You may have heard the term “Growth Hacker” floating around the interwebs lately. In general, Growth Hacking is about growing a company using marketing techniques that are non-traditional, and which allow you to reach a target audience in ways that are testable, and which are generally less expensive than traditional marketing campaigns.
We see a lot of mis-steps in small businesses (and large ones) when they try to approach Social Media, and how to leverage these ever-changing platforms. Sure, it’s nice to have a Facebook page, Twitter and Instagram accounts, and keep fresh content on all. But the bottom line for growth hacking is how well does that grow your business? The answer, unfortunately, is that it really doesn’t, and the logic is pretty simple.
Suppose that you just did something big, and you want to tell the world about it. You can post pictures on your Facebook page and Instagram account, and send out Tweets, but who will see those? Only people who have already followed you (and only a small percentage of those) or stumbles upon your posts with random hashtag searches. So how does that grow your business? Your goal should be to reach new potential customers, grab their interest, and then get them in the door, and far too often posting photos to your page simply does not do that.
So you jump up to the next option, and start paying Facebook to show people your pictures and posts. That can certainly drive impressions, but where’s the engagement and conversion? And, you might as well just work with someone like Valesis Digital (formerly Maxpoint) or Quantcast and run a full-on digital ad campaign, since both of those companies can provide some pretty amazing targeting and demographic analysis. But, again, you are now back to some pretty traditional advertising, and all of these options are going to be, well, obviously just ads to anyone looking at their Facebook feed or some other web site.
But what if there was a better way to reach your potential customers through Social Media? In fact, every time a happy customer walks out your door, you have an opportunity to turn them into a walking advertisement for your business. That’s what we help you do.
Figure 1: Wikipedia – https://goo.gl/4mdvrQ
They say a picture is worth a thousand words (for at least as long as people have been trying to market their products), and many businesses, particularly ones that sell “experiences”, already take lots of pictures. And many of those pictures make it on to Social Media sites. Growth Hacking here is making those pictures grow your business, and doing it in a measurable way.
Which brings us to the Social Flash Media platform – a tool for Growth Hackers. Put simply, we take the natural process of taking a photo and sharing it to Social Media, and add your brand information, meaningful content and tracking. This means that instead of posting to your Facebook page and hoping it pulls in a new customer, your brand and message goes out to the friends of your happy customers. This gives you instant access to people who are likely similar in location and interests to your customers, allowing you to reach that new audience in a trusted way. This leverages the value of Influencer Marketing and the best part is that you did not get here by paying Facebook!
And, we make that testable. You can see engagement (not impressions, but actual social engagement) for the photos you take, and can quickly make changes and updates to optimize your responses. Links that go into your website are all accompanied by UTM parameters so you can see which ones provide the best conversion.
Another key component to growth hacking is customer retention. It’s great to have a happy customer walk out the door, but it’s even better to have them walk back in. If you choose, you can add an email opt-in (and even have those sent directly to your MailChimp account), and follow-up with your customers to keep that awareness going, offer discounts and incentives, or any of those other boring traditional marketing tricks 🙂
Of course, there are a lot more Growth Hacking tips and techniques you can employ, and there are numerous resources to help you learn. We recommend an excellent (we call it such because it is well-written, inexpensive, and, perhaps best of all, a quick read/listen) book called Growth Hacker Marketing by Ryan Holiday. And, of course, it doesn’t hurt that he happens to be an Austinite, too.
About the Author:
Greg Bryant is the CTO of Social Flash Media. He has worked in many areas of technology,