Growth hacking: maximum conversion, minimum effort

The Internet has completely changed our lives, starting from the ways of buying clothes and shoes, ending with communicating with friends on social networks. In a relatively short period of time, a lot of startups appeared, which turned into multi-billion-dollar giant companies - such as Facebook, Twitter, PayPal and many others. Every second person knows about these companies, because he uses their services and, perhaps, can no longer imagine his life without an account on VKontakte or the possibility of making payments through PayPal.

How did these companies manage to win customers so quickly and, most importantly, retain them? One of the key factors is competent and effective marketing.

Let’s try to figure out what methods helped them reach their current level. When working with a startup, especially in the field of e-commerce, traditional marketing methods are not so effective. Why? Firstly, due to the high cost. Agree that not everyone will have extra money to pay for the work of a marketer, various advertising and so on. Often, such injections do not bring the expected result, and the company, despite the efforts made, goes into oblivion. Secondly, traditional marketing methods are not always suitable for e-commerce. To attract new customers, I had to develop new ideas and tactics - this is how growth hacking appeared .

Growth hacking- A marketing technique designed for the development of startups, which involves the use of analytical thinking, creativity, statistical research and programming methods. Growth hackers are people who can achieve significant results in attracting customers, while having a limited advertising budget, using non-obvious features and functions of popular online resources or non-standardly promoting a product offline. Growth hacker can write the script itself, conduct A / B testing, and integrate with the API of external services. All in all, Growth hacking is an innovative budget alternative to traditional marketing. “Growth first, budgets second” (“The first thing is growth, and then the budget”) - this is the basic principle of Growth hacking.

By the way, the term itself was proposed by Sean Ellis in 2010. Sean has helped many internet companies achieve incredible growth. Often he worked with companies in exchange for stocks, and when they were successful, he also earned dividend income. When it was time to find a replacement, Sean noticed that most marketers, having joined the company, started creating marketing strategies, investing huge budgets in advertising or changing the tactics of managing a team of marketers, which is absolutely not necessary for a young developing company. The main goal of a startup is rapid growth. So he came up with the idea that you need to look for someone who can come up with individual tactics for the company, which will ensure an influx of customers and, ultimately, make a profit.

Growth hacker is not a substitute for a marketer, and he is no better than him, he is just a specialist of a different kind. He should possess the following qualities: analytical thinking, creativity, understanding of motivation and psychology of people, perseverance and determination. In addition, he must feel the change in trends and anticipate future trends. And finally, such a specialist has a certain level of technical knowledge. All strategies, tactics and ideas of Growth hacker are aimed at a single goal - growth. Strong Growth hackers include those who can act and generate new ideas for promoting a product based on the current market situation. They can use techniques such as:

• use of interactive videos,
• product promotion via torrent,
• inclusion of product descriptions in various forums, blogs,
• promotion of one service through another,
• cross-domains and / or the offer of individual parts of applications for a fee,
• promotion using crowdsourcing or crowdfunding,
• and many other ideas.

One common Growth hacking method is A / B testing. The bottom line is that the control group of elements is compared with a set of test groups in which one or more indicators have been changed. This way, we can figure out which of the changes improves the target. An example is the study of the influence of the color scheme, location and size of interface elements on site conversion.

Let's move on to the fun part: live examples of Growth hacking. On the Internet you can find many examples, but we will consider the "classic".

1. Dropbox Invited a friend - got 16 GB more disk space. Easy, simple, and most importantly, effective. Today, this technology of attracting users through invitations is used extremely actively.
   
   
2. Paypal You will receive $ 10 and another $ 5 - the friend whom you will bring. Millions of users could not resist such an offer.
3. Craigslist’s integration of Airbnb has helped the site attract many new customers.
4. YouTube allowed its customers to embed their player on third-party resources, which was used by visitors to MySpace, Facebook and Vkontakte.
5. Twitter The developers of the strategy revealed the so-called “aha moment”. They believe that if a user "follows" 5-10 people on the first day of acquaintance with the site, the likelihood that he will use it regularly increases at times.
6. Hotmail With the help of a simple phrase: "This letter was sent using the Hotmail, get yourself a Hotmail right now" managed to attract 12 million users in a year and a half (and it was 1996).

Everything sounds great, you just need to come up with an idea that will ensure the rapid growth of the company. But what if there is no such idea? In this case, we advise to use the already-designed innovative technology - such as, for example, kolltreking or lead generation . We’ll talk about what it is.

The ultimate goal of these tools is to maximize conversion. Each user who visits the site must perform a targeted action. It’s good to know where he came from, and if he leaves the site, then for what reason.

The first problem is solved by call tracking. This technology allows you to associate incoming calls with an advertising source. It tracks the number of calls from various sources - search engines, contextual advertising and any type of offline advertising. There are two types of call tracking: static and dynamic .

• Static call tracking: a separate number is allocated for each advertising campaign, from each of them redirection to the main number of the company is configured. As soon as a visitor visits the site, call tracking determines which source he came from and shows him the corresponding number on the site. Number change occurs automatically.
• Dynamic call tracking allows you to determine the source of the transition up to the keyword. To do this, a certain number of numbers is allocated for the site, which is calculated depending on the traffic to the site and the number of advertising campaigns. Each visitor to the site is shown an individual number, so that then his visit can be associated with a specific request.
  
  

What results does the company get as a result?

1. On average, conversion doubles.
2. The advertising budget is reduced by at least 20% (since funds are redistributed depending on the effectiveness of advertising).
3. The service allows you to classify calls as high-quality and low-quality (repeats, erroneous, etc.), as well as analyze the quality of incoming calls processing (including by recording calls).

Thus, call tracking - as one of the mechanisms of Growth hacking - will work effectively to increase conversion and the growth of the company as a whole.

The second question remains: how to keep the visitor on the site, if he is ready to leave him for one reason or another, and if he still leaves, then how to identify the reason? Most often, visitors visit the site after hours: in the evening or on weekends. In this case, a lead generator will help not to lose contact with a potential client. This is an invitation to the client to leave their contact details so that the company manager contacts him during working hours. According to a CoMagic study (analytic service to increase sales), using a lead generator is 3.5 times more efficient than a regular feedback form. Consequently, the company receives an increase of up to 350% of requests and applications from visitors.



If the site visitor leaves without having completed the desired action, there is a form for the final banner:



This is something like the last attempt to keep the visitor's attention and draw him to him. Simple but effective enough service.

We can add that services such as an online consultant and a call from the site will also help to attract a potential client. To find out the reasons why the visitor decided to leave the page without having made a request or purchase, a small questionnaire will help.

The most important thing is not to overdo it: do not randomly throw the site visitor with all possible forms that also pop up immediately after closing. Such sites are extremely annoying. Using the above services requires a thoughtful plan and determining the target audience. Growth hacker, using smart call tracking and a lead generator, will be able to achieve a significant increase in conversion rates and profits at minimal cost.

In the future, according to Sean Ellis, Growth hacker will cease to be a lone wolf, it will be replaced by Growth teams. They will play a significant role in the development of startups, whose activities are mostly related to the Internet.

Finally, we list additional sources of information about Growth hacking so you can delve deeper into the topic:

http://growthhacks.ru
https://growthhackers.com/
http://www.startup-marketing.com/where-are-all-the-growth-hackers/