21 Actionable Growth Hacking Tactics
Update: Interested in even more Growth Hacking tactics?
Buy my book of 100 practical growth hacking tactics!
In this deck you will find 21 different areas of startup marketing where you can employ growth hacking tactics. Little tricks of automation or hackery that help you squeeze more out of your customer / user acquisition strategy. It's an extension of a previous deck I created, with a bunch of new content and has been well received at startup events I've presented it at.
I enjoy presentations with lots of actionable content so that's all this is. I dislike presentations that talk about theory or numbers. There is no viral coefficient or excel magic here - to me growth hacking is about doing rather than analysing.
On Slideshare: Actionable Growth Hacking Tactics
Growth Hacking is just a good way to describe how marketing is done at a startup. It's not a magical new technique, it's just a term to describe tactics that many startup marketers have been using for years. However, two areas where growth hacking differentiates from traditional marketing are:
- There is a particular focus on the application of technology. A good technical growth hacker should always be asking "how can this be automated". A good non-technical growth hacker should always be asking their technical partner "would it be possible to…?".
- There are some areas of growth hacking that larger companies cannot get away with. Some growth hacking tactics flirt with the boundaries of either legality or good citizenship, that are really only employable when you are small, scrappy and easily forgiven.
The deck speaks mostly for itself, but I'll add some minimal notes between them in this post.
A good growth hacker needs to focus on two types of growth. Steady and rapid. Slow steady growth will come from areas like SEO and social sharing. Rapid unsustainable growth will come from campaigns, exploits (that get shut off) and other temporary tactics.
Knowing the language of the customer refers to understanding how the customer articulates a problem to themselves. You might be a SaaS company selling a "shiny report tool" - but are your potential customers searching for "shiny report tool" or are they searching for "fast report tool" or "I hate making reports"?
Even if you don't have budget for paid search, Google Adwords is an incredibly useful tool for an early stage startup. With a budget of just $100 a week, you can not only validate ideas (are people interested in our product idea?) but you can also learn the language of your customers - i.e. do you get more clicks when you talk about "shiny report tool" or "fast report tool"?
Even when you think you've exhausted all possible growth hacking tactics… you can then choose to grow your business horizontally or vertically and employ those tactics all over again.
Buy the Growth Hacking Handbook for even more growth tactics!
I don't update this personal blog very often these days, I'm busy working on my business Bannerbear 🐻