Feeling bogged down by piles of digital marketing strategies yet nothing seems to convert?

While you might have a whole world of traditional marketing systems at play, a lack of results may point out the need for a little alignment.

Growth marketing helps to identify marketing bottlenecks, and apply data-driven hacks to get the greatest effect for minimum effort.

Want to know the process of hacking your growth marketing? Use this guide as a walkthrough on how to increase sales with growth marketing.

What is Growth Marketing?

The main premise of growth marketing is to use scientific data-driven methods to work out key areas for improvement.

By applying analytic tools and experimenting to see what works, growth marketers and growth hacking agencies can monitor and measure progress.

In doing this, it becomes clear where you can make a few tweaks that will radically affect the outcomes of your traditional marketing strategies.

Common growth hack results include increased engagement, lead generation, conversions, and sales.

Famously in his book ‘The Lean Startup’, Eric Reis advocates the ‘Build-Measure-Learn’ rule:

• Build campaigns
• Measure their success
• Learn to improve using the data you measure

When it comes to implementing growth hacks, there are six key areas to focus your growth marketing on.

• Awareness – How to increase the number of people that know about your solution
• Acquisition – How to enhance data capture from potential customers
• Activation – How to encourage product usage
• Revenue – How to boost your profit margin
• Retention – How to foster loyalty
• Referral – How to encourage recommendations

Take travel company, Masai Mara.

Applying a growth hacking mindset, the travel firm increased conversions by 40%.

To do this they analyzed previous customer journeys on their website. Results showed that customers weren’t clicking the menu as the hamburger menu style was confusing.

A simple tweak to make the navigational features clearer boosted conversion by nearly double!

Alternatively, consider the famous case of Airbnb in its early days.

Noticing a bottleneck in customers promoting their rooms, Airbnb reverse-engineered an API to allow hosts to directly share their properties on Craigslist.

Arguably, this cross-posting capability was the making of Airbnb.

How to Harness Growth Marketing to Increase Sales: A Step-by-Step Walkthrough

No doubt you’re deploying an armada of online marketing techniques, but perhaps you’re getting lost in the ocean of similar companies doing the same.

Growth hacking mindset rearranges the way you think to pinpoint exact bottlenecks and devise specific tweaks. This cuts the resistance in your digital marketing campaigns to convert more sales.

This section will give you a step-by-step walkthrough as to how you can use growth marketing as a means to attract more customers and drive more sales.

Step #1: Build brand awareness

Brand awareness is a two-tongued beast. You need to foster awareness among prospective customers and build awareness with Google’s spiders.

On the one hand, you need strong educational content that entertains and engages your target audience.

This means figuring out how to direct the right content to the right digital channels at the right times.

On the other, you need a robust SEO growth strategy to help this audience find you in search engines.

This means strong attention to keywording, well-organized backlinking, and a structured topical content architecture.

Simple growth hacking helps to achieve this with a few basic tweaks.

Hack #1: Use LinkedIn ‘thank you’ tags

Shaun Rein, founder of the China Market Research Group, used thank you tags to connect with 100k more people on LinkedIn.

Want to boost your LinkedIn network to kickstart inbound marketing?

Post and comment on industry-specific content and thank thought leaders, customers, and connections for their insights, content, and engagement.

This will build brand awareness, while driving engagement, sales, and possible partnerships.

Hack #2: Use emojis

Emoji marketing is highly effective. Posts with emojis, get 20-30% more clicks than those without.

Use emojis in your social media marketing campaigns, especially in Facebook lead ads.

Be daring. Add emojis in your titles.

Just ensure that when using emojis, you don’t clutter the wording so it’s too hard to read.

Equally, make your emojis relevant to the topic you’re talking about. Use emojis that are popular in your industry, and structure them in the way your target audience uses these icons.

Hack #3: Use the $1.80 Instagram strategy

Marketing guru, Gary Vee, advises you to use his $1.80 growth hack.

Give your ‘two cents’ across the top 10 industry hashtags on nine posts per week.

$0.02 x 9 posts x 10 hashtags = $1.80

This drives awareness and engagement in the same way that ‘thank you’ tags work. Chase up leads and ask questions.

Try to find out what these connections have to offer, in terms of information and visibility, and work to either capture them as a lead or a partner.

Step #2: Automate customer acquisition

Automated customer acquisition will connect your target buyer personas with the right solutions.

Since 61% of growth marketers agree that lead generation is the main goal for automation mechanisms, it’s important that your customer acquisition systems run smoothly.

To do this, you need to find their pain points and offer solutions to soothe those issues.

Your customer acquisition mechanisms will offer a halfway step between your customer’s problem and your paid-for solution.

This will usually come in the form digital marketing campaigns offering a free guide, free demo, mailing list with free info, promotion, discount, etc.

Customers will exchange their contact details and personal data for these resources.

This data is what drives your growth marketing.

Hack #4: Use the messenger apps

Some growth marketers say that the landing page is dead. Long live the chatbot + messenger app combo.

Top B2B Marketing consultant Jason Swenk earned a whopping $250k in just two months, by using a messenger app as his main acquisition channel.

By attaching a chatbot to his ‘contact’ link, he automated his customer acquisition with a messenger app. AI-powered chatbot will interpret customer questions – usually through multiple choice questions.

