5 steps to take your business to the next level with growth hacking in 2022: Howziter Test Study
In this blog we will be discussing the 5 steps to take your business to the next level with growth hacking. We will also use a real practical example to create a growth hacking tactic, to illustrate the power of growth hacking and demonstrate tools you can use to monitor and evaluate the effectiveness of your tactics.
Growth hacking is a term used to describe a process of rapid experimentation across marketing, product development, and sales in order to identify the most efficient ways to grow a business.
In the past, businesses have typically grown through paid advertising and word-of-mouth. However, with the advent of the internet and social media, there are now many more channels and methods that businesses can use to reach new customers.
Growth hacking is relevant for businesses in 2022 because it provides a way to test and iterate on different growth strategies quickly and efficiently. By rapidly experimenting with different tactics, businesses can identify the most effective ways to reach and engage their target customers.
Growth hacking is especially relevant for startups and small businesses that may not have the resources to invest in paid advertising or traditional marketing campaigns. By using growth hacking techniques, these businesses can quickly gain traction and grow at a much faster pace.
Step 1. Define your business goals for 2022
The very first step is to define your overall business goals, defining your business goals is very important for the following reasons:
Firstly, it provides a sense of direction and purpose for the business. Without clear goals, it can be difficult for a business to know what it should be striving for, and employees may be working towards different or conflicting objectives.
Secondly, well-defined goals can help to keep everyone in the organisation on the same page and working towards the same objectives. This can improve communication and collaboration, and help to avoid misunderstandings or conflict.
Finally, having clear goals can help businesses to measure and track their progress over time. This can be useful for identifying areas that need improvement and for setting future goals.
For this exercise, these are the business goals we have defined:
- Cut operating costs by x%
- Increase market share by x%
- Increase number of website visitors by x%
- Increase new product sales by xx%
- Increase Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) to $xxxxx
- Increase customer satisfaction score to XX%
The above goals do not quite meet the SMART goal standard: SMART Goals need to be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time bound. To be completely SMART, we can re-write them as follows, to add time limits:
- Cut operating costs by x% this operating quarter
- Increase market share by x% by 2023
- Increase number of website visitors by x% in 6 months
- Increase new product sales by xx% this financial year
- Increase Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) to $xxxxx this financial year
- Increase customer satisfaction score to XX% in 6 months
Each and every goal that you select, will require a specific plan of action. We will select this goal to proceed with:
👉🏽 Increase new product sales by xx% this financial year
Step 2. Research and identify your target audience
One way to identify your target audience is to look at your industry and see where your competition is focusing their marketing efforts. Are they targeting new customers, current customers, or a particular demographic? Once you have a good idea of your competition's targeting, you can start to figure out which of your target audiences they're neglecting.
Once you've identified your target audience, the next step is to research their interests and behavior. This can be a difficult task, but by using tools like Google Trends, you can get a rough idea of how popular certain topics are and see which topics are being discussed the most.
Once you have a good understanding of your target audience's interests and behavior, it's time to start developing strategies to reach them. One way to do this is to focus your marketing efforts on topics and channels that are popular with your target audience.
Step 3. Develop a growth hacking strategy
At this stage we already: (1) understand our business goals objectives, and (2) have identified our target audience and ideal customer.
This is where growth hacking differs from traditional marketing. With growth hacking, we are going to brainstorm ideas and suggestions on how we can reach our target customers, and achieve our goals with as little resources as possible, we are going to quickly test these ideas, measure results and decide whether the selected ideas are effective or not.
The steps are:
1. Identify your key growth levers.
2. Test and measure your results.
3. Continuously improve your growth hacking strategy.
4. Be prepared to pivot.
Step 4. Implement growth hacking tactics
There are many different growth hacking tactics you can use, but here are a few to get you started:
1. Use social media influencers
One way to get more traffic to your website is to enlist the help of social media influencers. These are people with a large following on social media who are likely to promote your website to their followers. You can reach out to these influencers and offer to pay them to promote your website.
2. Use paid search advertising to drive traffic to your website
Another way to get traffic to your website is to use paid search advertising. This is where you pay a company to have your website appear in the search results for certain keywords. When people click on your website from the search results, you earn money.
3. Use viral content to get people to your website
One way to get people to your website is to use viral content. This is content that is popular among the online community and is likely to get a lot of attention. When people see this content, they are likely to visit your website.
4. Use remarketing to reach people who have already visited your website.
Another way to reach people who have already visited your website is to use remarketing. This is where you target people who have visited your website but haven’t bought anything from you. You can send them targeted ads that will tempt them to buy something from you.
5. Use email marketing to reach people who have already subscribed to your email list.
Another way to reach people who have already subscribed to your email list is to use email marketing. This is where you send them targeted emails that contain information about your website or products. You can also use email marketing to drive traffic to your website from your email list.
6. Use Google AdWords to drive traffic to your website.
Google AdWords is a tool that you can use to drive traffic to your website. This is where you pay Google to have your website appear in the search results for certain keywords. When people click on your website from the search results, you earn money.
7. Use Yelp to find local businesses that your website can compete with.
Yelp is a website that helps you find local businesses. When you find a business that your website can compete with, you can use Yelp to find out more about the business and to see how many people have already visited the business. You can then use this information to promote your website to your followers.
The idea is to think outside the box and come up with unique ideas that can be easily tested at minimal cost. For this example, we will use the following tactic:
Our Growth Hacking Tactic: Reddit automation marketing tool for lead generation
We recently came across this tool - https://howitzer.co/ for Reddit Marketing, it was product of the day on Product Hunt. Howziter promises a 41% response rate on direct messaging. Sounds like a dream right?
Let us put it to the test by creating a growth experiment, we will go through the 5 steps to take your business to the next level with growth hacking, using this example to help illustrate how you would test other ideas using the same process.
Step 5. Evaluate and adjust your strategy as needed
Now we can test our tactic, measure and see results. For measuring and evaluation we will use Skhokho OKR tool. Create the following Objectives and Key Results:
Objective
👉🏽 Increase product sales by 20% this financial year
Key Results
👉🏽 🔥 Weekly website visitors from 1 000 to 1 300 [results will be confirmed by google analytics]
👉🏽 🔥 Free trial sign-ups increase by 20%
We will be assuming that if we can get 30% more website visitors and 20% more people to sign-up for our free trial, we can get sales to increase by 20%. That will depend on our conversion rates remaining the same, meaning we need to target high-intent customers, so we will add the following key result.
👉🏽 🔥 Maintain conversion rates at 10%
We will then start with the minimal $59 per month Howziter package and start our reddit campaign. On a weekly, bi-weekly or monthly basis we will need to report on the metrics associated with the Key Results, we can then assert that the tactic is working, if the metrics go up towards the target. If there is no change or a drop in the metrics, then we know the tactic is not working, and we can scrap the Reddit campaign and try something else.
The objective, targets, target clients — will always remain the same, all we will be changing going forward is the tactics, or experiments.
Feedback
Try Skhokho 14 dat free trial, try out some tactics and let us know which ones work and which ones do not work.
