Each startup is unique, and it’s very difficult to define ‘growth’ because of that. For some, growth hacking is about super-fast customer acquisition, while for others it’s directly ties to the actual revenue generated per client.
Whatever the style, scale, or industry of your business, digital marketing is right up there in your marketing strategy. And great digital marketing occurs at scale, and that requires tools to automate processes.
So, before you go hunting for the magic tool that will help you startup hack its way into a growth story (that’s doable, go for it), let’s establish some common vocabulary.
The 5-Step Growth Story of Every Business
Here are the 5 stages of customer interaction for every business, and you could hack your way to growth by hacking one or more of these stages.
- Acquisition: Get more people interested in product/service trials.
- Activation: Get them to actually try the product/service.
- Retention: Engage them for long term relations.
- Revenue: Translate the relationship into revenue.
- Referral: Nurture the relationship to get referrals and positive word of mouth from the customer.
Next up, we will cover 5 tools, that’s 1 each for these 5 stages.
1. OptinMonster
Leverage the power of this superlative lead generation software that can literally make your conversions multiply manifolds. The tool lets you build customized opt-in forms that help you build your email database of potential customers at scale.
Here’s how OptinMonster delivers great ‘acquisition’ results:
MonsterLinks™ 2-Step Options: Use this feature to create an optin form out of any URL or image.
Mobile friendly pop ups ensure you get subscriptions from people accessing your web pages on the move.
Create forms using the intuitive drag and drop page builder included in the package
Exit-Intent® Technology: Groundbreaking technology that helps you pop up customized and highly personalized messages based on the mouse behavior of the page visitor. This alone can convert a prospective page-abandonment into an email-subscription.
Here’s an example. Travel bookings website Anywhere uses this technology to convert up to 3.9% abandoning visitors, by showing a lucrative pop up, with two buttons that help progress the visitor down the conversion funnel.
2. Finteza
Finteza is a comprehensive analytics tool that allows you to analyze audience behavior, compare the performance of various pages, and optimize them for conversion.
With Finteza, you can easily understand the customer journey of your converted customers, and then replicate the same for your leads.
The detailed report offers a visual representation of how people convert on your website. This allows you to understand where a lot of prospects bounce back.
As you can see in the below image, out of 2,940 people who visited the site only 420 completed the registration. That’s an 85.7% drop in registration. This means chances are the registration process is quite complicated and hence, a lot of people are bouncing back.
As a marketer, you would like to analyze the whole process to better understand the reason for dropout and optimize it for conversion.
For more efficient data visualization, Finteza allows marketers to build a sales funnel and shows the audience path from the first visit to the final stage. This can help you learn a lot about the users’ behavior on your site.
3. AB Tasty
Controlled experimentation across different traffic segments can unveil groundbreaking insights. This knowledge, then, can help you multiply conversion rates of your landing pages by many times. For example, you can test different versions of your landing page copy to test the effectiveness of your copywriting strategy or CTA text. AB Tasty is a one-stop solution for all your A/B testing needs, helping you eliminate digital guesswork.
Key features:
- The standard A/B and multivariate tests are very easy to set up using this tool.
- You can use the funnel testing feature to set up tests involving different pages across the user journey.
- The drag and drop editor makes it super easy for anyone to use AB Tasty to set up tests.
- Apart from A/B testing, it also offers functionalities such as heatmaps, basic personalisation, and page flow reports.
- Personalization options in the tool help you deliver the right content, to the right audience, at the right time, for better testing.
4. Facebook Ads
Leverage the power and outreach of the biggest social media platform out there to reach out to audiences that are most likely to make a purchase. That’s how you maximize ROI on your ad-spends, and that’s how you ramp up revenues.
Facebook has so much insights on its users that you can target people that fit perfectly within your filters around demographics, interests, and behaviors. Here’s how nuanced the targeting can be:
You could literally reach out to 1,000 highly relevant users at $5 ad spending! The best part, your campaigns are easy to analyze, and this helps you optimize your ad spend with every campaign. As your cost of customer acquisition goes down your revenues are bound to go up.
Esquire Financing, a financial services company, used the Lookalike Audience feature of Facebook Ads to target a highly relevant set of users, and experienced a 49% increase in total sales.
The question you need to ask is – why not you?
5. Mention
If someone mentioned your brand in a positive context on a social media platform, chances are they’d be willing to leave a review, spread the word on other platforms, and in general, be your advocate.
Mention is a social media listening tool that helps you find out your brand mentions, monitor competitor’s brand mentions, and thus create a valuable database of opportunities you can leverage to spread positive word of mouth.
Mention offers you 3 distinctive capabilities:
- Mention Listen lets you ‘listen’ to what people are talking about your brand, and then use the insight to draw more referrals.
- Mention Publish lets you plan your social media content and becomes a one-stop shop for your community building campaigns management.
- Mention Respond, then, helps you engage with responders from a single interface.
It’s the complete social media monitoring suite that can help you grow your community of brand advocates.
Conclusion
As you read this, there’s a startup out there, operating in your industry, and making the right moves to hack growth. Beat them by using the right tools to speedtrack your customers’ journey across the 5 stages we talked about.
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Interesting article: “What is Digital Marketing?“