9 Growth Hacking Strategies (With Examples) To Expand Your Business

Companies like Airbnb, PayPal, Instagram, etc., didn’t become overnight successes. They started small and implemented various growth hack techniques to acquire a larger customer base and expand their business. These techniques, known as growth hacking, are quite popular in the business world. Even now, whenever a new shop opens, they provide huge discounts and freebies for their customers. This results in an increasing clientele base, better sales, and more profit. 

If you are planning to start a new business and want to make it a household name, like every other business wants, then you must know the various growth hacking techniques that can profit your business model. Don’t worry, as we are here to discuss growth hacking, the various tactics, and live examples that you can take inspiration from for your business model.

What Is Growth Hacking?

Before diving into the various growth hacking strategies, let’s understand what is growth hacking. Simply speaking, growth hacking is the process of testing different techniques to determine which one will help expand a business model. But is growth hacking really important? Growth hacking techniques help you understand your business’s future, clarify your vision, and scale it quickly.

What Are The Various Growth Hacking Strategies?

Now that we know what growth hacking means, let’s learn the various types of growth hacking strategies that companies use to expand their business. We’ll also add some case studies at the end for your understanding.

1. Email Marketing List

The first and most important growth hack technique is developing a detailed email list. Though most digital marketers think of email marketing as an age-old technique, it still works wonders to date. Emails help you reach your target audience directly.

Now, how many people open their mailboxes first thing in the morning? More than 90%! Yes, that’s shocking but true. Now imagine being able to promote your services to more than 90% of the target audience, that too, first thing in the morning. Wouldn’t that be a phenomenal way to promote and gain more audience?

Besides, having a robust email list can also help you create a buzz about upcoming updates and services. You can give out a small teaser about an upcoming launch, send in hints regarding upcoming services, or offer a special discount code for your email customers. This would help you gain mass hype over the Internet, resulting in more customers wanting to know more about your services.

Email marketing also help you develop personalized connections with your client base. You can send personalized emails to retain clients, provide special discounts and free services for regular customers, etc., and develop a personal bond with them. Developing an email list is the best way to gain more customers and expand your business.

2. Content Marketing

Content marketing plays a vital role in growth hacking marketing. It helps position your content in the correct marketplace so that users can find your brand and convert into customers. However, to create perfect growth hacking marketing strategies, you need to understand which content pieces can be used to promote your services and products.

For developing a solid content marketing strategy, you can create social media posts, video-based content, bite-sized content, etc. In short, anything that puts your products and services in the limelight and aligns with ongoing trends is the perfect content marketing strategy.

3. Referral Marketing

You have two products in front of you: one that is profoundly marketed and one that is referred by one of your close friends or family. Which one will you choose? Most of us will prefer the product that has been referred to us by our friends or family. This is the power of word-of-mouth marketing, which you can use to create referral marketing campaigns.

Some of the best referral marketing tips you can implement is by providing referral codes to your existing customer base along with some offers like, “Refer us to your friend, and when they sign up, you both get $10 each,” or anything similar. Many brands have opted for referral marketing in the beginning stages of their business and have achieved great results. However, having a budget for referral marketing is important so you don’t fall short while acquiring new customers. The best way would be to change the offers once you notice that your referral marketing budget is coming to an end. 

4. Influencer marketing

In today’s digital age, the Gen Z population tends to follow influencers and social media content creators before buying anything. Partnering up with influencers can profit your business and place your brand on the digital map. When influencers use your products and services, they usually review them on their page, which their followers view and directs them to your brand. It increases the foothold and traction of your website.

However, not all influencers are suitable for your business model. Basically, there are two types of influencers: macro and micro-influencers. Macro influencers have more than 40K followers and are well-known across the platforms on which they publish content. Micro-influencers are the ones that have a moderate number of followers and mostly have organic traffic flowing through their page. 

Which one is perfect for your business? Well, that depends on your business model. Suppose you have a well-established brand with a nice budget for influencer marketing. In that case, it’s better to opt for macro-influencers who have organic traffic, are well-known in your industry, and can direct the majority of their audience to your website. However, if you are a startup or handling SME businesses, then reaching out to micro-influencers will work in your favor.

5. Brand Collaborations

Brand collaborations also work as a way to grow your business. Most companies have partnered with organizations in the same industry, resulting in massive success. The main reason why brand partnerships bring forth success is due to the noise they create in the market. When customers of both brands get to know about the upcoming collaboration, they create hype that carries the entire market and results in huge anticipation of the target audience. Besides, brand collaborations also help you redirect your partner’s customers to your clientele base and grow your brand name in the market.

6. UGC Content Marketing

The next growth hacking technique is using UGC, or user-generated content, to your benefit. One way to use UGC content for growth is by posting your customers’ reviews as testimonials on your website.

However, currently, everyone is more concerned about a brand’s digital presence. If a brand’s digital reputation is good, then only a person will visit the brand website. That’s why it is better to search for UGC content on various social media platforms. Users mostly post about brand products and services on Instagram, Twitter, and other social media platforms. As a brand, you can use that content to your advantage.

