10 Growth Hacking Tips To Help Skyrocket Your User Base

“For meaningful growth, startups must completely change the rules of traditional channels or innovate outside of those growth channels.  They are too desperate and disadvantaged to adapt to the old rules of marketing. They have to dig deep creatively, and relentlessly test new ideas.  If they don’t figure it out quickly, they will go out of business.

Some people would just call this marketing.  I call it growth hacking.  And the best growth hacks take advantage of the unique opportunities available in a connected world where digital experiences can spread rapidly.  Since most growth ideas fail, it becomes critical to test a lot of them.  The faster you can hack together an idea, the sooner you can start testing it for some signs of life.

Growth hackers don’t have time to waste around a whiteboard strategizing marketing plans. They are desperately testing trying to find something that works,” says Sean Ellis, CEO of Qualaroo and GrowthHackers.com. 

 The term “growth hacker” initially coined by Sean Ellis, is a buzzword that have been growing worldwide as more of these new types of marketers help build companies like Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox, Airbnb, and many more.

One of the most essential, yet problematic parts of building a thriving company is to get your name out there and build a large, loyal user base. the need to reach large audiences in a short amount of time is what has ignited the use and need for a “growth hacking” type strategy. These strategies do not have large budgets, but instead add creativity and critical thinking to limited resources to attain rapid growth.

Growth hacking will look different for every company, because certain strategies may not work for every business type. Most strategies do not work the first time, and growth hackers test many strategies to figure out the right mix for their company. Ideally, you will want to incorporate a growth hacking mindset into your overall marketing plan, so we have curated a list of creative growth hacking tips that have helped significantly grow audiences at well known companies. Check out the following 10 tips to get you started as you brainstorm ways to grow your user base.

Tip 1. Seed Your Market With Supply + Word of Mouth

Many growth hackers understand that the easiest way to jumpstart any marketplace occurs by building up the supply side first, because it can be hacked with offering participation rewards, or paying for the supply. Tinder, a location based dating application launched in late 2012, has grown its user base to 50 million as of March 2015, with around 10 million daily active users. How did it get there in just a little over 2 years? The company’s founders understood the law of liquidity, which simply means that enough buyers and sellers must be available to participate in transactions.

This activation energy is needed in order for the adoption cycle to grow and take course. In the case of Tinder, just like at a bar or club, a large supply of women will grow the interest and participation of men. Understanding the concept of seeding the supply to meet the demand, Tinder stocked their dating app with women initially. To do this, they sent one of their early employees to sorority chapters to pitch the application, and had the ladies install the app right after the pitch. They then would go to fraternities, and the young men would see cute girls from their school, and want to download the app too.

Sororities and fraternities were chosen intentionally because of their added “word of mouth” ecosystem. Talk of the app would spread across a campus quickly, and then be passed along to other campuses through their network of friends. With any marketplace, the supply and demand must exist simultaneously in order to work, with this growth hacking combination of seeding supply plus adding the power of word of mouth advertising, Tinder’s marketplace was able to reach the necessary amount of supply and demand for it to flourish.

Tip 2. Creating Engaging, Smart Content  + Social Media

Content marketing strategies have significantly grown in their effectiveness to grow a large, engaged audience. In a recent interview I had with Brit + Co (read here) we interviewed Creative Director and employee number one, Anjelika Temple who helped CEO Brit Morin build the company’s user base to over 12 million engaged readers. Bootstrapping their first couple of months, they shot DIY projects from their dining room tables, set up an editorial calendar, and began pushing out creative and clever content a few times a week.

The startup leveraged social media in combination with their content strategy, initially using CEO Brit Morin’s established social following to drive traffic to the site. They paid close attention to their audience’s sharing preferences and needs to craft and design future content, and adapted to audience preferences while maintaining their core value of inspiring creativity.

