Growth Hacking Guide: Best Growth Hacking Tips 2020

Growth Hacking is really a buzz term used to describe a set of principals. Since the term was created to describe existing trends, there is no set standard of principals. But if we had to create a set of steps, it would look like this:

Step 1: Find Product-Market Fit
The biggest difference between regular marketing and ‘growth hacking’ is the view of the business as part of the marketing process, not something that is done to it after the product has been created.

When product market fit happens, a specific sub set of your customers will have a VERY strong positive reaction.

‘Product Market Fit’ means that the product, price, value proposition, target audience and competitive landscape are all taken into consideration and ‘click’. Products are changed. Audiences re-defined. Value propositions challenged. Despite Growth Hacking having some of the highest ROI, many businesses don’t like it. Because it ultimately will challenge some of the fundamental concepts and assumptions held by stakeholders. 

An example of product market fit work: A writer wants to create a parenting book, but isn’t sure of the focus it should have. Behaviour? Schooling? Should it be filled with examples or focus more on studies? A growth hacker might challenge the writer on whether he really knows his audience. So the writer might need to start a blog. Then see which blog posts he can get to resonate with his audience. What styles work. The writer can also build up a customer email list which can then be used to promote a  release or even a pre-release of the book.

The fundamental idea of product market fit is testing assumptions and going beyond what merely works and instead finding something your customers will be wild about. Many times this effort compounds by laying the ground work for the next phase.

Step 2: Find your Hack
A core concept in growth hacking is finding a set of ‘product evangelizers’. These are people who will love your product enough to not only use it, but tell others about it. For this, growth marketeers will intentionally focus on a sub group of users. The more niche the better, since we aren’t looking so much for sales at this point, but to create a ‘fan base’ of users who will swear by your product.

Continuing on with the example from Step 1, the writter might find a group like California Parents of Severely Autistic Children. If the writer made a post about this that was promoted and liked by this group, he might choose to include a chapter or two on “Severely Autistic Children” – it could be written in such a way that it benefits everyone, by providing guidelines to parents of non-autistic children tools, but that particularly resonates with this particular segment.

A growth hack that could be attempted in such a case would be to post to an existing online community (a Facebook group, online discussion forum or sub-Reddit) asking for advise on your chapter. Once the community likes it, offer a free download of the chapter by invitation only. This will make a product that not only resounds with your audience, but that has an added layer of exclusivity.

If you are using a WordPress site, this can be done quite easily with the many ‘invite only’ plugins available.

Step 3: Encouraging Virality

You have completed step 1 and found a product market fit. The right product for the right people at the right time and place. You have found your hack, creating an aura of exclusivity by making the ebook chapter download an invite only item that people in a certain group can get.

Now you need to ensure those people share and spread the word as much as possible. This shouldn’t be an afterthought, but a core part of the product.

Following the example of the writer he might include inside the book a mention of a ‘Free Parenting Calendar’ or ‘Learning Flash Cards’ or a Free Children’s book. To get the perk, the user must sign up. As part of the sign up process, the user can be required to Share to Unlock. There are a lot of plugins for WordPress that provide this functionality.

Other ideas include: 

• Create a win-win refer a friend program – Both friends get $X credit.
• Send free gifts to customers that they can use in public or give away.
• Putting share links on posts and articles.
• Creating contests that require sharing.
• Creating embed-able videos. 

The goal here is to make it as easy and natural for users to spread the word.

Step 4: Retain and Optimize

Getting sales from existing customers generally only costs a small fraction of what it costs to get new customers. So ensuring you maximize retention is a key to any growth hacking ‘system’. 

Using the previous example of a growth hacking technique to maximize retention for our Parenting Author:

• Create a ‘letters from the editor’ newsletter where users can submit anonymous parenting questions. The author can then send out a weekly newsletter with questions and answers.
• Implement birthday auto mailers. You could even work with parenting product providers to promote ‘birthday treats for parents’ that are discounted.
• Create a parenting course and provide ‘parenting tip’ videos that entice your existing customers to purchase the course.
• Create a forum for parenting as a Sub-Reddit or a stand alone forum.
• Implement a re-marketing campaign so that you can show ads for new services/versions to your existing user base.
• Stay active on twitter, facebook and any other marketing channel you choose. Better have less channels but stay connected and engaged.

If you still need more reasons to prioritize Retention, I love the breakdown that Savino Longo does here.