For example, let’s say one of the users loved the skincare products your brand manufactures, and they posted regarding the same on their Instagram story. You can take their permission and feature their story on your Instagram page. By doing so, your target audience will be getting a real-time review of your products, thus increasing their trust in your brand.

7. Observe Your Competitors

If you want to grow, you need to observe your competitors. See what techniques and strategies they are implementing to increase their reach. By understanding their approaches, you can identify your shortfalls and work on them. You can use RankWatch’s Competitor Analysis to understand your competitors’ nitty-gritty.

The tool thoroughly analyzes your top competitors and brings forward their top-performing pages along with the ranking keywords and other necessary metrics. You can dwell on the keywords, observe the various ranking pages, and then replicate the strategies for your brand’s growth hacking. Competitor analysis also helps you understand the various target audiences that your rivals are successfully targeting so that you can also do the same.

8. Guest Posting

Guest posting has proven to be a successful growth hacking technique. Companies have been using guest posting for years and have seen good results. However, searching for high-quality domains for guest posting is important to gain good visibility. 

The best way to find premium and relevant domains for guest posting opportunities is to use a strong backlink analyzer. Once you learn about your competitors’ link profiles and the various domains they partner with for guest posting, you can use this information to your benefit. RankWatch’s online backlink checker can help dissect your competitor’s link profile within seconds. Simply enter your competitor’s website URL and let the tool do its job.

Within seconds, you will get all the details related to referring domains, the anchor texts they are using, referring domains’ DA score, type of links, and other essential information. You can simply contact the referring domains that seem relevant to your brand and convey the guest posting collaboration. Remember, even a nofollow link from a well-established domain can bring significant traffic and visibility to your brand.

9. Repurpose Existing Content

The last and most important growth hack that all brands should implement is continuous content repurposing. Content repurposing not only allows you to update your existing content with new facts and details but also gives you an opportunity to refurbish the piece as per your current brand focus. 

On top of that, repurposing also gives you the opportunity to rank your content pieces for trending keywords and search phrases. But keep in mind that you need to conduct thorough keyword research before proceeding with content repurposing.

RankWatch’s free keyword research tool will help you uncover potential keywords that are relevant to your content, are trending on different search engines, have good competition, and have profitable PPC value. Besides, the tool also lists top question-based keywords that you can use throughout your content, such as headings and FAQs.

Famous Growth Hacking Examples

Now that you know the various growth hacks, let’s look at some real-life examples of businesses that implemented these strategies and saw instant results.

1. PayPal

PayPal is the biggest example of how referral marketing can help your business grow to new heights. When PayPal started out, they designed a referral program where a user refers the app to their contacts, and when they sign up, both the user and their contact will get $10 cashback.

The referral program got so much hype that PayPal was able to grow by 10% every day. However, after a while, they changed the offer to “if your referral makes the first payment, both you and your referral will get a cashback,” it still helped them grow.

2. AirBNB

AirBNB shows how brand partnerships work out as the perfect growth hack technique. They have partnered with various companies from different industries, and each of them has turned out to be successful. One such partnership was with Flipboard, a news-based app, which helped both companies in expanding their business.

As per the deal, Flipboard provided informative content to users who booked through the Airbnb app, helping them make proper decisions. In exchange for news content, Airbnb users provided UGC content, such as reviews and comments, that Flipboard used to their benefit.

3. Facebook

Facebook used a mixture of various growth hack techniques in its early stages. They used content marketing to promote their services on Quora and other social media. The Facebook team encouraged the users to invite their friends and family members to use the platform, thus using referral marketing. Lastly, they used email marketing to send out emails to the referred members, asking them to join the growing community. Till date, Facebook uses email marketing to let users know about the various norms going on in the platform. The mixture of various techniques helped Facebook become the giant social media platform it is today.

4. DropBox

One of the famous growth hacking examples through referral marketing is Dropbox. The Dropbox team introduced the “refer your friends to Dropbox, and both will get extra storage space.” Now, who wouldn’t want extra storage space?

The technique worked wonderfully and helped Dropbox have around 60% more signups within a short span of time.

5. Dollar Shave Club

The power of video content marketing can be learned from the Dollar Shave Clube. The company designed an interactive video promoting its services and used it to garner more customers. Using this video, the team sold new razor blades to clients every month for just $1.

The tactic worked wonderfully in their favor and helped the company become a household name within days.

Final Words

Growth hacking techniques are a must for businesses of any kind. Whether you are a startup or a well-established company, implementing a few growth hacking techniques every now and then will help keep your customers engaged and expand your branches at the same time. Besides, growth hacking also helps you understand the customers’ point of view on your services and products and gives you material to work on. Most companies also conduct feedback-based growth hack campaigns where they reward the customer for giving honest feedback. It serves as a win-win situation for both parties as the company understands the target audience’s pain points and works on them, and the customer gets a reward in exchange for a simple review. However, make sure to carry out the growth hacking techniques after proper market analysis and observation. 

Hoping that this blog was useful for you.

See you next time!