Growth Hacking: Real Life Marketing Strategy Examples you can use
Introduction [Marketing Strategy Examples]
Real life Marketing Strategy Examples for the 21st-century Growth orientated businesses (That’s everyone right?!).
At Maitre we’ve been inspired by Traction and the bulls eye framework.
2 years old now and is timeless.
Targeting Blogs / Influencers
It’s a chance to get in front of your target audience and it’s the chance to get backlinks (link to your site) and boost up your domain rating for SEO.
Without quality backlinks, you will not be indexed well for search.
Here is what Tom Hunt from Virtual Valley had to say…
So what did I do? I started reading about people that had done a similar ting and stumbled across a post by Leo from Buffer. He gained early traction for Buffer by simply writing blog posts on other people’s blog. It worked for him, so surely it would work for me? I then went onto post 43 guest blog posts in the space of 3 months, here is what I learnt:
Always be…networking
Build up your writing skills by posting on smaller blogs and blogs within your network before reaching out to other bloggers.Do your research
Research your potential blog host before reaching out to drastically increase the probability of acceptance.Know who you are writing for
Only reach out to blogs that target your ideal audience to maximise the amount of readers that will add YOUR blog to their reading list.Don’t be boring
If you feel yourself dozing off as you proofread your headline and post intro, start again.Every post is a networking opportunity
Every guest blog post is a networking opportunity that will yield further guest posting and partnership opportunities in the future. And I guess the question on your lips now is: “Did it work?” Well, let’s just say I successfully sold that startup and now am onto a new one. And how do you propose we gain early traction? Guest blogging of course ;)
Start counting…
Publicity
At Maitre we’ve had success in this field being featured in publications such as Tech-Crunch and Hackerpreneur.
Dmitry Dragilev of Criminally Prolific, suggests nailing your one sentence value prop so you can approach journo’s concisely without wasting time. It’s similar to approaching blogs…
- Personal — did you like a post they wrote?
- Value Proposition — what do you do in one sentence?
- Hook — Why should they write about you? Industry movements and trends, don’t beg just state the reasons
Here’s what Ed Moyse, press guru had to say about approaching journos…
I’d say the most important thing is to put yourself in a journalist’s shoes. They want to write an article that will engage their readers and get them sharing it on social media. Although your product launch might be big news for you, it might not be a story for the journalist’s readers — bear this in mind when pitching journalists! Something a lot of people don’t realise is that journalists often put out requests. They often need expert insight for an article (e.g. a doctor’s comment on an NHS story), or features to provide context to a story (e.g. London-based tech entrepreneurs who’ve been affected by Brexit).
Instead of pestering journalists, you’re helping them with a timely story. We set up JournoRequests.com to help businesses find relevant requests.
Take-aways…
- Put yourself in their shoes, what do they want?
- Look out for requests with tools like JustReachOut
A key stumbling point for start-ups is finding the writers in the first place, these two tools are great for that.
Hey Press — Find relevant journalists using your keyword niche
Journo Requests — Get PR requests straight to your inbox for your niche
HARO — Help a reporter out
Unconventional PR
This one is fun and there are some classic examples of huge viral successes.
Enter — TransferWise, they carry out P2P currency exchange — sounds boring right?
They used unconventional PR by having flash mobs protesting in the City of London about hidden bank charge fees…how sexy!
They also created #stophiddenfees online petitions, which were signed by up to 30,000 signatories complaining about such charges. All this was done in one of the most unsexiest industries going.
Squatty Potty’s viral video — this video alone was enough to increase sales by 600%!
[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbYWhdLO43Q[/embed]
The funny thing is, the staff almost didn’t go through with it as they thought it risky.
Search Engine Ads
Google, Bing…and all the rest but there the main ones.
If the Cost Per Aquisition (CPA) is low enough, a lot of businesses have built whole marketing strategies based on this channel alone, why not? It’s a near constant stream of leads if it works.
Beginning a search engine ad campaign falls into various stages…
Keyword research
Using Google’s keyword planner you can build a list of relevant keywords.
TIP — Place your competitors URL in the keyword planner…
Spy on their bid prices with Spyfu and bid $0.01 higher.
Also don’t forget to add negative keywords, for example, if you were advertising plain ‘dog grooming’, you might add ‘courses’ in as a negative keyword, as you wouldn’t want to advertise to folks searching for ‘dog grooming courses’ when you don’t offer a course.
Second Tip:
When you place keywords into your ad groups on Adwords, Google automatically assigns keyword variations which can damage your spend per campaign.