One of the main reason’s Brit + Co was so successful in their content strategy is their ability to hone and use a unique voice that resonated with their audience, and also focus on building a community rather than just pushing content. They engaged with their users daily to understand who they are, how they consume information, and what information they wanted to see. Basically, they took a human approach to creating their content, but looking at their community from a human set of eyes, and interacting with them on a personal level that kept them coming back.

 Tip 3. Funnel Supply or Demand from an Existing Platform with High Traffic

Traffic has become the currency of the internet, and it has now become a question of where to siphon demand or supply from platforms that have grown mass audiences. Google, eBay, and Facebook have realized this power and charge smaller companies for ad space and traffic, and hackers are now looking to newer platforms like Instagram and Snapchat to funnel traffic to grow their user base.

One of the most genius (yet morally questioned) examples of successfully implementing this strategy was the growth of Airbnb’s user base through hacking Craigslist. Airbnb, the service that convinced us to rent rooms from strangers, knew they needing to reach a large audience to build their supply and demand both quickly, and on a budget. Instead of going bankrupt through costly advertising strategies, the founders looked at established marketplaces that were already facilitating similar transactions. Craigslist was the perfect platform to funnel traffic from, with tens of millions of engaged users, and it’s high facilitation of renting spaces.

So what did Airbnb do? The decided to cross-post Airbnb listings to Craigslist where any user searching Craigslist vacation rental also received a bunch of Airbnb listings with an invitation to click to the the site. In a knock out effort, they also launched an email campaign to inform renters on Craigslist how easy it was to list on Airbnb as well, and users saw the value in posting on two listings for the same amount of effort. These marketing efforts gave Airbnb a massive boost in their marketplace without using thousands of marketing dollars.

 Tip 4. Referral a Friend With Enticing Incentive + Signup Driven Homepage

It is widely understand that people will recommend or share something they like with their friends, and that those referrals are much more likely to trust your brand and become customers. It is also fairly obvious that people will share something with their friends if they get a reward or something of value back in return. Dropbox used this knowledge to create a referral program to combat their high acquisition costs. The company awarded 500MB of free Dropbox storage space to users that referred a friend. This tactic was a low cost, high impact growth hack that significantly lowered their acquisition costs and grew their user base.

In combination with this, Dropbox set their homepage as a sign up page, with a 2 minute video explanation of the product. This gave a very clear call to action, and follows suit of the tactic private beta startups use to grow a pre-launch list. With both hacks in place, Dropbox went from having around 100,000 users to 4 million users within a 15-month time period. With little spent on advertising, and a $4B valuation after, we think these simple hacks are worth your consideration.

Tip 5. Place Your Focus On Retention

Why compete in a sea of people focused on growth when client retention is often ignored? You can drive a bunch of new users to your service, but if the majority of them leave then you will go out of business after the initial buzz has died down. In the early days, Twitter had a customer retention problem with many new users pouring in, but very few of them actually engaged with the site. To ensure continued growth of the platform, Twitter decided to focus its efforts on customer retention, and figure out what was different from users who returned versus inactive users instead of investing in email or retargeting ads.

What they found was that users who followed at least 5 to 10 accounts resulted in a higher chance of engagement, and from this information built a hack within their system called “suggested new users to follow” which had a positive impact almost immediately on their retention rate. Twitter also set up their new user flow to include a suggestion to follow their first 10 people right at signup and offer choices. While Twitter’s suggested user list looked like an innovation from the product team, the reality was that the growth team developed it.

 Tip 6. Exclusivity Drive Interest

The saying less is more plays out well in the world of growth hacks. If you want to increase customer demand for your product or service, an easy way to do this is through using scarcity and exclusivity tactics. Customers subconsciously place a higher value on something that is rare. Exclusivity is a tactic that makes people feel special to be a part of something, and that is why using an “exclusive invite” hack works well as growth strategy.

