Growth Hacking: 36 Real-Time Cases - Part 2
We continue to analyze the growth hacks of successful companies. In this article, you will learn how Moz and Qualaroo get a loyal audience through online communities, how a young CRM service attracts customers via Instagram, due to which Reddit and Quora have gained a critical mass of users + some cool Grocks from offline.
If you missed the first article, here is a link to it . I advise you to start with it - there are described very interesting groos khaki. If you are in the subject, then drove on!
This hack is still actively used by two well-known services - Moz (offers various services for SEO-shnik) and Qualaroo (a service for conducting surveys on the site). Both companies are designed to help internet marketers do their job better.
To help marketer - A selection of the best services for conducting surveys
')
When the question arose of how to get additional loyal customers, they chose not the easiest way. It was decided to create a full-fledged community, something in the form of a forum where marketers can ask questions, get advice, share information. In general, communicate and pump your skills.
So there were 2 most powerful community.
Moz created the Moz Community, in which they hold several webinars (“Mozinars”) a month with the best experts, conduct Q & A (question-answer) sessions, online and offline events.
In addition, the Moz guys are putting a lot of emphasis on content marketing - there are already about 5,000 posts on their blog. Almost every day they prepare high-quality material on topics that interest internet marketers.
The guys from Qualaroo did the same - they created the Growth Hackers Community. Every day the best articles on internet marketing, growing hacking, start-up development are added to this site. Each community member can ask a question, participate in the discussion and the AMA-session (Ask Me Anything - ask me everything you want) with the best industry experts, analyze cases of successful companies, watch thematic videos and even find a job.
Neither Moz nor Qualaroo is trying to sell their services directly through these communities. The main goal is to create a place where the target audience will hang out. And moreover, where the target audience will benefit, value. And, it means, it will come back again and again, become attached to the community, and, in parallel, to the company itself.
Although, a little organic advertising is present. For example, on GrowthHackers on the main page hangs a small banner about the upcoming conference. And in the Moz community, the menu has links to the company's products, free services, company pages, etc. But this is not the kind of hype that annoys us every day.
If you have technical, financial, and temporary opportunities, consider how you can make an active community around your product. Of course, this is not done in a day. And it will not bring leads and profit tomorrow. This is a long-playing topic that, if properly implemented, can be a key factor in your success.
Article in the topic - Upgrade content marketing: 16 working methods. Part 1
I just want to warn you that this is not a case from a famous company. This is a case of a small Brazilian startup - CRM systems for optimizing work with potential customers. I found it on the Quora question and answer site, about which we will talk further.
At the first stage of startup development, instagram and offline events in Brazil were used to attract customers. The essence of this hack was as follows:
Here is a small hack that used a startup at the initial stage of its “life”. Of course, this option is not suitable for all companies. But the meaning of cases is different. The main goal is to make you think creatively and start searching for non-standard opportunities to promote the project and attract customers.
I hope I can get this to you. And you can find and implement your own grows hacks.
Article in the topic - Startup Plotguru raised the landing page conversion from 9% to 52%. Are you weak?
Who knows reddit?
This is another user community, only it is not focused on any particular topic, unlike Moz or GrowthHackers.
Wikipedia Reddit is described as a social news site where registered users can post links to their favorite information. In addition, heated discussions boil there, you can promote your business, earn a rating and much more. The site looks old-fashioned, but it is very popular. Sometimes there you can get such information that you can hardly find anywhere else.
In general, the entire site is based on user activity. If they actively download links, vote for the best materials, the site lives. If there is no activity, then it makes no sense for visitors to go there.
Therefore, at the initial stage, in 2005, when it was first created, the main problem was how to create activity? We needed a critical mass of users, materials, comments, after which the rest will see the value of the site and begin to register there.
The critical mass itself does not reach. Only in exceptional cases does the product sell itself. As a rule, you first need to plow hard to attract the first users. And only then, when the project earns a good reputation, one can hope for organic growth.
How was the activity created on Reddit?
The founders of their own handles riveted fake accounts. They did this for several months, imitating real activity on the site. Due to this, real visitors had the impression that the site was alive and there were real users on it. After several months, hard work began to pay for itself and organic growth began.
The same strategy was used by the Quora website (the most popular question and answer service abroad). The two founders, without interruption, created new questions and answered them themselves. Then the first workers, beta testers joined them. Thanks to this, the database of questions and answers began to fill up, the site came to life, organic growth began.
Yes, it is not easy. Yes, it is often necessary to do this manually (although, I think that some can automate such processes). But when there are no other ways to get out of the “valley of death”, then such a hack can be salutary.
