a lot of funding. Growth hacks are important for this reason. You can build market traction with some elbow grease and smart customer engagement strategies. It may take some time for results to show, but this is what you need to build a lasting business.
