The Difference between Growth Hacking and Marketing

A growth hacker really is just a marketer, but one with a different set of challenges to tackle and tools to work with. There are a few key differences between startups and big companies that best explain the difference:

1.         Startups are organizations with extreme uncertainty. At a startup, you may not know who your core customer base is, why they buy your product (or whether they will at all), what marketing channels will work the best. Most of the time, corporations have all this figured out. So while startups are trying to both build a car and get the engine started, corporations are trying to make their cars run faster.

2.         Startups are designed for astronomical growth. Startups intend to grow at 20 percent month over month (or more), while corporations are satisfied with 5 percent year over year. As such, corporate marketers deal with the challenge of: I’ve got a mature business that already has significant market penetration. How do I eke out another few percent and keep the business growing? Startup marketers, by contrast, need to figure out how to 1000x their numbers but from a much smaller base.

3.         Startups don’t have access to the same resources or brand equity. Self-explanatory: you have less money and are less well-known at a startup than at an established company. This means you must both educate your prospective customer as well as acquire them without significant budgets.

Here is a laundry list of the primary tactics most growth hackers use:

•          Viral Acquisition: Leveraging built-in product features to encourage existing users to share your product with new users.

•          Paid Acquisition: There are many types. To name a few, search engine marketing, aka Google AdWords; Facebook ads; display ads; mobile ads; radio, TV, OOH (out-of-home), and many others all can be part of one’s arsenal – but they don’t provide accurate enough source attribution for most growth hackers; and finally, affiliate marketing, or providing incentives to third-party marketers who then promote your product for you and take a cut of the revenue.

•          Call Centers / Sales Teams: Surely building a sales teams does not count as “growth hacking,” but recently a new trend is emerging: leveraging outsourced low-cost labor to help support a startup’s efforts (usually in the Philippines, sometimes college interns). These workers can do anything from massively e-mail your prospective customers to create hundreds of SEO-friendly pages.

•          Content Marketing: Leveraging blog posts, infographics, and viral videos to increase brand awareness and site traffic. Turn those visitors into users.

•          E-mail Marketing: If you believe a growth hacker’s job is not just to increase new users/customers but also to engage them or encourage them to spend more money, then e-mail marketing is a significant part of their arsenal.

•          Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Don’t be fooled: what most mainstream SEO books and articles talk about is very different from what startups do for SEO. Startups that use SEO effectively build scalable infrastructure that applies to tens of thousands or millions of pages. Most of the SEO theory on the web is focused on ranking for just 5-10 keywords.

•          A/B testing and Analytics: Though this is not an acquisition method, there is no doubt that heavy data analytics and A/B testing helps a growth hacker improve their acquisition and conversion funnels.

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SEO Growth Hacks

Get featured snippets for your site

A featured snippet or “rich answer” is when Google highlights content at the top of the SERPs for certain queries.

The highlighted part at the top of the page is the featured snippet. As per a 2015 report, roughly 19.5% of all queries have these rich answers.

Now if you look at the image again, you’ll notice that Wikipedia actually ranks at #3 for this query. Yet, because of the featured snippet, it occupies the top spot on the page.

In other words, Wikipedia gets the bulk of the traffic for this query despite ranking below other websites.

This is a great example of a tactic that lets you punch above your weight (i.e. a growth hack). A site that lands a featured snippet spot invariably gets much more traffic than sites that outrank it in the SERPs.

Create content that supports scalable, long-term link building

Not all content is equal when it comes to SEO.

Some content types, such as research reports, tools, in-depth guides, and even pranks and hoaxes often attract far more links than standard blog posts.

Focusing on these content-types can often get you outsized results for less effort.

Tweak your on-page factors

While domain and page-level link factors still matter, content, engagement and experience matter nearly as much, if not more.

We often find that we can make great strides applying this tactic to sites that haven’t paid attention to on-page factors.

Google’s recent moves also show an increasing reliance on on-page factors, whether it’s penalizing slow sites or making sure that sites are mobile-friendly.