Think about this option if you develop something like an online forum, where initially there will always be a dilemma “empty site means no users” and “lack of users means empty site”. Although the same situation exists in marketplaces and in social networks, where this dilemma must always be solved.
Growth Hacking article : How to choose the right approach for your company
Consider the examples of Tinder (dating application) and Alibaba (the largest site for the sale of goods on the Internet).
The Tinder application had about the same problem as a quora or reddit. For girls to start using the app, there must be guys. For guys to start using the app, there must be girls there. Simply put, you need a critical mass of users.
Attracting the first users of the director of marketing Whitney Woolf was engaged personally. The company organized a tour, during which Whitney traveled around the campuses of renowned US universities.
She performed in women's clubs and promoted the app. After the meeting, the girls installed it. Then Whitney went to the men's club, where she showed beautiful, free, but most importantly - active - girls in the application, who are open to dating.
Thanks to this tour, the number of users increased from 5 thousand to 15. Now the tyder has 50 million users, 10 million active every day. If at the very beginning of the development of a startup, Whitney didn’t go to independently involve each user, then this startup could die without becoming popular.
Jack Ma (the head of the largest trading holding Alibaba Group) was doing the same thing. In the early 2000s, he personally traveled to each factory to talk with executives and show them how Alibaba and Taobao websites will help sell their products.
This is a time consuming process and it takes a lot of time. But sometimes this is an inevitable stage in the development of the project.
Article in the topic - Case: Increase of registrations by 11.6% in the service Piktochart
Facebook is a company that has used a lot of grove hacks in its history. That is why their audience exceeds 1 billion users worldwide.
In the first part of this article, I described several hacks that Facebook used and uses to interact with the audience. Let's take another interesting case.
Once upon a time, the grou hackers of the company made special widgets that could be placed on sites. Each site owner, personal blog, could post a widget with a link to their group, public page or personal account. It was useful both for the user and for facebook.
The user was able to promote your account in the social network. And those people who want to be aware of everything that happens with the site owner or company subscribed to it. And Facebook received additional advertising, new users and another way to “pull” the user to his site.
I did not have long to look for an example of this widget. For example, in the Netology blog under every article in the footer there is such a block.
As you can see, the Facebook widget is located on the left, and in the middle are the same widgets from Twitter and YouTube.
Are there any other doubts about the effectiveness of this technique? And Facebook, and Twitter, and Youtube, and Vkontakte do it for a reason, for fun.
By the way, the Facebook widget was shown to site visitors billions of times in a month, generating hundreds of millions of clicks and a huge amount of new registrations.
I came up with something similar and Youtube, when I gave the opportunity to embed videos directly to sites. Once this opportunity was developed, site and blog owners could completely embed the video directly to their page, rather than send the user to Youtube.
On the one hand, fewer people began to navigate to the YouTube site itself. But, for sure, the number of visitors is not their main metric. The main thing is the number of watched videos, the average duration of viewing a single video, etc. And the insertion of videos on other people's sites does not contradict these goals.
But it gives access to a huge audience of site owners around the world. In addition, it simplifies the process of user interaction with the content - now they do not need to go to another page to view the video. They can do it right on the page with the article, for example.
This grove hack is one of the important factors in the popularity of Youtube. This helped "get" to new users and get an insane amount of backlinks to the site.
The article on the topic - How to make the video sell
Referral programs work not only online. There are many cases, as offline companies use this technique to attract new customers.
For example, one pool service company gave each of its clients a brochure about their business and asked them to transfer it to their neighbors who have swimming pools. Brad some, you say. Who will advertise their services to their neighbors?
But the trick was that the neighbor and the one who gave him this brochure received the same discount on all the services of the company. All in the black. That is why such a referral program worked.
By the way, one of the important points of any referral program is that both participants should receive some kind of benefit. Otherwise, there are cases when only the one who recommends benefits. What then is the sense for another person to accept his offer? No
Let's consider another case of using referral programs in the offline world. The insurance company from Zurich offered to each new client to invite their friends, acquaintances, colleagues to use its services. For each invited client, both program participants received a $ 100 shopping coupon. And this option to find new customers turned out to be more profitable compared to other channels of attraction.
By the way, one of the factors of the effectiveness of referral programs is a psychological principle, according to which people trust the recommendations from friends, relatives, colleagues much more than anyone from outside. According to a Nielsen study , 92% of people believe such recommendations and base their choice on this information.
