11 Best Growth Hacking Tips For Small Businesses

Whether you’re a solo consultant or small agency or business, increasing your ROI should always be on your mind. Here’s 11 proven tips for growth hacking your business backed by real-world examples.

1. Provide stripped down valuable parts of your product or service for free in exchange for email or information as a lead generation strategy.  Spread the word on relevant channels.
2. Retargeting: Customize ads to specific audiences. If some viewers look at pricing on your website, send them ads for free trials. Use Facebook Ads to build those audiences. Narrow your acquisition strategy to what works.
3. Don’t be afraid to go to the location of your target demographic and manually help them see and use your product, whether it be universities, conferences or events. Grassroots efforts can pay off. Insights gained from your audience is also valuable.
4. If you have a product that has multiple use cases, try reaching each audience with content marketing. For example, Zapier automates and connects web applications through its software, so on its blog, it has become an industry expert on how to use the tools with which it integrates.
5. Increase conversion from lead to user. Provide users secure footing when onboarding by giving them “aha” moments where they intuitively understand the app’s intent.
   For example, Twitter used “Top People to Follow” and Tinder automatically showed romantic matches as people signed up. Linkedin used the question “Where did you used to work?”.
6. Focus on a single metric that correlates with “stickiness”. Facebook applied this when they focused on each user having at least 7 friends within their first 10 days of signing up to ensure continued use on the platform.
7. Watch loyal users closely to identify factors for success. Copy that behavior for new users and encourage them to follow strategies that lead to becoming loyal. This is what Slack did by testing their product on their own team and then looking at the data/behavior.
8. Understand user acquisition roadblocks. By doing this, you can see the precise barriers that are blocking them from signing up. Minor barriers could have the largest impact, like to migrate from an existing tool to yours. This was the problem ActiveCampaign, an email marketing tool encountered, after which they developed a service that helped users switch from other tools to theirs.
9. Hire the right people and enable them to focus on core competencies, like solving users’ problems or working on technical development. Ensure they don’t get bogged down with other less important tasks. For example, Apple makes sure its innovation team is focused on innovation, their core competency, and nothing else.
10. Focus on the audience that needs your product to solve their problems. From there you can gain word-of-mouth from your most vocal users. Stripe did this by connecting directly to developers, their target audience, and because it was so successful, the merchants who hired developers started demanding it.
11. Use analytics the right way! You can identify behaviors that drive engagement vs. churn, then contact customers when you see these behaviors. Drive engagement up by getting ahead of this “churn”. For example if the users that stay in the app figure things out in 2-3 min and the rest don’t, send targeted emails to those users before they forget about the app. Help desk tool Groove used this strategy to decrease turnover rate.We hope these 11 tips will help you grow and streamline your business. To get the remaining 10 tips chock-full with proven examples of how companies have achieved their business goals, click the button below to download a complimentary PDF!