This simple trick will boost your campaign CPC and CTR by 3X
- Create an ad group for every keyword phrase, to force an exact match, add these icons around your keywords
- Create an ad group for every keyword phrase, to force an exact match, add these icons around your keywords
- +your+keyword
- “your keyword”
- [your keyword]
3. Add exact keyword to your URL e.g. maitreapp.co/you-keyword using Googles URL builder 4. Outbid your competitors by $0.01 using the tip above
4. Outbid your competitors by $0.01 using the tip above
Other tools you should check out are
Social Ads
Mediums such as Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Instagram. The purchase intent is a lot lower on Social so the highest converting and lower CPA tends to be offers or giveaways.
Try a drip email marketing campaign — whereby you offer something like a free value creating email course via social ads. Over the number of emails soft pitch your product.
By offering a free product your CTR tends to be lower.
Erika Volk fitness used it to get a Facebook campaign Cost per Click of $0.06 and a cost per email of $0.26.
By offering a free email fitness course she was able to end up ROI positive. Fair play.
The campaign broke down into
1.Free email course
2. Landing Page for leads from Facebook.
3. Well optimised images for Facebook Ads,
4. Over the course of 5–8 emails she soft pitched the upgrade to a paid course.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
Great medium term strategy but one which you should start right away, as search engines penalise new sites with no history.
SEO tends to break down into 5 distinct categories,
- On-page SEO
- Keyword Research
- Link Building
- Technical SEO
- User Experience
GREAT CONTENT is key to SEO, especially if you have no traffic.
After that, it is backlinks from authority sites, this is a strong indicator to search engines that your page is worth ranking for.
This also leads onto to the second strongest ranking factor, ‘domain authority’ as measured by ahrefs. In reality, this is a measure of all the ranking factors. There’s over 200 in total.
When you have a backlink from a site with a better ‘domain authority’, a little of their domain juice gets carried over to your site.
What you should do.
- Create quality content -goes without saying.
- PROMOTE, PROMOTE, PROMOTE
If you don’t promote, there’s no point wasting time writing a post.
Remember — all links count, some more than others, Medium, Quora, Other websites, Social Media, forums…All of them!
Content Marketing
This in correlation with SEO is a favourite, and one which we are using now at Maître.
Actionable content trumps all, when it comes to this channel, people respond most to real life examples and takeaways, rather than boring sales speak.
Also, give people something to share such as infographics, videos, pdf’s, this all helps with link building for SEO.
We recently produced a product launch checklist, which got 40 shares and rising.
We’ve enjoyed all that Growandconvert.com have created, right from the off they have put actionable content at the forefront of their value proposition.
We have an upcoming growth along series so keep an eye for that.
Viral Marketing
People are busy and let’s face it unless your product is an uber-funny cat vid, it’s not likely to be shared without a bit of encouragement.
This is why a lot of companies create referral programmes, which incentivizes sharing, and if done right this can lead to exponential growth.
This was one of the inspirations behind Maître — to grease the wheel or virality through giving people a reason to share, and why not? The big boys all did it: Dropbox, Uber, Airbnb, etc.
The clever name for what you want to achieve in this channel is called a ‘viral-loop’, which translates to…
User Purchases > Refers contact > That contact purchases [RINSE & REPEAT]
One to consider is…how can you leverage off your current communication channels? For example, we use a ‘Powered by Maitre’ with a link back to our site on all our correspondence and trial versions of the Maitre email widget.
This trick is old hat now but Hotmail famously growth hacked their way to exponential growth doing this.
Free traffic & leads…
Few sign ups as well…
One important measure in all this is the ‘viral coefficient’. It’s a simple calculation where anything above 1 will lead to exponential growth. Here is the formula…
K = Viral coefficient
n = users
r = referrals sent
s = number of successful referrals
K = (s/r) * (r/n)
If we had 300 users they send 1000 referrals and of those referrals 250 converted to users.
K = (250/1000) * (1000/300) K = 0.25 * 3 = 0.75
Anything above 1.0 creates exponential growth, anything between 0.5–1.0 is substantial.
Existing Platforms
Leveraging off of communities with active users.
There’s a lot of them so we won’t be able to talk about all. But in generally there’s a few rules of thumb…
- Don’t blatantly sell
- Give back
- Build up your influence
Check out Subreddits for your niche, usually found by typing ‘[your niche] subreddit’
Perring, Reddit marketing expert suggests…
Find niches you like, join them
post regular non-marketing related content
Post 1 out of 10 articles to Reddit
Promote the post to your mates with genuine accounts — don’t get your Mum to create an account just to upvote, it doesn’t work.
Delete old marketing posts on Reddit, Redditors can see your old posts (they hate marketers)
Here is a list of Existing Platforms you can check out…
- Public Slack Groups (Hamsterpad search engine for slack)
- Facebook Groups
- Twitter Chats
- Quora
- Product Hunt
- BetaList
- Niche Forums (type: “[niche] forum”, in Google)
Phoaw, that was a lot of writing!
