Let’s face it—the world of marketing has changed so extremely in the past few years that it is almost unrecognizable. Thanks to the explosion of the internet and cellphones marketers everywhere are having to make changes—old-school techniques like cold-calling and telemarketing just aren’t cutting it anymore. Today, the internet is king, and online content is how many businesses choose to promote their products or services. However, it’s far too easy to get lost in the mass of content that is posted every minute online—to stay relevant, you’re going to have to get a little creative. That’s where growth hacking comes in.
Growth hacking may sound scary (like it involves breaking into government data bases to get secret growth codes), but in actuality, it’s a fairly straightforward idea. At its most basic, growth hacking means getting creative to find low-cost and inventive substitutes for traditional marketing techniques. This means researching and utilizing unique ways to promote the content you post online, and in extension, your brand. Luckily, growth hacking is a practice made for the online world—there are nearly endless possibilities for ways to market your content that are inexpensive, effective, and that encourage the brand’s growth. That’s the mantra of growth hackers: what can we do to inspire growth?
If you can’t quite answer that question yet, it may be helpful to see how others have found ways to growth hack their content. Here are three examples of successful growth hacking techniques that you can apply to your own online content:
1. SEO or Search Engine Optimization
This technique is huge. This means, essentially, making your webpage/content easy for search engines to find, deem relevant, and include high up on the search results page. This can include adding relevant keywords in crucial parts of your site (like URL’s, mea descriptions and image alt tags). It can also include linking out to esteemed sources on your site, which can help boost your reputation as a credible site to search engine spiders. The process can be complicated (there are many more potential steps, tricks and tips!), but don’t worry, we’re always here to help! Click here to get into contact with our SEO experts.
2. Utilize Social Media
Social media is the growth hacker’s best friend. It’s an easy, quick and free way to promote your content and inspire sharing of it. Not only this, but it is an excellent way to create a persona for your brand, and to engage with both prospective and current customers. The best part is, you can link to your social media just about anywhere on your online content—at the bottom of blog posts, in your sidebar, under your brand’s name, on your “about us” or ‘contact us” page. The easier it is for someone to share your content on social media, the more likely they are to do so!
3. Include CTA or Calls to Action
Sometimes, the best way to get someone to engage with your content is just to ask! If you want to see more growth on your Facebook page, for example, include links on your content for visitors to “like” “comment” on or “share” it. If you want to encourage sharing of the content elsewhere, you can use words like “spread” “help” or “share” to inspire distribution of it on multiple platforms. The more people share, the more people will become aware of your brand, and the more growth you will achieve!
Of course, growth hacking content can seem like a broad idea, and it can be tough to know where to begin. Let us guide the way! Click here for help getting your brand started on growth hacking practices.
This article was written for Business 2 Community by Rachel Ehnert.
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Great stuff , thanks for sharing your knowledge! Very useful tips.
These three areas are a good start. But to add to your list a little bit:
I always encourage my company’s employees to share our content with their own networks for greater exposure. In particular, we expect our sales team to share with clients and prospects so that the content may be useful in the sales process.
We work with content syndication sites (like B2C here) to help us expand the reach of our content.
We use customized messages on our blog to encourage readers to download our eBooks, whitepapers, etc. More info about that here: http://www.evergage.com/blog/value-second-chance-messages/
Finally (although there are almost definitely more) we personalize our website to provide content to our website visitors in real-time depending on what they are looking for on the site. This helps to promote our content in a more relevant way.
Really nice tips!
I also use BRAND24 internet monitoring application for finding online conversations relevant to my business, join and engage them. This way I can be sure i reach to the people who are already interested in this type of service so conversion is really nice. Brand24 is very affordable and efficient solution for this and also for managing online presence and customer service.
This content was written by Rachel Ehnert, a copywriting intern at Purple Cow in 2016, not Jay Leonard.
If you can send us a bio / pic for her at [email protected] we’ll edit it, we had a site bug which switched authors on old posts
We had a bug on old posts where authors were lost, and we had to reassign authors so that our site health and rankings weren’t affected. We can restore authorship if you can send us a list of the posts at [email protected], and the bio information / pic etc.
I’ve changed the author on this one to now.