It’s also about gaining mind share by taking advantage of the social and digital tools that enable people to find your brand ahead of others.
Search
Know what and who is getting the most attention in your market. Through tools as simple as Google’s Search console, you can discover what websites are getting the most impressions and highest click‐through rates and what keywords in your industry are getting the same. Pay attention to how the brands getting the most impressions are marketing themselves and what keywords are most popular for consumer searches in your industry.Make sure you include these in your positioning and marketing messages. And make sure you build your own search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM) strategies around the keywords and products most searched by your core consumers. These will change and change frequently, so keeping current on these trends is critical.
Build links
There’s a reason LinkedIn is growing in size and value to marketers in all industries and of businesses of all sizes. As of September 2016, it had upward of 106 million users, which presents a big networking opportunity for just about any business professional. Take stock of your own network (if you’re not on LinkedIn, get on it now). How big is your network? Do you have 1,000 or more connections? How many of those can you name? And for how many of those do you have personal or work email addresses? Probably “not a lot” is your answer to both of those questions.In today’s world of digital networks, if you’re not mining your network connections, you’re likely walking away from a gold mine. You need to create templates for communicating with members in ways that get them to respond. Try emailing connections on LinkedIn and asking whether they’d be interested in a free white paper or participating in a brief survey.
For either of these, they need to share their email address with you, which you can then add to your database for content marketing. You’ve just gained a critical email address and sparked a direct relationship that you or your sales team can nurture.
Fish for emails
Although phishing most often refers to unethical scams designed to get personal contact information to exploit consumers, fishing — the kind that uses bait to hook people on your brand — is still good and pays off. Fishing for emails is as simple as offering something of value to consumers in exchange for their email address. You don’t need click bait to get people to participate if you offer something real and of real value.For example, if you’re a marketing consultant and you design a banner ad or email that says, “Need help calculating your customer lifetime value?” you can require people to click on a form in your marketing template that sends their email address directly to you. Bam! You’ve got another email for your growth marketing campaigns and a lead with whom you’ve just started a new relationship.
Try tripwires
Tripwire is yet another new term, relatively speaking, for marketing tactics but not a new concept or strategy. Tripwire marketing is simply the act of offering something people can’t refuse. It’s one of those “big blowout sales” used car lots have been using for years. People see these all the time in infomercials on TV and now through digital channels all over the web.You sell someone on the benefit it offers and then offer it for a limited time as a free trial (“get now, pay later if you keep it” approach) or for such a low price that no one can say no. The trick according to Neil Patel, a growth marketing guru, is to keep your price pretty low (less than $50) and to offer a more expensive, better value product at checkout. According to Patel, at least 30 percent of your shoppers should end up buying the higher‐end product or better value, which you can position as your “best value.”
Hire a growth hacker
So how do you go about integrating these tactics into your growth strategy given that many are time‐consuming? Simple. Hire a growth hacker who can dedicate her days to sending out templates for invitations to connects, offers for white papers, and other messages for you. If you have a well‐connected sales or executive team, open their networks for your growth hacker.Your goal should be to establish a connection with about 20 percent of those to whom you reach out. Again, if you have a network of 3,000 people on your social sites, 20 percent is 600. Now multiply that number by five executives on your team and you’ll have a new database of 3,000 highly qualified leads to nurture and grow.
To read more about growth hacking, follow Neil Patel’s blog.