Refocus Your Goals with Growth Hacking

You may have heard the term growth hacking pop up in social feeds and content shares. Sound like a buzzword or entrepreneur jargon? You’d be wrong.

Growth hacking is an essential part of growing any business by cutting through the rough and surging forward. It’s the all-terrain model that works not only for new businesses, but also for an existing business to refocus and get back to a point where you’re growth-focused and forward thinking.

It’s not a role, or responsibility for a single individual. Everyone in your organization is a growth hacker and plays a part in the concept.

Neil Patel provides the best definition of growth hacking:

Every decision that a growth hacker makes is informed by growth. Every strategy, every tactic, and every initiative, is attempted in the hopes of growing. Growth is the sun that a growth hacker revolves around. Of course, traditional marketers care about growth too, but not to the same extent. Remember, the power of a growth hacker is in their obsessive focus on a singular goal. By ignoring almost everything, they can achieve the one task that matters most early on.

For an established company that growth refers to shifting your focus back to the things you did that made your launch so successful. You want to expand on those things that propelled you forward so you can move beyond the holding pattern you’ve been caught in.

Follow these growth-hacking tips to take back control of your company’s momentum

Step 1 – Break down your goals into accessible milestones and track them appropriately

Rather than putting all of your attention and energy into a massive goal, set your team up to hone in on short-term milestones that are more readily achievable but still drive you toward your ambitions.  Here are examples of smaller goals on the roadmap to a bigger goal:

• Drive 5,000 visitors to a specific product page or landing page
• Generate 100 leads to a piece of marketing content like an eBook through social media or influencer marketing before the end of the month.
• Improve speed of payment collections
• Reduce inventory overhead cost by 10%

Many successful growth hackers work in bite-sized goals that are a short sprint. Those are much more attainable for a team, especially with smaller organizations. Goals that are too large and “too-big-thinking” can paralyze even a seasoned manager.

Step 2 – Measure everything

A huge part of growth is knowing your numbers. Responding to qualitative data (customer feedback, reviews, support chats) is vital to long-term marketing and service, growth should take a certain priority. Qualitative data can wait a bit until you’ve grown traffic, product use is expanding and brand visibility gets a boost.

• Set up google analytics to easily track your online traffic
• Setup an ERP platform to more easily track internal data and workflows
• Analyze your data and gain insight with actionable information

Step 3 – Get creative with your funnel

Analytics, enterprise resource planning and workflow optimization will only take you so far. You need to start thinking creatively and outside of your traditional safe zone. The creative stage isn’t easy but it’s vastly rewarding.

It’s difficult to say exactly what you need to do to optimize your sales funnel and drive leads, boost acquisition and create more brand awareness. No one can guide you in that. You might not need content marketing or social media. You might need the full gamut or perhaps you do just fine with email marketing, or Instagram. It all boils down to your own awesome ideas that people within your industry haven’t thought of yet.

The important thing is to try. Try new things. Be creative. Improving your company growth isn’t just about using ERP to make your operations more efficient. You have to consider your marketing and brand position as well.

Thankfully, when you use ERP software to make your operations more efficient you’ll have more time and money to put into brand visibility and marketing to help sustain your growth.

Step 4 – Test, Measure and Revise/Repeat

A growth hacker tests everything they do. You have the systems in place to record the data and review so use it to your advantage. You can see how a lead comes to you and which campaigns are effective. Revise them as needed.

Then look to your workflow and see how that lead travels through your sales funnel and where you can improve that aspect of your business. If you’re still working on dated systems and spreadsheets then this is where you want to look at a better ERP platform to improve that workflow.

Where your marketing is concerned you should be A/B test your campaigns and don’t be afraid to try new things. If it doesn’t work, revise it or drop it. If it works then run it again with an A/B and make it work even better from lead acquisition to close.

At the opening we mentioned that your entire team is made of growth hackers. They all contribute. While they each will have their own individual position-based goals, they will all work intently toward a single goal: growing your business until it breaks through the stratosphere and soars beyond.

What steps have you taken to grow your business this year?