Did you know that growth hacking is not only a practice but also a job title?

In today’s episode, we’re going to explain WTF growth hacking is, why it’s considered the new marketing, and give you some secret sauce growth hacks that you can apply to your career or business starting today.

WTF is growth hacking?

Growth hacking took its roots in the tech startup world as a way to rapidly experiment with tactics and hacks to drive growth. And because startups generally don’t have a big marketing budget compared to established companies, they have to be super smart and extremely economical with finding novel ways to drive growth. The growth we’re talking about could be customer growth, follower growth, revenue growth, or whatever kind of growth it is. 

The reason why growth hacking has been dubbed the new marketing, or marketing 2.0, is because the skills a growth hacker needs are basically what a marketer of the future requires. It’s all about being smart in using the digital tools that we all have at our disposal to grow your business, the company you work for, or even your own personal brand. 

The most important principles of growth hacking are: using data to drive your decision-making, rapid experimentation, measuring absolutely everything, and exploiting new digital technologies to drive growth.

Using data to drive growth

In growth hacking, data needs to inform your decisions and should give you a clue whether to continue to try a growth method or to start something completely else. Growth hacking is found in the digital space, and the beauty of this is that we have the data right there at our disposal. Whether it’s using data gleaned from social media to build your customer or user personas, leveraging data to test the effectiveness of a landing page, or using data to optimise your email newsletters. Data is your best friend when it comes to growth hacking. 

The best way to test what works and what doesn’t is through rapid experimentation. This is about setting up A/B tests and lots of small experiments, so you can track your tactics and activities. Of course, make sure that you’re measuring everything as you know what’s working and how quickly things are growing in your favour. 

4 easy growth hacks

Now that you know what growth hacking is, and which principles growth hackers use, we’re going to take you through four really easy-to-apply growth hacks, so you can start experimenting right now.

1. The Five Second Web Page Test

Did you know that you have literally five seconds to capture your audience’s attention on your website? So is your homepage your landing page working hard enough for you? Whether you want signups for the user to explore more, or to simply ensure visitors understand what your website is actually all about, we’ve got a super simple and free growth hack that helps you test this out in a rapid and super lean way with real users. 

Firstly, take a screenshot of the webpage you want to test, head to usabilityhub.com, and register on the site. Go to ‘create new test’ and click on the first option: ‘five-second test’. Write up some brief instructions or a specific question you want to test out. For example: what product or service does this website offer? Who is this website targeted to? What can you do next on this page, etc. Then upload your screenshot. 

On this website, you can test with up to 10 users for free. And of course, if you pay a little bit more, you can test with many, many more users. Once those results come in, you have some rapid-fire data that you can help to better optimise your webpage and drive that growth you crave. 

2. Grow by providing tools

Have you ever conducted one of those quizzes that tells you what kind of Instagrammer you are? Or have you ever used a mortgage calculator on a banking website? Free Tools are one of the best ways to inspire engagement with your users and keep them feeling warm and fuzzy by offering genuine value. 

The cool thing is that you don’t have to hire a developer to get one of these tools on your app or your site. There are loads of cool services that offer off-the-shelf tools that you can customise for your brand or business. One such example is outgrow.co, which offers a free trial. They offer calculators, polls, quizzes, or even chatbots. Check this out and see if it works for you. 

3. Driving more traffic

This tip is one of those things like, why don’t people know more about this? If one of your goals is to drive new traffic sources to your website or app, then this hack is for you. By using this tool, you can check where your competitors’ traffic sources are coming from, giving you some amazing insights into your desired target users’ web behaviour and heaps of ideas on how and where to capture them. 

Go to similarweb.com, type in the URL of your competitor’s website, and then you’ll get a breakdown of where their visitors have come from. You can see the search keywords they’ve used if they’ve come from search, what places they’ve come from to get to their site, such as the specific social media channels, what topics they’re interested in, and other sites they’ve visited. We highly recommend using this tool, because it gives you so much insight into where your desired target customer or user hangs out, and where you can find and connect with them.

4. Deepen customer understanding

Do you quickly want to get a feeling of who your customers, users, and followers are? What they’re into and what their personalities are like? Then there are two great tools that give you a quick snapshot of someone. 

The first tool is crystalknows.com. Based on their social profiles or behaviours, Crystal Knows will provide an easy-to-digest analysis of a particular person’s personality. The next tool is from IBM Watson, and it’s called Personality Insights. This tool also provides a thorough personality analysis, based on what a certain person has written online. These tools are super useful to help better tailor content to your users by understanding and gaining better insights into who they are, and what they’re like.

That’s all from us today! We hope that you’ve got enough info to understand just WTF growth hacking is, with some nice little hacks and tactics that you can experiment with starting today. Also, just a quick note to say we’re not actually affiliated with any of the tools we’ve recommended today. So we are totally neutral over here. 

“Very early, I knew that the only objective in life was to grow.” – Margaret Fuller

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