6 Effective & Proven Growth Hacking Examples

There exists a constant need for ways to grow your business profitably and quickly. Growth Hacking is the trend that is now sweeping the world of business. This is a marketing strategy used by many startups and internet startups to introduce special techniques that are meant to grow the business. This article shows some of the most creative and successful growth hacking examples in use today.

What is Growth hacking?

Growth hacking is a term that was around for a few years but had been gaining momentum. To be precise, growth hacking is about finding ways for companies to grow faster than their competitors through new digital or offline channels.

It puts emphasis on leveraging newly emerged digital growth opportunities. It creates a lead generation or customer-acquisition strategy that maximizes return on your investment.

Companies have grown through this model of investment and marketing over the past years. They disrupted the status quo and built sustainable competitive advantages for their businesses.

How does Growth hacking work?

Growth hacking is the process of enhancing user growth by finding and solving problems outlined in the growth process. It does so by optimizing marketing and developing permanent solutions to those problems. There are numerous growth hacking examples to follow.

Growth hackers find ways to grow a company, product, or service by testing audience reactions and reactions to the internet. They look closely at the market niche and create a strategy to attract the attention of their audience. Growth hackers are often paid to develop targeted marketing campaigns that drive traffic to a website, product, or service.

6 Real & Proven Growth Hacking Examples

However, growth hacking has gained popularity over the past two years and has become a way of life. At each point and every move a business takes, they should think of growth hacking. Below are six growth hacking examples from some famous companies that have seen tremendous success from their efforts.

Airbnb

The Airbnb growth hack is a huge win for the individuals who wished to make money and the hosts who wanted a better experience.

Today, Airbnb is well-known for being a site where travelers can find cheap lodging in practically any place they go. But initially, they had to establish their user base, clientele, and reputation.

Airbnb’s founder noticed that most of their target market was looking for accommodations on Craigslist. As a result, they provided an opportunity for Airbnb hosts to quickly copy their listing to Craigslist, verify the details, and post.

And guess what? Airbnb got instant access to a massive market of potential users on Craigslist, quickly scaling from 50,000 to 550,000 listings.

Dropbox

Dropbox is renowned for its unique referral program and onboarding procedure. It essentially offers cloud storage to people but rewards users with extra storage by gamifying the onboarding process.

They offered existing users more free storage in exchange for connecting their Dropbox accounts to Twitter and Facebook. Dropbox also wanted users to promote them on those social networks. That was a cost-free method of rapidly increasing users.

It works like when a buddy you recommend to Dropbox signs up, you both receive 500 MB more storage.

Facebook

Most social networks use complex algorithms to connect us with friends, but Facebook has a particularly unique method of connecting people. This pervasive social network employed growth hacks to increase its reach quickly.

Users see the “online” friends they interact with online, the friends that are “offline,” and their friends. Facebook, a powerful social platform, sets social discovery in motion.

Facebook prompted users to add their contacts and sent emails to those contacts when they were mentioned or tagged on the platform. The mention notification email prompted people to sign up for Facebook accounts to view what had been said about them.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is THE networking platform for professionals and employers. A good LinkedIn presence can help you find customers and recruits and establish professional credibility. But it wasn’t always that simple.

The initial focus of LinkedIn was on the tech industry in the Silicon Valley area to test their idea of business networking. After it was successful, the business could grow into other sectors and regions, expanding its global coverage.

They also paid attention to what spurred growth for the company. So, LinkedIn improved its home page because it generated greater growth than email invitations.

The company then began making money off its strengths, enticing users to subscribe in exchange for faster access to potentially useful connections.

PayPal

PayPal is one of the most competitive markets for online payment businesses. How did they accomplish this? The company employed the paid referral strategy to incentivize the existing users and grow their business by almost 10% daily.

They gave away around $60 million to incentivize users. But that is a small number compared to their eventual valuation of over $40 billion in 2015. Even more interesting is that PayPal’s growth hacking took place when social media was not even prevalent. It grew through word of mouth, email, blogs, and instant messaging.

They initially decreased the referral payments to $5, but as they gained popularity in the market, they eventually eliminated them entirely.

Slack

Slack is one of the prominent and fastest-growing B2B SaaS companies. The team credits their rapid success to finding a market niche, perfecting the user experience, and utilizing a freemium business model.

And Slack was the solution to the market gap of low productivity and excessive stress brought on by sloppy communication.

Their freemium model is very easy to work with, and once the teams expand, the decision to pay for the tool comes naturally. This growth hacking strategy took them from 15,000 to 500,000 daily users in just one year.

Growth Hacking Methods to Improve Conversion

It’s been proven time after time that growth hacking is a value-adding marketing strategy. It can quickly help grow your business to new levels and make selling to customers much more effective. Growth hacking highly involves sales and increasing revenues. Below are eight effective growth hacking methods to boost conversion and grow different areas of your business.

Use social media platforms not used by competitors yet

Approach your competitors. Don’t be afraid to explore what your competitors are not doing and determine why they are not doing this. Explain your findings to the company.

They might be doing the best practices but simply not be aware of it. Discover social media platforms in which your competitors are not yet active.

Offer something for free

There are a lot of methods to improve conversion. Give something away for free, and be generous to your audience with your content.

Offer exclusive deals and give engagements to the people you want to convert the best. Discounts and exclusive content for those joining the mailing list will boost the number of subscribers and the amount of money you can earn.

Perform A/B testing continuously

A/B testing is done by showing a real audience a different variation of a page and its design. This can be done with text, ads, images, videos, or any other website element.

You can test variations on different pages and different sections of your site to increase the percentage of conversions. The back-end tracking through traffic analytics will let you know which variation was most clicked on and which was least.

Modify the design of your landing page

Perhaps it’s time to start again if your landing page fails to engage your visitors. This is especially true if you’ve previously done all of your A/B testings and your conversion rates are still low.

By changing up the layout, you can change up the marketing approach and improve your conversion rate. Consider the landing page differently and think about what would convince the audience to convert.

Send invite emails to your audience

One way to help increase conversion rate is through email marketing. A tested and proven email marketing technique is to send an email to your audience inviting them to email you. This kind of email will commonly convert some people who may otherwise leave after a website visit. Use an email automation tool to send an email to your audience occasionally.

Get your content to be interactive

People engage with content that is interactive and social. Start by creating shareable images or videos to help entice users to leave a comment. If your content is interactive, make sure to engage with the comments and provide value back to your website audience.

Put out a challenge

One way to improve conversion is by setting a challenge. This growth hacking method is used to create competition within your goal and raise the stakes. You can challenge your audience to a competition or make it a prize for those who complete the goal. This is an easy way to get people on board and can provide a great incentive for all their friends and social media connections.

Provide a freemium choice

Offer a free trial of your product or service before a paid option is put in place. Offering a freemium option is a good way to convert a high number of visitors to lead users. When a user joins, they are offered a free tool to get started with. And when users upgrade to the paid version, they receive added benefits like lifetime discounts or premium branding.

Conclusion

Business growth can be measured by the number of customers and impressions, revenue, and engagement in their business. Growth hacking is the process of taking an initial idea or perception and turning it into a practical business concept and marketing strategy. Many methods can be used for growth hacking. This article provides six growth hacking examples and effective ways to grow your business and improve conversions.