15 Great Growth Hacking Methods to Transform your Business

The most effective growth hacking methods

What is growth hacking?

Growth hacking is a technique used to rapidly grow businesses through a variety of creative and non-textbook tactics.

“Hackers” are people who are known for bypassing security systems and breaking into computers. In a similar fashion, albeit more ethically, “growth hackers” use unorthodox tactics to grow their businesses and leapfrog their competitors.

They’ll scrap the traditional marketing approaches in favor of anything else that can help can them achieve their objectives more efficiently. Nothing is off-limits to them, as long as it works and is scalable.

The biggest risk growth hackers face is wasting their time and resources on unproven strategies, and not getting the desired outcomes. And on the other hand, the potential reward is discovering untapped marketing channels with unrestricted access to their target consumers.

Growth Hacking vs inbound marketing

The growth hacking process involves rapid experimentation across marketing channels and product development to identify the most efficient ways to grow a business. It is designed for startups which don’t have enough resources to create formal processes, yet need to grow rapidly.

Inbound marketing is the process of drawing customers to you by providing them with valuable content to read, watch or listen to. It is drawn from the concepts of inbound marketing and focuses on getting found online by people searching for your product or service.

A notable example of growth hacking

Uber has one of the most successful growth hacking stories of all time. In its early days, its primary marketing strategy comprised of launching small cities, focusing on winning it over, and then moving on to the next city and doing the same thing. Uber would target cities based on factors such as nightlife, events, and the availability of convenient taxi services.

The company’s founders were so confident in its ride-hailing model that they offered customers $20 to take their first rides. They knew that riders would not want to use any other taxi service after trying them out. They even offered free rides to people who had been invited to the app by other users – which they still do, to this day.

Offering free rides eliminated the hesitance for a lot of people. And since Uber’s rides were superior to the other taxis, people would just keep inviting each other and spreading the word. The company relied almost entirely on word of mouth to fuel its growth, and it worked like a charm.

The key takeaway: Uber started by building a service that solved a lot of people’s problems. It was cheaper and more convenient than the traditional taxis.

The company then launched in small cities where it was easier to grow through word of mouth. Once it had completely dominated a city by offering incentives to get people to sign up, it would move on to the next city and repeat the process. Uber is now present in nearly every major city globally.

15 Effective Growth Hacking Techniques to Scale your Business

1. Claim free ad credit offers

A lot of digital advertising platforms, including Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads, and Snapchat Ads, offer free ad credit to first-time users.

You can kickstart your digital marketing campaign (even if you don’t have a budget) by claiming these offers and running highly targeted PPC campaigns. Read on to the end of this post to learn how you can get over $1,300 worth of free credit from Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads, and several other platforms.

2. Collect ratings and reviews

This is one of the most effective growth hacking techniques. People have become so obsessed with the idea of reading reviews because it helps validate their purchase decisions. Around 70% of consumers will not purchase anything online before reading reviews.

If they see that a product has many negative comments, then they’ll know not to waste their money on it. And if it has many positive reviews, they subconsciously drop their guard and assume that it’s a quality product. Positive ratings and reviews can give businesses social proof unlike anything else. They are essential for success in this digital era.

The easiest way to get reviews is by asking for them from customers through an email follow-up. The entire process can be automated, such that the request is added to a “thank you” email or on a payment receipt.

3. Referral marketing

Referral marketing is one of the best growth hacks for getting other people to actively promote your business to their peers. It can be executed in many different ways.

For instance, you can start an affiliate program and offer lucrative rewards to people who send you referrals. Many companies in the tech industry rely on affiliates for the bulk of their sales. For example, Hostgator pays affiliates around $100 for every single referral, and that encourages them to go all out promoting the company.

Another angle you can take with referral marketing is to offer discounts and bonuses to current customers every time they refer your business to another person. Uber uses this strategy to a great effect. Whenever you refer a friend to the platform, you both get rewarded with some sort of discount or a free ride.

4. Cross-promotion

Cross-promotion involves partnering with other businesses that you’re not directly competing with, but target a similar audience, and then actively promoting each other. It’s an excellent growth hacking strategy if you have a limited marketing budget.

For example, if you have a car hire business, you can partner with local hotels and lodges, such that they refer you to people who are looking to lease cars, and you refer them to people who are looking for places to stay. It’s a win-win for everyone.

