There are many examples of growth hacking techniques that have produced incredible results. Airbnb and its Craiglist ads, Mark Zuckerberg scraping his college email addresses to create Facebook, Instagram and influencers... If you're interested in digital marketing, you've probably heard of these stories.
But these incredible anecdotes hide a reality: Growth Hacking is not just about creative and original hacks. It is above all a method that installs sustainable results in the long term. Most successful growth hacking strategies are based on several levers, several techniques, used and repeated over time. It's not so much about creating the perfect hack, the one that will make you multiply your turnover by ten in a few days (even if we love that kind of hack!), as it is about putting in place a set of tactics that ensure regular growth.
So how do you do Growth Hacking in 2021? What are these famous techniques that work? GrowthYouNeed tells you everything! Discover 4 Growth Hacking techniques to boost your growth.
What is Growth Hacking?
The definition of Growth Hacking stipulates that it is a discipline that aims to ensure maximum growth for a company with a minimum of means. This is often achieved by using certain tools or levers in a roundabout way or by implementing creative hacks.
Growth Hacking uses the AARRR framework, for Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Revenue, Referral. These are the five identified stages of the ideal user journey. Each stage has its own KPIs and the Growth Hacker aims to improve these indicators at every stage. To understand his work in detail, here is an example of how Growth Hacking works for acquisition.
Now that we have defined Growth Hacking more clearly, let's look at 4 proven techniques that will help you accelerate your growth!
Scraping: the art of retrieving data
Scraping is the technique of retrieving data from a third-party site or database. All sorts of things can be scraped: e-mail addresses, information on prospects, classified ads, etc.
For example, let's take the case of a product that is aimed at sales people. One way to contact as many of them as possible would be to use the advertising tools of Facebook or LinkedIn to target people whose job it is. Every time you contact one, you pay. If you have a little budget to spend on advertising, this is a good technique and is very effective.
But thanks to scraping, you can do this for free. All you have to do is search for all the people who have the job title "Salesperson", "Sales Manager" or any other synonym, on LinkedIn and scrape the results page. Thanks to the information that people put on their profile (surname, first name, job title, email etc.), you can build up a large database, with a pool of leads to contact.
Do you understand how scraping can help you in your growth hacking ?
Work on your landing pages
This is an imponderable, and still in 2021. Work on your landing pages. As we said above, Growth Hacking and its techniques are based on the AARRR framework. Work on your landing pages to improve your KPIs on the second A, Activation. Indeed, many businesses work primarily on acquisition, assuming that if you increase the number of visitors to your site, then your turnover will follow.
In most cases, the reasoning is true. If you have a 2% conversion rate, then for every 1,000 users you capture you will convert 20. Capture 2,000 users, and you will get 40 conversions.
On the other hand, by working on your landing pages, it is not so much the number of visitors that you will increase, but the conversion rate. If your conversion rate rises to 4%, you will get your 40 conversions with your 1,000 users. When you know the price of advertising on the Internet, this is a great saving!
When working on your landing pages, there are several important elements to consider.
First, the elements above the waterline. What are they presenting? Is the subject of your page clear? Is it what the user is looking for?
Then think about your CTAs, the Call-To-Action buttons. These are buttons that will encourage your user to engage with the site: purchase, download a brochure or ebook, contact form... Your CTAs must be clear and visible.
Take care of your visuals. Whether it is a service, e-commerce or simply a blog, your visuals will serve to inspire confidence in the user. If you sell products, put them in front, in a situation, so that your user can project himself.
Finally, make sure that your pages load quickly and well, both on the computer and on mobile. We'll come back to this: Web Performance is our 4th technique. But even today, it is still neglected, even though it is essential for the proper functioning of your site!
Marketing automation more important than ever in 2021
Marketing automation is surely one of the most effective growth hacking techniques. Today, it is simpler than ever to set it up thanks to dedicated tools that are very easy to use.
What is marketing automation? It's about creating marketing scenarios for your users, so that all your actions towards them are automated. You will only have to make your first settings: the rest will then run by itself.
When a user performs a specific action, the marketing automation tool assigns him a class corresponding to this action. Depending on the classes of this user, your marketing automation tool will perform certain actions. Some concrete examples.
A user adds a product to their shopping cart and enters their details. But he does not complete the purchase and leaves the site before finalizing it. Forgetfulness, distraction, hesitation? It's impossible to know. But your marketing scenario has foreseen it: thanks to the contact details he has left, you can send him an e-mail stipulating that his basket is still saved and awaiting validation.
No answer from him after a few days? Maybe he's hesitating. Once again, don't panic: your script has foreseen this and sends this user a promotional code to encourage them to buy.
The strength of marketing automation depends on the scenarios you create. The challenge is to think of all the situations that could arise and respond appropriately. Once this is done, however, it is an extremely effective growth hacking technique: your tool will be able to handle large quantities of leads and customers without any action on your part.
Web Perf, a technique with double benefits
We talked about it when we described the importance of landing pages: the WebPerf in 2021 is more important than ever for two reasons.
The first is conversion. 1 second of loading time can correspond to 7% less conversion rate. This is huge, and yet many businesses still have sites that load slowly, especially on mobile, even though more than half of all internet traffic is on the phone in France today.
The second reason why web performance is so important is your SEO. In 2021, Google has planned major updates that will take into account, even more than before, the user experience and in particular the loading time of your pages. A site that is too slow is a site that Google will not want to present to its users and will therefore be excluded from the search results.
Web performance is often overlooked by growth hackers: it is often thought of as a developer's job rather than a marketing one. But today, thanks to many free tools, you can improve loading performance without having to develop.
Here are some tools to help you:
Turn your PNG images into JPGs, faster to load: https: //png2jpg.com/
Compress your images so that they weigh less: https: //compressjpeg.com/fr/
Measure the loading time of your web pages: https: //gtmetrix.com/ and https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?hl=fr
To discover other growth hacking techniques, use GrowthYouNeed
GrowthYouNeed is a Growth Hacking agency based in Paris and structured around several areas of expertise. Thanks to our experts, we will be able to support you in your growth on all levers.
Do not hesitate to use our services or ask us your questions related to GrowthHacking techniques: we will be happy to help you!
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