Growth Hacking: Ways & tricks to get traction for your startup

Growth Hacking: Ways & tricks to get traction for your startup

wannapreneur2entrepreneur.comShivankit Arora (marketingmasala.com)

What is growth hacking?

• The term itself is not a new concept• Growth hacking is a smart marketing hack which will

exclusively work for your startup and take it from 0 users to a decent level of traction

• You can use different tools/ways of marketing in a cost effective way to hack your startup’s growth


Growth Hacking Funnel (AARRR)

These stages work for almost all startups

• Awareness/Acquisition : Getting maximum potential users to see your product with least monetary spend on marketing

• Activation : Getting users to sign up for your product/service after they have become aware about you

• Retention : Making users to continue their engagement with your product or service • Referral : Users talking to other potential users and telling them about your

product/service• Revenue : Building a pipeline for constant revenue generation and scaling the

business


A little on growth engines

• Viral Engine of Growth– You need volume, low ticket size or it’s free for users.– Number of new users acquired for each of the existing users – Invite friends by social media sites or Uber

• Sticky Engine of Growth– Subscriptions, regular fee.– An existing customer is as important or even more than a new one.– Discount on next purchase etc.

• Paid Engine of Growth– If you have a high ticket size.– If average acquisition cost < Total life time value, don’t mind re-investing the profits .

• Using multiple combinations– But focus on one.


How popular startups/companies growth hacked their way?

• Drop Box : Started a referral program giving free storage to all users who referred their friends to use Drop Box

• AirBnB : Bed and breakfast company which started posting their accommodations on craigslist and started getting huge traction.

• QuickSprout.com : Established marketer Neil Patel writes here and shares his knowledge about digital marketing. He builds his credibility and brands himself through his blog. One of his posts got him 17 leads


How to use the popular growth hack case studies?

• Facebook: Growth hacking via customer enablement– Create opportunities for them– It could as simple as referrals or go beyond further.

• Quora: Growth hacking by experimenting on user behavior– Study your users behavior end-to-end.– Reverse engineer your happiest users and narrow down the focus.

• Paypal: Piggybacking others' success could be a growth hack– Collaborate, collaborate, collaborate with startups, events, communities. E.g. Pixr8

• Hotmail: Integration into customers' life– Mark your presence in their life, e.g. restaurants check-in, FB mentions, Fun&Food village.– Wingify helped customer celebrate their success


Tools of the trade (detailed)

• Search engine optimization• Search engine marketing• Content marketing : The next big thing for sustainability• Email marketing• Offline marketing and word of mouth• Private advertising


Enough of gyaan. Show me the real deal. How to hack growth?

Before starting on this, I want you to break the following beliefs if you have them• A start-up is a complete chaos and we can make any change at

any point of time based on our “gut” feeling• If you include management in a start-up, it will get boring• Now I have my product. Let’s do SEO, SMM, Email, Offline,

advertising and go crazy with all sorts of marketing. Doesn’t matter if it is relevant to me or not

• Growth Hacking is magic and I will win in the first go


Step 1- Understand who is your customer and which marketing channel is most relevant to reach them

After you figure out who is your customer are and where they are, you need to figure out the most RELEVANT channels to reach them.The next thing that needs to be implemented is allocating the right marketing channel to different stages of the growth hacking funnel• Awareness : Is social media more important than SEO at the start?• Activation : How to optimize landing pages to get more signup? Will A/B testing

work?• Retention: How about email-marketing to stay in touch with your audience?• Referral : Will launching a contest invite more people to use product or service?• Revenue : How to amplify ROI and build new cost-effective solutions?


Some companies who used step 1 to find relevant marketing channels

• Bewakoof.com : Realized that their major audience is college people and fresher's in jobs who want to wear jokes and fun stuff on their clothes. Used humor content and sarcasm posts to address people through Facebook mainly. Established themselves as a fun company that people want to interact with and wear their clothes

• Kids educational app (client) : Used content marketing and put up a blog that gives advice about parenting, educating small children. Social media directed towards helping parents with small children. Huge number of interactions with online parenting communities and blogs. Established image as a leader in child education and parenting


Step 2 : Define a process for all marketing efforts

• There are 100’s of ways to market your startup. Once you have discovered what is relevant to your business, you need to define a process with actionable steps

• These steps when carried out consistently will create a lasting effect

• Don’t complicate it. At least not in the beginning. Use simple excel sheets for a start

• If you guys are a team, use a free tool called trello.com to manage project work


My process chart-Social Media Marketing


My process chart- E-commerce marketing


Step 3 : Startups need to learn everyday. Keep analyzing and optimizing your marketing

• There will always be something new to add. Never stop growing• Every weekend (or Monday) sit down and evaluate the

performance of your marketing• Figure out what is working and what is not and move smartly• Prioritize your efforts and give more time to marketing channels

that are giving a good return for you• Maintain a tracker that records all KPI’s weekly and keep deriving

insights from it


Tracker for social media marketing


Step 4 : Choosing the best analytics tools for your growth marketing (free and paid)

Marketing Channel Tool Free or Paid

SEO performance Moz.com and SEMRush Paid

Site Analytics Google Analytics Free

Detailed site analytics CrazyEgg/Quick Sprout Paid after free trial

Social media Facebook insights, Analytics.twitter.com, Google plus Ripples, Iconosquare

Free

Social media TrueSocialMetrics.com Paid

Email Marketing MailChimp and Aweber Freemium (Paid after a limit)


Key Takeaways

• See your marketing in the AARRR funnel (Awareness-Activation-Retention-Referral-Revenue) and decide which channels are most relevant for you

• Create a process chart which has actionable steps that can be carried out everyday

• Every week, evaluate your marketing performance and see what is working and what is not.

• Use the best analytics tools that you can afford• Keep trying till you get it right

• “Don’t be afraid of failure, you only have to be right once” – Drew Houston, Founder DropBox


Resources to learn and study from

Books1. Lean Startup- Bible for startup owners2. Zero to One by Peter Theil

Blogs and sites (More important than books. Keep you updated)3. GrowthHackers.com4. Inbound.org5. Startup-marketing.com6. QuickSprout.com7. Blog.KissMetrics.com8. SocialMediaExaminer.com


Shivankit AroraMarketingMasala.com

[email protected]

Presenter Details:


Small Business & Entrepreneurship

Growth Hacking: Ways & tricks to get traction for your startup