How To Get Away With Marketing — Growth Hacking Tips
Get your wine glasses and popcorn ready—we’re kicking off #TGIT Digital Astronauts style! Thanks to Shonda Rhimes, we’ve all learned how to manage a White House scandal and tie up loose ends in a murder investigation. But for us common folk—who aren’t involved in a steamy affair with the President or an exclusive member of the Keating Kult—there’s not much we can apply to our daily lives. Lucky for business owners, we have the secret sauce to channel your power plays and gain leverage over your competition, without using any feminine wiles. So move over Annalise, we’re about to show you how to get away with marketing.
How does one get away with marketing—you ask? Well, there are a few sneaky tactics you can employ to elevate your marketing game from basic to ninja. We all know about the standard mix-up of email marketing, pay per click advertising, and SEO, but here are some untraditional growth hacking techniques that game-changing businesses have used to go from 0-100 real quick. And don’t worry, they're completely legal.
Run a pre launch give away
Pre-launch give aways can range from blah to amazing. Oftentimes you’ll see brands take a cookie cutter approach and offer a free iPad, or something that doesn’t quite speak to their target market. To truly reap the rewards of a pre-launch give away, you have to do something memorable. At first glance, you may think of a give away as a just a brand building exercise, but it can be so much more. Every person that signs up for your give away is now a lead and potential customer.
Take Qwertee for example. Qwertee sells one of a kind, quirky t-shirts, and their growth hacking trick involved a Pre-Launch giveaway. They ran a contest on Facebook with grand prize winners winning 30 free T-shirts of their choice! This built them a fan base of over 297k on Facebook. With this sneaky growth hacking strategy they hit everything right on the money, and now have a huge audience of motivated fans, turned customers.
Track Pre Launch Visitors for Social Retargeting
What’s sneakier than just leveraging a Pre-Launch Give Away to growth hack your way to 300k clamoring fans? Taking the data from everyone that visited your page including the ones that didn’t signup for your give away, and creating ads to follow them around various social media platforms.
Here’s how you can set this up on Facebook:
1. Navigate to the “Audience” section of the advertising tab.
2. “Create Audience” on the top right.
3. Select “Custom Audience"
4. Select “Website Visitors”.
5. Enter your domain name, leave the rest of the fields the same and change “In the last x days” to 180 days.
6. “Create Audience” and place the tracking code in between thesection of your website.
Create A Viral Sign Up Form
This is one of my personal favorite strategies. The concept sounds simple—you create signup form that features an incentive that grows for each friend you refer. The outcome is exponential growth in terms of your marketing list.
A great example of this is Shop It To Me. I remember when a friend of mine signed up for this and referred me. It was marketed as a “personal invitation from [friend x]” and a reserved spot in Shop It To Me’s program. Once you completed the signup process, you were prompted to share the Shop It To Me program with a friend, and get a $25 gift card to Nordstrom. Needless to say, Shop It To Me now has over 80k fans on Facebook and a marketing list in the Hundreds of thousands range (at least!).
Offer Incentives To Users Who Hit Milestones
You’ve heard the saying: 20% of your customers are responsible for 80% of your revenue (and vice versa). It’s a proven fact that repeating customers are more valuable to a business than one-timers. Create a loyalty program that incentivizes your customers to stick with your brand and reward them for reaching certain milestones.
One that’s done a great job of earning more of my business is the Sephora Beauty Insider program. They have a 3-tier rewards membership program that unlocks certain benefits depending on your spending level. The more you spend, the higher your status in the community, and the more “exclusive” benefits you get.
Hashtag Hijacking
As a growing business, you’ll get sales pitches from various events in your industry asking you to pay thousands to either attend or set up a stand. When it’s all said and done, you’ve lost a bunch of money for little to no return. A sneaky way to get away with marketing at these events, is not showing up at all, but rather utilizing twitter advertising around event hashtags.
Here’s how you can set these up:
1. Go to the “Twitter Advertising” section of your Twitter account.
2. “Create New Campaign” and select website clicks and conversions.
3. Set up your ad to go to a landing page on your site.
4. Add the event hashtag in your targeting section within the “keywords” sections.
5. Set your budget to run before, during and after the event.
This lets you have the power to be the talk of events without ever stepping foot on the exhibition floor.
So now that you have the tools you need to get away with marketing—sit back, relax, and enjoy #TGIT!