Pintrest used this hack when they initially launched as “invitation only,” where anyone could request an invite. These potential users would receive an email informing them there was a long list and would be allowed in as soon as possible. This may or may not have been true, but it did generate a ton of buzz and desirability for Pintrest. In a little over 3 years, Pintrest grew from 100,000 users to 70 million+ users proving exclusivity is an incredibly effective way to drive growth.

 Tip 7. Make It Easy To Share

With social media on the rise we have entered a sharing social frenzy. We share what we eat, we share our photos, and at this point almost every aspect of our lives. YouTube, now the second largest search engine after Google, initially wanted to keep all traffic flowing to their homepage. Then, they realized the potential for exposure on other established platforms, so they created a simple embed code for their videos, making it easy for users to upload their videos on their own websites, blogs, and social platforms. Youtube now has 1 billion+ unique visits each month.

Another startup that took this hack to the next level was Instagram, who made it quick and easy for their users to cross-post to other social platforms with a feature built right into the app. This benefitted other platforms with an increase in photo content, and Instagram, because their distinct photos starting popping up on other platforms serving as free advertising and a way to drive traffic to their app.

 Tip 8. Offer Something Valuable For Free + Make It Easy To Sign Up Yourself and Others

Many SaaS companies use a freemium model to grow their user base, but the model does not work unless you are offering users something of enough value. Slack is one of those startups that offers what has been called “an actually useful free service,” that hacked their product to offer a simple signup process to address a simple solution for workplace project management. With the combination of a useful service, and a simple interface Slack went from 15,000 users in February 2014 to 500,000 users by February 2015.

Slack’s straightforward signup simply allows new users to enter an email address and receive a link to a simple registration form. After this users are prompted to add team members and integrations with other apps. This sign up process is a bonus hack to increase the number of sign ups by adding teams of people rather than single users. Of the 220,000+ teams created in Slack, more than 30,000 are actively using it.

 Tip 9.  Add An Element Of Social Good  + Word of Mouth

When you do good, you feel good. Many companies are starting to feel the shift to a socially conscious business movement, and smart growth hackers know there is high reward for those who know how to add an element of social good properly to their marketing mix. Karma, a pay-as-you-go mobile Wifi Hotspot, used a clever hack built within their product and core marketing to let others do good for others around them.

As a part of their marketing, Karma rewards their users for sharing their hotspot with friends and strangers, and each time someone logs onto their wifi, they are reward 100 megabytes of extra data. A secondary element of giving someone an incentive to save money on something they need, enhances the chances of a person actually pursuing it, hence why we see millions of shoppers waiting in Black Friday lines to save a bucks.

Users willing to share with strangers to get a dose of “feel good for doing good” are prone to tell others at an airport or coffee shop to user their wifi, which leads to the word of mouth aspect of this growth hack. Win-win is one of the best kinds of solutions!

 Tip 10. Appeal to Human Nature

Sometimes the best strategy involves a simple understanding behind how we think and act as humans. One of the key human qualities social media has shown us is that people love to show off. We post about our vacations, our accomplishments, and really anything that states “I’m cool, look at me!”

QuizUp hacked their entire product to cater to this human behavior by making it the central part of the app. With hacks like a simple sign-up, social invites, and social sharing features by allowing their users to post results after a game to show off their skills. Users were not shy about sharing their results, and millions of results were displayed through Facebook and Twitter which became their main source of customer acquisition.

Their app spread like wildfire, grew to 1.5 million users within 2 weeks, and became the fastest growing iPhone app in history (with now more than 20 million downloads). Most startups can only daydream about this kind of growth. Humans will be humans, and the strategy encompassing this concept was brilliant.

http://www.ninatomaro.com/10-growth-hacking-tips/Nina is a ridiculously passionate content strategist, writer, and speaker, who gets out of bed because she has made it her mission to help people and companies share their story and knowledge in a way that allows them to be heard. To find out how Nina can help you grow your audience reach out here: http://www.ninatomaro.com/write-me/