In general, referral programs are a great way to attract an additional target audience at the expense of existing customers. Soon on Buste we will tell about the 50 most successful referral programs and about 25 important nuances that affect their effectiveness.
Article in the topic - How to increase conversion - 30 short tips for internet marketers
Interesting hack from Huoston Airport
By all the rules of business development, Houston Airport listens to the target audience - conducts surveys, collects feedback and improves the service delivery process.
One survey focused on the issues that most stress customers. The answer was unequivocal - problems in obtaining luggage. And most of all, clients said that the process took too much time - it took 9 minutes to get the luggage.
Well, since customers are so annoying, the airport listened to feedback, invested several million dollars and changed the process of baggage claim. The result - the waiting time was reduced to 6 minutes. It seems to be good, at 33% optimized the process.
Article in topic - Services for user surveys
After that, we conducted a survey on the second round - the answer remained the same. 9 minutes, 6 minutes - still long. Began to look for a new way to solve the problem.
The idea turned out to be brilliant - they simply took and changed the place where the baggage was received. Now it was much further from the place of arrival of passengers. While the person reached this place, the necessary 6 minutes had already passed, and he did not have to languish in anticipation.
Praise to the person who was able to come up with such an unusual solution to the problem.
I hope the article was interesting and useful for you. The next stat is the third batch of successful grow hacks. Do not miss.
By the way, if you want to receive your hack on your mail every day, then here is your invitation to the closed online community GrowthHackingIdea.com
If you want your friends and colleagues to learn more about Growth Hacking, share this article on social networks. They will be grateful for that. And I even more so!
Prepared by the site about internet marketing - Boosta.ru
Read also our other popular articles:
1. They will help you find all the “killers” of the conversion - 10 reports in Google Analytics (5000+ views)
2. The biggest mistake in A / B testing (2,000+ views)
3. 100 ideas for A / B testing. Part One (2000+ views)
4. 100 ideas for A / B testing: Part Two (1000+ views)
5. How to find an idea for an A / B test: heat maps and polls (1000+ views)
If you missed the first article, here is a link to it . I advise you to start with it - there are described very interesting groos khaki. If you are in the subject, then drove on!
Creating an active thematic community
This hack is still actively used by two well-known services - Moz (offers various services for SEO-shnik) and Qualaroo (a service for conducting surveys on the site). Both companies are designed to help internet marketers do their job better.
To help marketer - A selection of the best services for conducting surveys
')
When the question arose of how to get additional loyal customers, they chose not the easiest way. It was decided to create a full-fledged community, something in the form of a forum where marketers can ask questions, get advice, share information. In general, communicate and pump your skills.
So there were 2 most powerful community.
Moz created the Moz Community, in which they hold several webinars (“Mozinars”) a month with the best experts, conduct Q & A (question-answer) sessions, online and offline events.
In addition, the Moz guys are putting a lot of emphasis on content marketing - there are already about 5,000 posts on their blog. Almost every day they prepare high-quality material on topics that interest internet marketers.
The guys from Qualaroo did the same - they created the Growth Hackers Community. Every day the best articles on internet marketing, growing hacking, start-up development are added to this site. Each community member can ask a question, participate in the discussion and the AMA-session (Ask Me Anything - ask me everything you want) with the best industry experts, analyze cases of successful companies, watch thematic videos and even find a job.
Neither Moz nor Qualaroo is trying to sell their services directly through these communities. The main goal is to create a place where the target audience will hang out. And moreover, where the target audience will benefit, value. And, it means, it will come back again and again, become attached to the community, and, in parallel, to the company itself.
Although, a little organic advertising is present. For example, on GrowthHackers on the main page hangs a small banner about the upcoming conference. And in the Moz community, the menu has links to the company's products, free services, company pages, etc. But this is not the kind of hype that annoys us every day.
If you have technical, financial, and temporary opportunities, consider how you can make an active community around your product. Of course, this is not done in a day. And it will not bring leads and profit tomorrow. This is a long-playing topic that, if properly implemented, can be a key factor in your success.
Article in the topic - Upgrade content marketing: 16 working methods. Part 1
Hack on Instagram
I just want to warn you that this is not a case from a famous company. This is a case of a small Brazilian startup - CRM systems for optimizing work with potential customers. I found it on the Quora question and answer site, about which we will talk further.
At the first stage of startup development, instagram and offline events in Brazil were used to attract customers. The essence of this hack was as follows:
- Medium and large events in Brazil were tracked, and, based on this, a calendar for the coming month was compiled.
