What makes growth hacking different from other marketing techniques is that it is focused on finding the most unique, effective, and inexpensive strategies possible to build a business. The best startups that succeed through growth hacking has developed a great product with strong demand and has created a scalable marketing plan to attract new customers to it.
Find Your Product Market Fit
In order to growth hack your business you need to first find your product market fit. Product market fit is how your product satisfies a market’s demand. Simply, you need to build a product that someone wants. If you can’t provide this than your business will fail.
The best way to build an awesome product is to cater to the interests of a small but active group, your target customers. You must figure out their buying needs and behavior to create a product that will become a valuable asset in their life.
But don’t forget that in order to build a great product you must constantly improve it. Customer data and information, like online user activity and customer feedback, is essential to finding your product market fit. You want to know what part of your product that they respond positively and negatively to.
You can track user activity on your website with tools like Google Analytics and Optimizely. Or you can gain customer feedback by asking them to answer surveys with tools like Surveymonkey and Google Forms. After you gain customer insight, start implementing their recommendations into your product or service so you can start creating a product that your target customers want.
Example: I want to write and sell a book about how to build a profitable writing business online, but I fear that no one will buy it. I need to figure out what kind of material that my target readers want to have in the book. So I decide to write articles inspired by a few chapters of it in my blog. Then I guest post on other influential blogs that attract a lot of my target readers.
For every article that I write, I look at its social media shares and blog comments to understand what readers like or don’t like. If I get a lot of positive activity on certain posts, than I know I have to put similar content in my book. The articles with little to no activity don’t get included in my book at all. My target reader’s feedback allows me to create a book that they would want enough to buy.
Hack Your Marketing Efforts
What’s the point of building a product if nobody gets to know about it? The phrase, “if you build it than they will come” does not apply to the marketing world.
At this stage, you are focused on acquiring new customers. You are not trying to grab attention of the whole world, you’re just trying to turn your target audience into loyal customers.
6 Ways to Get Your Target Customer’s Attention
1. Reach out to influential blogs and bloggers that in your target niche or market. Provide them content like a guest blog or ask them to endorse your product.
2. Submit posts and links to popular forums like Quora, Reddit, or Hacker News.
3. Create content on your blog or website to be ranked first in SEO.
4. Find out places in your local area where your target customers will most likely hang out and talk to them about how your product serves them.
5. Pitch a journalist or editor to feature your business or product in their magazine or journal.
6. Get the personal emails of your target customers and start sending them invitations to try your product.
