10 Growth Hacking Tactics for Businesses with No Budget

10 Growth Hacking Tactics for Businesses with No Budget

Growth hacking is a buzz term that may sound confusing if you’re not used to it.

When a growth hack is successful, you can scale a small startup exponentially within a relatively short period of time.

AirBnB stands as a shining example of the success of growth hacking, turning a niche business into one of Silicon Valley’s unicorns.

You may not be able to achieve AirBnB’s mythical status, but you can still use growth tactics to grow your own business. Many of them don’t take a lot of money so long as you have the required skillset.

In fact, a few of these are quite easy, and should be standard practice for digital marketers.

Here are 10 growth tactics you can use on your business without breaking the bank.

1. Optimize your website

The Internet has reached almost full worldwide penetration, especially among developed countries, where 82 percent of people are online.

This makes a website absolutely vital in making your web presence known among the general public. Even small mom and pop shops have a website.

Optimizing your website for conversions, retention, and SEO increases your chance of drawing organic search traffic, the holy grail of online marketing.

To do this, of course, you’ll need a bit of SEO knowledge.

2. Research SEO keywords

SEO is the science of optimizing your website for the best search engine visibility. It’s a vital part of any online strategy and needs to be taken into account for every page you build.

Here’s a little background on SEO.

Gone are the days of wordstuffing as an SEO tactic. Today, the focus is on longtail keywords.

With more 70 percent of online searches involving of long tail keywords, the more you can include in your web properties, the larger your sales funnel grows and the more organic search traffic you’ll receive.

Unless you’re a retail giant like Amazon or Walmart, creating so many keyword-rich pages requires a blog.

3. Create a company blog

Like I said, a company blog is the best way to create a lot of landing pages that rank well with search engines.

Brand storytelling is an important part of blogging. You need to be able to “sell” without overtly selling.

As for whose perspective is best, here’s a marketing chart showing who enterprise marketers believe are the most effective storytellers.

Between your marketing team, executive team, and guest posts solicited from bloggers and other professionals, you should be able to build a great blog requiring little to know spending.

Once you have a blog established, it’s easier to gain valuable backlinks from relevant and authoritative sites.

4. Guest post on established blogs

Although once you’ve published a blog, you may find yourself being sourced and cited by other bloggers and journalists looking for statistics and quotes from professionals, you don’t want to leave your success up to chance.

Guest blogging is a successful method for entrepreneurs and business executives to spread their messages onto larger platforms.

A recent experiment posting 44 guest posts on 41 platforms resulted in a 20 percent increase in traffic and increase in domain authority.

Link-building is a vital part of SEO, so by guest posting, you’ll accomplish both SEO and content marketing at once. Any time you can accomplish two things in one, you have a win for your growth.

5. Release white papers

Beyond blogs, which are generally aimed at the general public, white papers are another great way to draw traffic to your website.

White papers are technical reports that provide in-depth research, data, graphs, and analysis for specific topics within an industry.

Professionals are always seeking graphs, charts, and data in their research on various topics, so providing white papers establishes you as a great B2B resource.

Although blogs are also in-depth, transparent, and factual, white papers are often more dry and more likely to draw the attention of .edu and .govs, whose backlinks can catapult your site to the top of the search rankings.

6. Help a reporter

Few things help build a buzz for a business than media attention. With a large budget, you can hire an established PR agency filled with media specialists with rich contact lists throughout the media.

However, if you’re on a budget, you can use a popular PR and media tool - Help a Reporter Out.

By signing up as a source on HARO, you’ll receive email notifications three times a day for up to four industries that you specialize in. These emails include up to dozens of established bloggers and journalists looking for sources for stories.

A simple click on a query allows you to email your quotes, interviews, and/or pictures to that journalist to possibly be featured in their story (often with a backlink, or a company mention at the minimum).

The more stories you’re quoted in, the more exposure both you and your business get, increasing the chances of acquiring new customers.

7. Curate and aggregate relevant content

Not all content on your company blog and social media channels needs to be original. Huffington Post is widely recognized as the highest trafficked blog online, and it’s a notorious content aggregator.

In fact, over 60 percent of companies who responded to a recent survey share third-party content with their customers are least once a week.

That’s not all - 78 percent of companies who responded have a dedicated content curator on their team.

Spotify is a great example of successful content curation. Entering a crowded field of Apple Music, Pandora, YouTube, SoundCloud, and music piracy, Spotify grew to an $8 billion valuation by offering curated playlists.