From here, the software gives a marketing qualified lead (MQL) score and then connects leads with a salesperson in real time.

To get the best results from growth hacking your customer acquisition channels with messenger apps, do this:

• Use analytics tools to find out customer problems
• Direct content marketing efforts to solve customer problems
• Try using a messenger app instead of landing pages. Try tools like:
  • Chatfuel
  • Manychat
  • MobileMonkey
  • Whop’s Telegram bot

Step #3: Increase product activation

More people using your product not only builds brand awareness, but it also drives sales.

You’ll get more attention from customers if you leverage thought leaders, role models and influencers in your industry, as they offer social proof of the value of your product.

Influencer marketing has a 520% ROI. That’s certainly not a return any marketer can sniff at.

Influencer marketing allows you to reach key industry audiences using thought leaders as your kingpin.

Since social proof drives conversion rates up by 34%, it’s valuable to use influencers to confirm your efficacy.

Hack #5: Use influencer marketing

See how environmentally friendly bottle brand, Ocean Bottle leverages influencer content marketing in its Instagram growth strategy.

Fostering a growth hacking mindset, the reusable goods company invests its own hashtags ‘#BYOB’ and ‘#obambassador’. In doing this, Ocean Bottle encourages user-generated content.

This growth hack saves content marketing production time and encourages engagement.

Ocean Bottle posts a self-portrait of influencer @santandave to flaunt social proof of his support for this project. This growth hack gives the bottle brand access to his 1+ million followers.

Hack #6: Use giveaways to encourage feedback

Testimonials and reviews are the key to selling your product. To encourage more high ratings, you want customers who are in a good mood.

Give away products through social media competitions. This growth hack will encourage social media engagement.

At the same time, you can guarantee a review from a lucky winner, or you can push reviews by awarding it to a lucky customer who’s rated your product online.

Step #4: Boost revenue growth

Put simply, you want more sales and better quality sales.

To boost revenue growth, you need your customers to buy more things for higher prices more often.

Quick follow-up and targeted promotions work wonders to drive revenue marketing growth.

Hack #7: Use automated follow-up mechanisms

Shockingly, 90% don’t follow up with leads within the first five minutes. In fact, over half of businesses don’t follow up with leads at all!

This is crazy considering we knew how important a quick follow-up is as far back as 10 years ago. Harvard Business Review showed companies that follow up in the first five minutes experience 22x the conversions of those who don’t.

To make 220% more sales, use a software like Zapier. A bot qualifies your lead automatically and passes it directly to the relevant sales person. No wait time.

Hack #8: Use first-time limited purchase promotions  

80% of buyers will make a first-time purchase if they’re pushed a relevant offer.

Create FOMO urgency to join your community by making the offer a limited time affair.

See how ice-cream vendor, Dairy Queen uses the #limitedtime hashtag to encourage users to share its 80th birthday promotion.

You can generate the same engagement and conversion rate through time-bound first-time offers.

Step #5: Tighten customer retention

Don’t lose your audience. There’s always more sales to be made and these customers are already convinced.

Keep up-to-date with customer experience issues, behaviors, and conversations using analytics software.

Accept feedback into your current marketing systems and deploy growth hack tactics to tweak these systems to personalize campaigns to these new issues.

Keep your customers engaged with targeted marketing efforts. This can include anything from personalizing email subject lines to letting customers tailor how they receive your product.

Hack #9: Use next-purchase discounts

As 91% of shoppers only buy from companies who recognize and remember them, it’s smart to only present relevant offers and recommendations.

Consider how Virgin Experience keeps people coming back for more. Offering a 10% off discount to new signups straight away, the company gathers data.

Next, customers receive a token for 15% off the next purchase as soon as they buy.

Knowing what the customer has already bought, Virgin recommends similar products to spend the discount on. Virgin could always steer certain promotions to push particular new product lines.

Hack #10: Use auto-engagement growth hacks

If you can code HTML, try growth hacking your system to auto-like tweets by your existing customers.

Alternatively, schedule a campaign of tweets that tag potential clients, influencers, thought leaders, and prospective partners. Don’t be shy! It’s a numbers game.

Another growth strategy is to A/B test drip email marketing campaigns to customers once they purchase. Why not set up a year of automated emails and tweak as you go?

Step #6: Implement a referral system

Use your existing customers to find new customers.

As your existing clients use your product, they know best who will like it. So, encourage them to sell it with a robust referral or affiliate program.

Since 82% of consumers look for referrals from family and friends, referrals are your top source of highly qualified leads.

Hack #11: Follow-up email referral link

A Great Read encourages and rewards referrals directly after each sale with a follow-up email marketing campaign.

Notice how the links are easy to share on social media and on other digital channels.

Try limiting invites to increase FOMO.

Also try offering a juicy reward like money off or credit.

Give instructions as to the kinds of people you want your customer to invite. This creates exclusivity and fosters a tribe mentality.

Conclusion

Thanks to this comprehensive article, you’ll now have a ton of growth marketing hacks up your sleeve.

The most important thing to remember is to create systems and tweak bottlenecks with growth hacks.

And if you have any questions about growth marketing, don’t hesitate to reach out to the experts at Wordable.

Kevin Kessler

Kevin J. Kessler is a published author of five fantasy novels, a professional wrestler, and a puppeteer (not all at the same time). Kevin is a content writer at Codeless.

https://getcodeless.com