You can partner with numerous businesses across different industries and advertise each other across your social pages, email, and even on blog posts. Cross-promotion doesn’t take much effort and has no costs involved.

5. Social media contests

Doing contests is a great way to get people to talk about your business online. The contests can take many different formats. For example, you can get your followers to use your hashtags and share posts from your social media platform for a chance to win a prize.

The more lucrative your prizes, the more people are likely to participate. If you can get only 10 people with around 1,000 followers to share your posts, then it would be seen by up to 10,000 people from their networks.

Getting people to talk about your business is more effective than any self-promotion you can do. You’ll also benefit by getting credibility and social proof.

6. Use LinkedIn to find leads

LinkedIn is one of the best places to find leads online. Its users mostly consist of business professionals with two times the buying capacity of the average internet user.

You can use it to find customers, employees, investors, partnerships, and so much more. There’s no other platform like it for business networking. This in-depth article goes over some tried and tested ways to find clients and grow a business using LinkedIn.

7. Feature customer success stories

This is another excellent growth hacking strategy. Featuring your customers’ success stories on can help you achieve two things. First, it gives your business social proof by showing that people are actually using your products and finding success with them.

Secondly, it encourages the featured customers to share the post on their social media pages. All it takes to get such testimonials is simply asking for them from your best customers. You can specifically target the ones who have a large following.

8. Give out freebies

A common challenge faced by newly launched businesses is getting people to purchase their products or services when nobody knows who they are. Most consumers only buy from brands that they recognize.

Giving out free things can help overcome that challenge and get the ball rolling for your business. The cost will be recouped down the line. You can offer freebies such as gift cards, discount coupons, t-shirts, free trials and samples, or anything else that holds value. Uber offers free rides as part of its onboarding process.

Remember that your early customers are the foundation upon which your business is going to grow. Their word of mouth will increase your brand awareness; their ratings and reviews will give you social proof. Spending a little extra on them can go a long way in helping grow your business.

9. Get featured on popular publications

Whenever your business gets covered by a respected blog, magazine, or media outlet, it gains instant authority in the eyes of consumers.

You can get featured through sponsored articles and reviews, or by becoming a contributor on niche blogs. Contributors usually get a byline where they can briefly promote their business and link to its website.

Another great way to get featured is by signing up on Help a Reporter Out and doing interviews. Every time your interviews get published, or your quote is used, you’ll get full accreditation in the story as well as a backlink to your website.

10. Focus on building an email list

An email list is one of the most important digital assets for a growth hacker. Having one will give you unlimited access to your target audience – on-demand.

Whenever you launch new products or you just want to share a message with your customers, sending an email blast is the easiest way to reach them. Email marketing campaigns have an average open rate of 21.3%, which is significantly higher than the click-through rates on most other digital advertising formats.

You can build your list by adding an opt-in form on your website and then offering a free downloadable item such as an e-book to get people to sign up.

Retargeting is another way to get users on your email list. If you’ve ever gone to a website and then seen the same ads follow you around the internet (you may have even noticed them on Facebook and Instagram), then you’ve experienced retargeting.

Retargeting is when you use certain tools to put a cookie on your browser so that any time you go anywhere online, the tool tracks you. The tool then automatically puts an opt-in form for your email list on the retargeting website so that people who visit those sites can sign up.

11. Prioritize SEO

SEO can help your business achieve exponential growth in the long term. If customers can easily find you through a Google search, then you won’t need to spend money on ads, which will help you reduce your customer acquisition cost. There are surely not many other growth hacking tactics more effective than this. The only challenge is that it often requires a lot of patience.

You can aim to rank your website on search engines for all keyword variations that are relative to what you do. For example, if you sell sports equipment, you can rank for keywords such as:

“sports equipment stores near me”
“running shoes for sale”
“where to buy tennis racquets”

Since SEO is a long-term process, outsource the work to freelancers and SEO specialists. That helps reduce the burden on your in-house team.

Using keywords in you website and its content will help search engines understand what your webpage is about, so they can rank it higher in SERPS.

Another important factor for improving your website’s SEO is backlinks. Backlinks are links that point to your website from external websites.

