You have been a growth hacker and helping companies grow. How would you define growth hacking?

Growth Hacking for me is a bit different than the “growth hacking” you hear about when it comes to early stage startups. For me, I tend to come into companies a few years in, right after they’ve received a couple rounds of funding. At this point we start looking at all the activity that’s been going on since the start, cut the things that don’t work and focus on the things that do in order to scale. My job becomes to look at every stage in the funnel and find the best ways to move the needle whether its through acquisition, activation, retention, revenue or referral.

Give us some examples of growth hacking done by you.

I tend to hack away (no pun intended) on PPC campaigns. People tend to think that having a lot of keywords are the best way you make sure to get every last conversion. I like to focus only the keywords that convert consistently (even if it’s only 1-2) and then spend my time making the landing pages better in order to enhance the user experience, but also to increase quality score (making each lead cheaper). I’ve done this quite a few times, but in one case I was able to increase leads year over year 50-100% while dropping the cost conversion from $175 when we started down to $50 today.

In an SEO example for the same company, we took all the companies major services and broke them out by location. We created backend landing pages that were indexable by Google but not in the navigation. We made sure the pages weren’t duplicate. We increased organic traffic by 200%. As soon as organic traffic started to roll in, we made sure that we were constantly testing and tweaking those pages to ensure the best conversion rate possible. Even though it took a few months before Google indexed those pages and we started showing up on the first page, we were able to use this as a longer term strategy while the other PPC campaigns were doing their magic in the short term.

When thinking of growth hacking strategies – break them up. What areas can you focus on for short term benefits and what areas can you focus on for longer term? People tend to think of growth hacking as what can we do NOW, but I try to focus on both.. I mean, 3-6 months flies by in a startup – you want to be prepared.

How can companies leverage growth hacking? What resources are required for this?

Learn as much as you can about your target demographic and the people coming to your site. Analytics offers demographic, device, location, and keyword information that are essential to creating building out campaigns that speak directly to your customer. Their there to use! Take 10 minutes a week to look at them, and get to know the “Who” behind your data.

What challenges you have seen which hamper the growth of any business?

This may come as a shocker, but instead of focusing on doing things quickly and throwing a million things at the wall at once, I say slow it down. Make BIG changes, wait 2-3 weeks, assess what happened and what changes you’ll make as a result. Without that time period to really understand what happened, you’re guessing which is detrimental to growth. If you’re not learning about your audience and the way they move around your site, you’re probably not going to grow to your full potential. The hardest part is setting expectations, and trying to “slow” down in a startup, where people tend to focus on “getting s#$ done.”

Give us some tips on doing digital marketing at low or zero cost.

Three things: 

SEO: If you don’t have money, look at all the ways you can build out your site with well optimized landing pages. Can you add locations to your keywords? Can you create pages where you compare your company to the competition (Your Company vs. X). This is a great strategy to bring in organic traffic with people who are looking for exactly what you’re selling.

Remarketing: Remarketing campaigns are the best way to convert people who have already visited your site and have some interest. Creating remarketing for Facebook & Google can be cheap, and worthwhile.

Authority Building Campaigns: Creating blog posts that bring together different experts speaking on topics that relate to your product are a great way to spread the word. Not only does your product get linked with that expect, but they may also share your content with their audience. Don’t forget to add a exit pop up with an offer to those who visit your site.

What are your secret tools for growth hacking?

Hmm it wouldn’t be a secret then would it? 😉

I would say Google Analytics & Screaming Frog. People tend to focus on so many testing tools out there and new tools keep popping up but I tend to stay with ones that have been tried and true over teh years.I find Google Analytics helps me to learn more about the visitors to my site, and especially the demographics of those who convert. While Screaming Frog allows me to look at the structure and content available on my competitor’s site that I can use to compete against them and prioritize content creation on my end.

Tips to find and hire growth hacker for any company?

Look for a T-shaped marketer. Someone who has expertise in 1-2 areas, but also has experience in most areas of digital marketing. These are the people who not only understand the little details that make a campaign work, but also the big picture and how each area fits together.