Growth Hacking Is the New Marketing

My Personal Growth Hacking Tactics for Tech Startups in 2019

The person you see on the stage in the above picture is me, my name is Pavan. A growth hacking enthusiast and I talk a lot about growth, startups, and DevOps. Recently, I gave a talk at one of India’s prominent institutions (IIMB) on Growth Hacking for Startups organized by NSRCEL. I would like to share a small summary of what I spoke. Let’s get going…

The startup ecosystem is evolving at a rapid pace and this has forced companies around the world to be more competitive. There is a need to stand out from the crowd, it is not just about the unique value proposition your startup has, you need strategies that scale and help your company grow exponentially. There might already be firms offering the products or services same as you but what makes you different from others?

The answer is ‘Growth Hacking’, Yes, the unique, creative and unconventional strategies that can be scalable and impact directly to the growth of the organization.

Want to be a growth hacker? Check out my article below,

Today we will see some early traction growth hacking tactics that can help your startup grow exponentially.

Leveraging the users of an already well-established community is a well-thought growth hack and a very rarely used marketing trick, we also call it community marketing. Being active in industry targeted communities/forums can help boost your brand presence. Most of the successful companies we see today did gain their initial traction by getting engaged in the targeted communities or forums. You need to be slow initially and gain some authenticity to reach a stage where people value your suggestions. Make a content plan to see what you can post on a daily basis in the form of a story that makes people to get involved with the content and react to it in one or the other form. Once you develop sufficient trust, you can always divert the community members to your desired domain.

Getting involved in community marketing can be of two types, an organic way or through the sponsored way. Organic community marketing refers you getting involved in groups that are already established and members who share a mutual affinity for a common concern. Sponsored community marketing is where it involves you, as the brand or business, creating a community where fans of your products or services can join, interact, share feedback — not only with each other but with the brand itself.

5 things to keep in mind when it comes to organic community marketing,

This is how I participate on Reddit, see below,

Social media has evolved big time in recent years and is definitely a boon for entrepreneurs. We have seen videos and memes going viral overnight. Social channels like Instagram and LinkedIn are gaining huge popularity and they provide a number of opportunities for entrepreneurs to promote their brands in as many ways as possible. No matter which social network, consistency, and creativity can help you gain good momentum. Brands nowadays go live through their social profiles to share important information or just to get to know about their fans and sometimes they show what’s happening behind the scenes, etc. It is up to one’s potential on how well they can make use of these social channels in the modern marketing world.

Some points to be creative on social media,

Collaborating with social media influencers will help you gain word of mouth and an exponential reach. A good push from a genuine Influencer can change the whole game, but finding that genuine influencer is the key. Influencer marketing is on the rise these days, brands have found that collaborating with influencers is the easiest way to reach a number of people in a go.

These influencers are trusted by millions of buyers, and marketers are paying attention to this trend.

Shown below is the Google trend of influencer marketing on the web, as you can see, it is up and growing.

Be an open book and it is okay, have a section on your blog that is meant for transparency, show your technology stack to your customers, write down your release notes and recently added features as blog posts. Write about your milestones and what have you achieved so far and what’s the company future looks like. A case study from the founder or a co-founder creates a good impact in the community and it can easily gain trust.
Writing about personal wins and gains can do more wonders. Something like, — ‘How we gained our first 1000 customers in 30 days’, ‘how our website started receiving 5k visits per day’, ‘how we became product hunt’s top voted product/tool’, etc. Such stories create an eagerness and curiosity in the minds of the people and help you get discovered. Who knows, when shared on Hacker News or Reddit, it might go viral as well. Who doesn’t like growth or traction stories, they are all valuable and present a lot of learning to other entrepreneurs. Even if you gain a small momentum for your startup through such case studies, it’s okay, create such case studies and publicize them. Some examples are below,
Tugce Bulut, Co-founder and CEO of Streetbees writes about her scaling journey and insights in this startup story — ‘How we scaled our startup to 87 people of 20 nationalities in three years’.
Josh Pigford, founder of Baremetrics shares how they got their first 100 customers over the course of about 4 months — ‘How We Got Our First 100 Customers’. Shane Barker, a well-known digital marketing consultant wrote how he grew his website traffic from 50K to 90K in 6 Months.
And here is one more, see how Noah Kagan grew a website to 10K visitors in a month.

Documenting a personal win/success as a blog will always help others in the community.

From a brand perspective, case studies help people understand more about your product and see how others are using your it.

Content is still the king and recently video format has become a major part when it comes to creating content. It is assumed that LinkedIn is giving more importance to well-crafted videos and make them reach more people compared to the text format.
This media (video) has already proven to be very efficient; 70% of marketers say interactive video engages audiences “well” or “very well,” and 68% of marketers believe it will continue to become a major element of modern marketing mixes.

Hubspot’s study highlights the importance of videos for marketers going forward.

Guest blogging is one of the tricks to cut the crowd and stand out. Guest blogging not only helps in improving the SEO and getting backlinks but also enhances the brand reputation on the web. Writing on the popular industry publications can do wonders in getting you more targeted traffic and leads.

Some tips to keep in mind when it comes to guest blogging

Sometimes it is hard to get into the authoritative and popular publications, they might ask your previously published articles. So I always recommend people who want to guest blog to write some articles on websites like Medium, it’s free and you can validate how people react to your content before going for guest blogging on such popular websites.

My guest blogs are below, take a look,

Profile creation might look outdated but still has power when it comes to Google indexing and getting found on the web. Profile creation on different listing websites can give a good number of backlinks and this helps in the initial website traffic boost. Apart from being on different social media channels, you need to get listed on the startup listing directories.

Here Is a list of the best startup directories online,

One easy hack you can do in the initial days to get easy traction is finding the known personalities or influencers in your industry and asking them for the interview. Get them on a Podcast or Google hangout or even a simple Skype call. You can interview one person at a time or send a list of questions to a number of experts on an email and ask them to reply back.

By doing this, you get a fresh content article with a lot of insights. Combine all the answers given by these experts and publish it as an article on your blog, we call it an expert opinion round-up blog. Promote it well and ask the people you interviewed to tweet and re-tweet, share on their social channels. Email all these experts asking them to share your round-up article.

Growth mindset has become an integral part of the marketing team these days. To be in the race, entrepreneurs are required to think out of the box when it comes to promoting their startups and reach a wide audience at a faster rate. I hope these growth hacks are enough to start your growth marketing activities and get your initial users.

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