Which is to say, if you can offer users a stellar on-page experience, you might be able to outrank much stronger domains.

Invest in influencer relationships instead of conventional outreach

When most marketers think of “influencer marketing”, they usually think in terms of social media marketing.

Sure, getting your content shared by an influencer can drive a ton of traffic, but the benefits go beyond that.

Content creators often look to top influencers (which includes newsletters and sites) to discover new content. More often than not, content shared by influencers gets linked out to by dozens of their followers.

Create content for questions, not keywords

As a growth-focused marketer, you want to create content for the next generation of consumers, not the last.

In the words of Wayne Gretzky, go “where the puck is going to be, not where it has been”.

For SEOs, this means being aware of two trends that are changing computing: Artificial Intelligence (AI) and voice computing.

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10 Marketing Tips for Start-Ups

The reality is, most start-ups are bootstrapping their way toward growth. With limited funds entrepreneurs are forced to get creative in their problem solving. Marketing lends itself perfectly to this way of thinking, with savvy practitioners capable of making a big splash without breaking the bank.

Unfortunately, you will encounter some challenges along the way. How do you decide where to focus your marketing efforts? Where do you allocate your limited budget? Who do you market to? No matter how good a marketer you are, there’s always going to be a certain amount of guess work involved in answering these questions. Put yourself on solid ground by following these 10 marketing tips for start-ups.

What’s Your Budget?

In a recent study, BDC highlighted that 30% of Canadian small and medium enterprises have a marketing budget of less than $5,000 per year. Avoid the temptation to get caught up on the total dollar amount you’re spending. Instead, budget on a figure you can comfortably afford. How effectively you spend these dollars is more important than trying to break the bank on your marketing budget.

Make Use of Different Platforms

Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. With the plethora of channels out there, marketers have never had it better. Start off by experimenting with different strategies. Craft an elevator pitch; Invest in online display ads and make use of email marketing software like MailChimp. Keep trying different ways to spread the word until you find one that works for your business.

Find Your Niche

A common pitfall for new entrepreneurs is the belief that everyone is their target market. If you’re trying to sell to everyone, you’ll fail to create any connections with potential customers. Establish who your target market is and tailor your advertising effort toward them. Speak to these potential customers, understand their lifestyles, concerns and needs. The better you know them, the more effectively you can sell to them.

Make Use of Social

Social media is one of the most powerful tools at your disposal. Find out what platform your target market uses and engage with them. For example, you won’t find many male tech enthusiasts on Pinterest, so it’s not essential for you to be on every platform. Join in the discussion on social, talk to potential customers without giving them the hard sell. Ensure your personal profiles are also up to date. Customers will be curious who you are and some may want to follow you.

Ensure Quality Content

Content Marketing isn’t just a buzz word. It’s one of the most effective ways to get people talking about your products. Create a blog and link to it on your social channels. People love reading lists (after all, you’re reading one right now), try to think of lists that provide a jumping off point for conversations. Note what topics are trending in your industry, or local area, and use them for content. If you’re creating the content the only investment you’re making is your own time.

Identify Allies

No matter what industry you’re in there will be key figures and influencers in positions of power. Work toward building a relationship with these people by sharing their content, interacting with them and even introducing yourself to them at events. If they can be convinced to share your content it will give your marketing and legitimacy a massive boost.

Attend Events

Though we live in an increasingly digital age, networking events still serve an important purpose in the business world. Identify events in your industry and attend. Take the time to introduce yourself to people and ask questions. Grow your network of potential customers by speaking to them face-to-face.

Use SEO to Grow

An entire cottage industry has popped up around search engine optimization but it’s an area you can tackle yourself. Make use of Google Analytics and Search Console to see which pages on your site are performing well. If your site runs off a platform like WordPress, the Yoast plug-in can point out tweaks and improvements you can make to aid your SEO ranking. If your content is well written, lacking in errors, and hits the keywords you want, you’re already doing well.