- When the event started, the guys tracked the hashtags of the events on Instagram (they did the same on Facebook and Twitter)
- On behalf of the company, they left comments under the photos and posts about this event. The comments were of the following type - “Cool, that you are now at this event. If you need help in interacting with everyone you met at the conference, try our CRM system. ” The text may not be entirely accurate, but the message, I think, is understandable.
- They also posted thematic images using their CRM-system. For example, if a fashion event took place, they placed 2-3 pictures on their account, which explained how their system works effectively in the fashion industry. If someone came to their account, then this positively influenced the first impression of the company.
Here is a small hack that used a startup at the initial stage of its “life”. Of course, this option is not suitable for all companies. But the meaning of cases is different. The main goal is to make you think creatively and start searching for non-standard opportunities to promote the project and attract customers.
I hope I can get this to you. And you can find and implement your own grows hacks.
Article in the topic - Startup Plotguru raised the landing page conversion from 9% to 52%. Are you weak?
Fake activity
Who knows reddit?
This is another user community, only it is not focused on any particular topic, unlike Moz or GrowthHackers.
Wikipedia Reddit is described as a social news site where registered users can post links to their favorite information. In addition, heated discussions boil there, you can promote your business, earn a rating and much more. The site looks old-fashioned, but it is very popular. Sometimes there you can get such information that you can hardly find anywhere else.
In general, the entire site is based on user activity. If they actively download links, vote for the best materials, the site lives. If there is no activity, then it makes no sense for visitors to go there.
Therefore, at the initial stage, in 2005, when it was first created, the main problem was how to create activity? We needed a critical mass of users, materials, comments, after which the rest will see the value of the site and begin to register there.
The critical mass itself does not reach. Only in exceptional cases does the product sell itself. As a rule, you first need to plow hard to attract the first users. And only then, when the project earns a good reputation, one can hope for organic growth.
How was the activity created on Reddit?
The founders of their own handles riveted fake accounts. They did this for several months, imitating real activity on the site. Due to this, real visitors had the impression that the site was alive and there were real users on it. After several months, hard work began to pay for itself and organic growth began.
The same strategy was used by the Quora website (the most popular question and answer service abroad). The two founders, without interruption, created new questions and answered them themselves. Then the first workers, beta testers joined them. Thanks to this, the database of questions and answers began to fill up, the site came to life, organic growth began.
Yes, it is not easy. Yes, it is often necessary to do this manually (although, I think that some can automate such processes). But when there are no other ways to get out of the “valley of death”, then such a hack can be salutary.
Think about this option if you develop something like an online forum, where initially there will always be a dilemma “empty site means no users” and “lack of users means empty site”. Although the same situation exists in marketplaces and in social networks, where this dilemma must always be solved.
Growth Hacking article : How to choose the right approach for your company
Personal contact with the target audience
Consider the examples of Tinder (dating application) and Alibaba (the largest site for the sale of goods on the Internet).
The Tinder application had about the same problem as a quora or reddit. For girls to start using the app, there must be guys. For guys to start using the app, there must be girls there. Simply put, you need a critical mass of users.
Attracting the first users of the director of marketing Whitney Woolf was engaged personally. The company organized a tour, during which Whitney traveled around the campuses of renowned US universities.
She performed in women's clubs and promoted the app. After the meeting, the girls installed it. Then Whitney went to the men's club, where she showed beautiful, free, but most importantly - active - girls in the application, who are open to dating.
Thanks to this tour, the number of users increased from 5 thousand to 15. Now the tyder has 50 million users, 10 million active every day. If at the very beginning of the development of a startup, Whitney didn’t go to independently involve each user, then this startup could die without becoming popular.
Jack Ma (the head of the largest trading holding Alibaba Group) was doing the same thing. In the early 2000s, he personally traveled to each factory to talk with executives and show them how Alibaba and Taobao websites will help sell their products.
This is a time consuming process and it takes a lot of time. But sometimes this is an inevitable stage in the development of the project.
Article in the topic - Case: Increase of registrations by 11.6% in the service Piktochart
Using company widgets
Facebook is a company that has used a lot of grove hacks in its history. That is why their audience exceeds 1 billion users worldwide.
In the first part of this article, I described several hacks that Facebook used and uses to interact with the audience. Let's take another interesting case.
Once upon a time, the grou hackers of the company made special widgets that could be placed on sites. Each site owner, personal blog, could post a widget with a link to their group, public page or personal account. It was useful both for the user and for facebook.
