When it comes to creating a disruptive marketing strategy for your startup or business, the key is to invest time and resources into things most other teams wouldn’t think to do.
For example, most marketing mixes consist of the same general marketing and advertising pillars: traditional exposure, word of mouth, PR, and now digital. They come up with a budget they believe is worthwhile for each type of reach, and then track performance over time to measure the return on their investment.
While every startup and established business should begin with this high-level approach to marketing their goods and/or services, it’s important to acknowledge that this is by no means a growth-hacker’s way of doing things. In fact, the whole purpose of “growth hacking” is to push beyond what is normal, accepted, or easy to accomplish.
Here’s a great example:
In the book, The Upstarts, author Brad Stone breaks down one of the most effective growth hacks that made famous the billion-dollar startup we know today as Airbnb. In the beginning, Airbnb was struggling tremendously to deliver new listings to prospective customers. Since they didn’t have an audience base of their own to market to, they looked for a platform that did: a website called Craigslist.
Instead of marketing in a more conventional way, like settling for running banner ads on the Craigslist site to drive traffic and acquire potential customers, Airbnb’s team decided to really push the envelope. They created a bot to visit the website, create a sample listing for a potential Craigslist user (who had a home or property they might be willing to rent out), and then forward a sample of that listing to the Craigslist user—which suddenly showed the much larger Craigslist audience the value of listing their property on Airbnb.
While this might sound like a lot of work (and it was), it also was one of the most defining factors in getting Airbnb off the ground.
Great marketing hacks aren’t supposed to be easy. They’re supposed to be hard work to deploy, because that’s how you make a strong and memorable impact.
Here are 4 tactical marketing hacks that will allow you to disrupt any industry:
1. Expand your written content strategy through social written content websites.
Most companies choose to allocate a portion of their budget to maintaining a blog on their website. They see their blog as a way of building SEO traffic and tapping into the organic search results of prospective clients, users, etc.
What most companies don’t fully realize about their SEO strategy is that, for one, writing content on the Internet is not where the audience building process ends—it’s where it begins. Keywords, richness of content, and backlinks influence how your page is ranked exponentially more than just content for the sake of content.
On top of that, most clients and users don’t go to company websites to read and learn. They search social written sites like Quora, Medium, and LinkedIn to read instead.
A very simple hack for bringing more awareness to your written content and blogging strategy is to republish your original content on those written platforms in the form of articles. Create a profile, and at the bottom you can even link back to your company site and say, “This post originally appeared on…”. The exposure you get on these written platforms is 10x what you’ll get on your website.
Why?
Because those sites are where tens of millions of readers are actively looking for helpful content—not your company website, and not even Google.
2. Test everything with micro Facebook ads or Google Adwords.
One of the most effective marketing hacks out there is to test virtually anything and everything with very small budgets on test ads within Facebook or Google Adwords—so that you can see what messages respond best with users.
A great example here is how Tim Ferris leveraged this strategy to determine the title of the book that made him famous: The 4-Hour Workweek.
According to Adweek, “Rather than letting the publisher simply select a title for him, he decided to run a number of tests within Google Adwords. He took 6 prospective titles that everyone could live with, and developed a campaign for each. At the end of the week, for less than $200 he knew that “The 4-Hour Workweek” had the best click-through rate by far and he went with that title.”
This same strategy that helped Ferris find his first blowout hit can also help you determine which article titles will perform the best, video headlines, email opt-ins, website traffic CTAs, anything and everything.
Then, once you know what works, you can increase your advertising spend.
3. Intentionally partner with industry influencers—as an influencer yourself.
One of the best ways to increase your credibility within an industry is to begin associating yourself with other industry superstars. A more general way of thinking about this marketing hack would be to call it “influencer marketing.”
But there is a way to take influencer marketing a step further.
As the founder, there is huge value for you to be the one speaking on behalf of your company and increasing your own presence. Instead of coming up with a budget to get other social media influencers talking about your products, consider using a portion of that budget to start opening doors for yourself in different verticals.
For example, this is precisely what Gary Vaynerchuk offers through his YouTube channel (and most people don’t know this). On his website, he explains that you, as someone looking to build brand equity, now have “the opportunity to bring a personalized Q&A tailored to the interests of your organization or audience, filmed and packaged by Gary’s own production team.”
Now, instead of paying another influencer to take a picture of your product and show it to their audience, you’re working with an influencer as an influencer, getting your message out there and also building your personal brand equity at the same time.
4. Leverage LinkedIn and the “Connect” function.
Every since LinkedIn was purchased by Microsoft for $26.2 billion, the platform has seen some massive overhauls—many of which have been incredibly positive for the social site.
While other social platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, etc., tend to grab the spotlight, LinkedIn is a very powerful tool for connecting with decision makers within companies. Whether you’re looking to sell to Fortune 500 executives, or you’re trying to forge a partnership with a big brand, you have to remember you’re selling to a very specific sort of person within another company.
And there is no better place to find that person than LinkedIn.
Within the platform, you can search by industry, title, years of experience, etc., curating pages upon pages of prospective people for you to talk to. However, while LinkedIn’s sales tool can be great, their InMail function isn’t exactly the best (and besides, nobody likes receiving a sponsored message).
Instead, what you can do is attach a personalized message to the Connect function. When you go to Connect with a certain individual, you have about the space of a Tweet to explain why you’re connecting and why they should accept. Consider this to be your Call To Action. In less than two sentences, it’s your job to explain who you are, what you do, and what value you can bring the other person.
In most cases, if you can make this message sound personalized, the other person will accept your connection request. And now that you’re connecting, you can continue to follow up with them directly.
This is how you can begin building and nurturing relationships with very key decision makers at major companies, solely by refining your messaging and showing them the value you can bring as quickly as possible.