Follow Up

Customers have never been more empowered to provide feedback. Go above and beyond to ensure the feedback you receive is positive. These testimonials are worth their weight in gold as a marketing tool. Reach out to your customers and ask them how you can improve your product and service. A satisfied and engaged customer has the potential to do your advertising work for you.

Market Yourself

As the owner, you are the public face of your company. Take the necessary steps to always appear professional in the eyes of your peers. Present yourself well, say the right things (avoid divisive topics on social media) and show up at all your industry’s major events. If you turn yourself into a trusted figure in your field, it will have a tremendous effect on your business.

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Digital Marketing Ideas for Startups to Succeed

Social media marketing

The most effective tool in the hands of a marketer is free, easily available and highly effective if used the right way. Establishing a strong presence online is possible through setting up social media profiles on relevant social media channels; ones that are aligned with the nature of your business.

Being present on social media can be highly beneficial for businesses for a number of good reasons. First, it becomes easy for your brand to disseminate information to your target audience. Secondly, almost all social media channels offer insights and analytics that helps you identify the type of content that your target audience likes consuming. Lastly, content can easily go viral on social media, and you never know when it can be your brand going viral!

Competitor research

New players in the market always run an in-depth competitor analysis in terms of product, service, quality and price. But very often they forget to analyze marketing strategies their competitors tried and tested. It is essential that you evaluate and study your potential competitors and the strategies they use or implement. Competitor analysis plays a huge role in improving your business strategy and this is why brands invest in it.

Search engine optimization

The objective of optimizing your website is to make your business discoverable to those looking for it. Optimizing your website is as important for a startup as it is for an established business.

The process of SEO begins with a thorough and detailed keyword research. This keyword research must be location specific (if the business offers its services in a particular area). A good way to go about it is to target highly relevant keywords with a fairly high search count.

Ideally, every piece of content you push out to the internet must be optimized with the keywords that you would like your business to rank on. As long as you keep your content (and images) optimized for keywords you wish to rank on, you should be good with your search engine optimization! 

Content marketing strategy

Successful content marketing is something that we experienced with our own brand. Once our team understood the value of publishing keyword based, informative and useful content that solve pain points, we knew this was the direction to head in.

The underlying cause for successful content marketing remains the same; people who are interested in finding a solution to a problem are willing to consume a lot of content, based on which they plan what to do next.

If your business offers informative, useful and unique content that is being searched for by your target audience, your brand is bound to build a sense of trust and authority in your domain or industry. Before you know it, relevant people will start to notice your brand and you will soon establish your brand as a credible source of information.

Email marketing

What is email marketing? If you have a registered email ID, you're probably familiar with promotional emails that you receive from multiple brands, even if they are completely irrelevant to you. When a business starts reaching out to its customers and potential clients via emails, it is email marketing.

Email marketing is a quick, simple and efficient way to get in touch with potential clients or initiate various collaborations. Email marketing tools like Mail Chimp are easy to use and also give you access to insights that help measure the efficiency of your campaign. This is something that does not require a huge investment and can be easily taken up by startups.

Research and analysis

The research sets the foundation for any type of marketing that needs to be carried out, irrespective of whether it’s being done by a startup or a big, established business. Research and analysis pave the way for a startup to identify the strategies being used by their competitors. This helps you identify the kind of strategies that you would like to try out, or not try out. Strategies that are successful with competitors are often picked up and tweaked by startups for their own benefit. In order to stay ahead in the game startups must invest some of their time on market research.

Video marketing

Creating and publishing videos is not as easy a task as creating and publishing graphics. A lot goes into video marketing and very often, startups do not have the funds to facilitate this. However, video marketing is one of the most important aspects of marketing today. This is because video content is at least 5 times more engaging than static content, enabling audiences to interact with brands for longer and with more attention.

Videos enable businesses to share valuable information about themselves in a manner that is engaging but also evokes an action. Startups or businesses that are short on funds can opt for animated videos and GIFs, instead of professionally produced videos. In either case, videos are a great alternative for static graphic content.

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