Awesome growth hacking tricks from Nate Barnwell: There is a revolution taking place in the world of startup growth, and we wanted to help people understand this new phenomenon. Those who understand growth hacking will have a competitive advantage that is hard to overstate, and we wanted to provide a robust framework for thinking about it. This guide is for entrepreneurs, founders, growth leads, or anyone else who is trying to grow a startup. If acquiring new customers (and retaining existing ones) is important to your business then you should read this guide. If customers matter to you, then growth hacking should matter to you. Let’s begin.
The focus and the ultimate goal of all these growth strategies are to achieve growth by gaining new customers. It is not possible to achieve long-term and stable growth without a regular and loyal customer base. You can clearly identify how you must use a growth strategy in the light of various criteria such as market, customer profile, your field of activity and your product. In this context, the growth strategies used by some brands can be read as successful growth strategy examples. Cloud storage, which is used widely today, was a very new technology when Dropbox was introduced in 2008. The way of growth was to persuade people to use such a system instead of the physical storage devices used until then. The growth strategy that the company used for this purpose was market expansion. This method, which is performed through a viral loop, is based on users recommending the system to others. Normally offering 2 GB of free storage, Dropbox offered 500 MB of extra additional storage for each user registered with your referral link. In doing so, users who wanted to have up to 16 GB of free storage space recommended Dropbox to their friends and colleagues. By all means, this kind of viral method was not effective in the first months of the company. It started providing positive results in the following months and the company reached its one-millionth customer at the end of its first year. The number of customers increased to three million in the next two months. Today, the company serves more than 500 million users.
Nathan Barnwell growth hacking strategies: It might be a while before this particular approach can be employed again, but it’s effective enough to warrant a mention. Sometimes, adding a human element to your growth strategy can help set things in motion for your business. Prospects are often receptive to a personal approach — and there’s nothing more personal than immediate, face-to-face interactions. Putting boots on the ground and personally interfacing with potential customers can be a great way to get your business the traction it needs to get going. This could mean hosting or sponsoring events, attending conferences relevant to your space, hiring brand ambassadors, or any other way to directly and strategically reach out to your target demographic in person.
Aside from “growth hacker” — an increasingly unpopular term — growth marketers are also sometimes referred to as: Growth marketing managers Demand generation marketers, Performance marketers, Digital marketing managers. Each of these roles are focused on growing users and revenue for a company, Jonathan Martinez, a growth marketing manager at Uber, told Nate Barnwell. However, Divisional founder Trevor Sookraj explained to Nathan Barnwell that these terms aren’t all exact synonyms for “growth marketer.” They all mean subtly different things. Performance marketers only work on paid channels, most often paid social (Facebook Ads) and SEM (AdWords). They typically don’t work with email, content, or other channels — whereas growth marketers will test out any channel.
Once you’ve built a testing habit within the growth team (ideally 2–3 tests per week), it’s time to start trying to maximise impact. To drive full impact, you’ll need to be able to test across the entire customer journey (acquisition channels, new customer onboarding, referral hooks in product, etc.). This is where things start getting hard. The highest impact part of the customer journey is usually testing across the first customer experience. One benchmark to consider is that the fastest growing consumer apps generally invest 50% of the product development resources in the first customer experience. It makes sense, because there is no second customer experience if you don’t nail the first one. Read many more info on Nathan Barnwell.
Once you’ve determined what you’re growing and why you’re growing, the next step is to determine how much you’ll be growing. These goals should be based on your endgame aspirations of where you ideally want your organization to be, but they should also be achievable and realistic – which is why setting a goal based on industry research is so valuable. Lastly, take the steps to quantify your goals in terms of metrics and timeline. Aiming to “grow sales by 30% quarter-over-quarter for the next three years” is much clearer than “increasing sales.” Next, outline how you’ll achieve your growth goals with a detailed growth strategy. Again – we suggest writing out a detailed growth strategy plan to gain the understanding and buy-in of your team.