The user was able to promote your account in the social network. And those people who want to be aware of everything that happens with the site owner or company subscribed to it. And Facebook received additional advertising, new users and another way to “pull” the user to his site.
I did not have long to look for an example of this widget. For example, in the Netology blog under every article in the footer there is such a block.
As you can see, the Facebook widget is located on the left, and in the middle are the same widgets from Twitter and YouTube.
Are there any other doubts about the effectiveness of this technique? And Facebook, and Twitter, and Youtube, and Vkontakte do it for a reason, for fun.
By the way, the Facebook widget was shown to site visitors billions of times in a month, generating hundreds of millions of clicks and a huge amount of new registrations.
I came up with something similar and Youtube, when I gave the opportunity to embed videos directly to sites. Once this opportunity was developed, site and blog owners could completely embed the video directly to their page, rather than send the user to Youtube.
On the one hand, fewer people began to navigate to the YouTube site itself. But, for sure, the number of visitors is not their main metric. The main thing is the number of watched videos, the average duration of viewing a single video, etc. And the insertion of videos on other people's sites does not contradict these goals.
But it gives access to a huge audience of site owners around the world. In addition, it simplifies the process of user interaction with the content - now they do not need to go to another page to view the video. They can do it right on the page with the article, for example.
This grove hack is one of the important factors in the popularity of Youtube. This helped "get" to new users and get an insane amount of backlinks to the site.
The article on the topic - How to make the video sell
Referral hacks from the world of offline
Referral programs work not only online. There are many cases, as offline companies use this technique to attract new customers.
For example, one pool service company gave each of its clients a brochure about their business and asked them to transfer it to their neighbors who have swimming pools. Brad some, you say. Who will advertise their services to their neighbors?
But the trick was that the neighbor and the one who gave him this brochure received the same discount on all the services of the company. All in the black. That is why such a referral program worked.
By the way, one of the important points of any referral program is that both participants should receive some kind of benefit. Otherwise, there are cases when only the one who recommends benefits. What then is the sense for another person to accept his offer? No
Let's consider another case of using referral programs in the offline world. The insurance company from Zurich offered to each new client to invite their friends, acquaintances, colleagues to use its services. For each invited client, both program participants received a $ 100 shopping coupon. And this option to find new customers turned out to be more profitable compared to other channels of attraction.
By the way, one of the factors of the effectiveness of referral programs is a psychological principle, according to which people trust the recommendations from friends, relatives, colleagues much more than anyone from outside. According to a Nielsen study , 92% of people believe such recommendations and base their choice on this information.
In general, referral programs are a great way to attract an additional target audience at the expense of existing customers. Soon on Buste we will tell about the 50 most successful referral programs and about 25 important nuances that affect their effectiveness.
Article in the topic - How to increase conversion - 30 short tips for internet marketers
Interesting hack from Huoston Airport
By all the rules of business development, Houston Airport listens to the target audience - conducts surveys, collects feedback and improves the service delivery process.
One survey focused on the issues that most stress customers. The answer was unequivocal - problems in obtaining luggage. And most of all, clients said that the process took too much time - it took 9 minutes to get the luggage.
Well, since customers are so annoying, the airport listened to feedback, invested several million dollars and changed the process of baggage claim. The result - the waiting time was reduced to 6 minutes. It seems to be good, at 33% optimized the process.
Article in topic - Services for user surveys
After that, we conducted a survey on the second round - the answer remained the same. 9 minutes, 6 minutes - still long. Began to look for a new way to solve the problem.
The idea turned out to be brilliant - they simply took and changed the place where the baggage was received. Now it was much further from the place of arrival of passengers. While the person reached this place, the necessary 6 minutes had already passed, and he did not have to languish in anticipation.
Praise to the person who was able to come up with such an unusual solution to the problem.
I hope the article was interesting and useful for you. The next stat is the third batch of successful grow hacks. Do not miss.
By the way, if you want to receive your hack on your mail every day, then here is your invitation to the closed online community GrowthHackingIdea.com
If you want your friends and colleagues to learn more about Growth Hacking, share this article on social networks. They will be grateful for that. And I even more so!
Prepared by the site about internet marketing - Boosta.ru
Read also our other popular articles:
1. They will help you find all the “killers” of the conversion - 10 reports in Google Analytics (5000+ views)
2. The biggest mistake in A / B testing (2,000+ views)
3. 100 ideas for A / B testing. Part One (2000+ views)
4. 100 ideas for A / B testing: Part Two (1000+ views)
5. How to find an idea for an A / B test: heat maps and polls (1000+ views)
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/298284/
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