Growth Hacking: Take your startup from 0 to 1SHIVANKIT 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

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

PayPal : Started giving 10$ to everyone who signed up for the service.

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

Tools of the trade (detailed)Search engine optimization

Search engine marketing

Inbound Marketing

Content marketing

Social media optimization and marketing

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.

How to do it?

1. Write a customer persona

2. Find out where they hangout most

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 their audience and 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

How do I find the ideal customer?

Rabbler App Rabbler is an app that lets you create polls

,vote and interact with them .

In other words, the company is trying to build the

Quora of polls

Every marketing technique include social media,

Online advertising FAILED.

We then understood that our target audience was youth and ran a campus ambassador program.

Narrowing down targets for our agency

Angel List A portal where startups, founders, investors and job aspirants create profiles and look for opportunities.

We shortlisted US/Silicon Valley startups and emailed their founders what was wrong with marketing of their startup

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

How to find the right marketing process for your startup? Analyze the results you have till now

Make a hypothesis

Run a small experiment to validate it

If it works, make it a process.

If it doesn’t, try something else. Make this loop as fast as possible

CookGourmet- Online recipe and ingredients delivery

Analysis till now : Facebook ads gave poor performancePeople did not understand what the site didPeople were looking for credibility

HypothesisDifferentiate ad sets in Delhi, Gurgaon, NoidaTest 3 captions on each adTest mobile, desktop and third party apps-ResultsHousewives are most interestedInstructions in the caption work bestMobile app ads work best

B2B client in London- Social Media

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 /In page 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 Takeaways1. See your marketing in the AARRR funnel (Awareness-Activation-Retention-Referral-Revenue)

and decide which channels are most relevant for you

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

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

4. Use the best analytics tools that you can afford

5. 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

Books Lean Startup- Bible for startup owners

Zero to One by Peter Theil

Blogs and sites (More important than books. Keep you updated) GrowthHackers.com

Inbound.org

Startup-marketing.com

QuickSprout.com

Blog.KissMetrics.com

SocialMediaExaminer.com

Got a question? Let’s talkGive us a visit at MarketingMasala.com

Shivankit Arora- shivankit@marketingmasala.com