Getting links from trusted, high authority websites will boost your search engine ranking. To gain backlinks, try reaching out to other websites or bloggers that write about topics similar to yours or who have a large following to see if you can get your link posted on their site.

12. Host free webinars

Did you know that 20-40% of webinar attendees end up becoming business leads? Webinars are a fantastic way to get your message across while demonstrating your knowledge and expertise.

In addition to being a very cost effective method of lead generation, webinars are also more likely to turn into sales than any other form of lead generation. It is no surprise that businesses have quickly adopted them as a primary lead generation tool.

But even with the power of webinars at your fingertips, you still have to work against the same lead generation problems that other methods face.

Which is why it is important to maintain an email list of people that engage with your webinar. Since webinars offer such a targeted and high converting way to showcase your product or service, you want to make sure that you keep in touch with your leads even after the event is over.

You can host webinars on any topics that are likely to be of interest to your target customers. For example, if you’re a marketing consultant, you can host one on “how to use social media to double your sales in only 3 months”.

After the event has concluded, make sure to republish the video on all your platforms, including your website, social media pages, YouTube, and other content-sharing platforms. Spreading it in such a way increases the chances of your targets stumbling upon them and becoming familiarized with your name.

13. Steal cues from your competitors

This growth hacking strategy can be particularly useful for businesses that are just starting out and don’t have enough data about the realities of the market. Stealing cues from competitors can give an idea of strategies that are most likely to yield the best results.

For example, if you discover that your competitors are getting most of their website traffic from LinkedIn, then you’ll know that it’s something worth investigating further rather than blindly wasting time on Instagram. Having such an insight can potentially save you years of learning through trial and error. There are many online tools you can use to spy on your competitors, including Buzzsumo, Similarweb, and SEMrush.

14. Automate repetitive tasks

As growth hackers, time is undoubtedly our most valuable asset. The more of it we have on our hands, the more we can accomplish. Automating repetitive tasks will help you free up time that you can then shift to more important things. It is one of the most effective productivity hacks.

For example, rather than manually responding to messages on your social media pages, you can install a chatbot to do it for you with better efficiency.

Rather than manually sending emails to your customers, you can send them in bulk using Mailchimp. You can streamline your entire sales and marketing operations using Hubspot.

If there’s any menial task that’s taking up too much time, yet you cannot automate, then you can outsource to freelancers on Fiverr or Upwork.

15. Create an omnipresence on the internet

The majority of consumers do some online research whenever they need anything. Creating an omnipresence means being in all the places where they are likely to go searching for you. It’s one of the best growth hacks.

For example, if they search for your products on Google, your website or e-commerce store should be among the top results. If they go to YouTube, you should have videos on there too. And if they decide to check on online marketplaces or business directories, you should also have a listing in the results.

Even when they’re not searching for products, but some answers to their questions, you can still get your brand in front of their eyes through your blog posts.

If you can dominate the internet in such a way, then you’ll be able to growth hack your business and help it achieve rapid growth in the shortest time possible. Your success will be fueled by brand familiarity, just like Uber’s success was fueled by word of mouth. Most consumers only buy from businesses that they recognize.

Conclusion

When you’re a startup or a small business, your budget for expanding and growing is limited. By using the growth hacking strategies outlined in this post, you can increase sales without spending more on advertising or marketing materials. It takes creativity and dedication but it pays off big time when done correctly!

Growth Hacking Resources

Use the links below to get free ad credit to kickstart PPC campaigns:

$100 on LinkedIn – https://bit.ly/linkedinadscredit
$375 on Snapchat Ads – https://bit.ly/snapchatadscredit
$100 for Facebook Remarketing – https://bit.ly/perfectaudiencecredit
$100 for YouTube Ads – https://bit.ly/youtubeadscredit
$50 for Amazon Ads – https://bit.ly/amazonadscredit
$100 for Apple Search – https://bit.ly/searchappleads
$150 for Google Ads (US) – https://bit.ly/creditgoogleads
$300 for Yelp Ads – https://bit.ly/yelpadscredit

Some useful tools:

Automate your sales and marketing using Hubspot – Hubspot get started
Build a professional website using Wix – http://bit.ly/2vA9doX
Build an e-commerce store using Shopify – Shopify Free Trial
Perform keyword research for your blog and PPC campaigns using SEMrush – https://bit.ly/2OtnIYg