8. Run social media contests

Social media has been a viable avenue to grow businesses since the early 2000s. Here are a few social media statistics.

While blogging and SEO are great ways to market your business, social media is the place to promote your content. Shares, likes, and followers are the currency of social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Instagram, and Pinterest, and help drive traffic while you slowly build organic search.

Social media recommendations are so solid because they often come from close friends and family, the most trusted consumer recommendation resource on the planet.

By running contests (especially with vivid visual content) on social media, you increase your company’s exposure and interest in your brand.

9. Crowdsource ideas

Crowdsourcing is a great way to “automate” basic tasks through cheap outsourcing. Here’s a graph of how industries currently use crowdsourcing.

Some companies, like Starbucks, found success crowdsourcing ideas. Through the My Starbucks Idea program, the company was able to implement 277 ideas generated from its community of fans.

Like self-checkout, crowdsourcing ideas from the community or even running a user-generated site is considered shadow labor. Shadow labor differs in slave labor in that the work is volunteer, but it’s free labor all the same, so get your customers to work for you.

And don’t forget to keep in touch with your customers.

10. Build email lists

Despite all the technological advances of the Internet since the early 90s, email is still the most popular and effective method of communication, even on smartphones.

Building and managing email lists can be accomplished within any email provider’s web UI, any third-party desktop email app (such as Outlook and Thunderbird), and any email app.

There are also plenty of third-party B2B services that help manage email lists for business.

Regular email newsletters (whether weekly or monthly) remind customers you’re still alive, puts you at the front of their minds, and encourages both clicks and sales.

Plenty of companies still find success through email campaigns, and since they’re now mostly read on mobile devices, you’ll be reaching people on a more personal channel, helping build more solid relationships.

Just remember to ask permission before emailing, preferably through an email subscription button on your website.

Conclusion

Although the media constantly applauds company success stories using growth hacking, not everyone will see 1278352187365 percent increases like the unicorns and dragons at the top.

Even a solid 100-500 percent growth is still a respectable year over year growth for a startup and will attract both customers and investors.

These results are possible. All it takes is dedication to specific strategies like those listed above.

Simple actions like optimizing your website, creating more content, and promoting that content to as large an audience as possible can be accomplished with elbow grease instead of cash.

You don’t need to spend a lot of money to make money, so get that old adage out of your mind.

Instead, roll up your sleeves, and focus on the growing your company to seemingly astronomical proportions using simple growth hacking techniques.

What are your go-to growth hacking techniques that don’t cost anything?

Cyril Solomon

Digital Marketing Consultant | Influencer @ #HappeningHyderabad 54k+ | Lead Generation - Google Ads, Facebook Ads | Social Media | Content Writer | Copywriting | Linkedin Personal Branding Consultant Agency

2y

Social listening, #crowdsourcing, local guides-searches-maps #GrowthHacking #DigitalMarketing #SocialMedia #marketing #branding WE Hub, A Government of Telangana Initiative T-Hub Hyderabad

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Dora SEO

Dofollow trust flow backlinks

6y
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Alex Еrin

Founder at Say2B.com and GetDoppio - Loyalty & Reward Systems

7y

Hi Neil, thank you for the great post!

Michael Volkin

800+ CEOs coached - Small Business Mentor - Helping Startups Scale - Lead Mentor for the Titan Entrepreneur Group

7y

I might be biased, but I am loving your Crowdsourcing graph! -Mike, http://www.Crowdsourcia.com

Trisha Amable

Girlfridayz marketing services provide B2B and Startup with high-qualified leads, sales and traffics with our scalable solution result-orientated services through creatives, resources, website design and planning.

7y

Hi Neil great post however all you say I do it except white paper which are more government oriented. My company blog is read by 1200 people per month according to Google my SEO is on cue I use long tail keyword and description on every page and your keywords need to feature in your content to achieve maximum link building getting guest blogging opportunity is not easy. Or a mention in an authoritative newspaper or blog. The radio and TV is still the highest in term of Ads including pay per click. Girlfridayz write professional blog post for company and can update or create social media profile re-target old blog post content add a new picture. Consistency and persistence is a key to success and grows hacking. Girlfridayz.com is an online marketing consultant Girlfridayz We help start up and grow your business with through various services. Community involvement is good for business attend your local events with your card and your mouth. Christmas fair cake sale business event political event enter competition like the apprentice to get exposure or Richard Branson Voom your brand get exposure get your visible marketing on car magnet clothing banner still a crowd puller loan sign more subtle on a calendar mug key ring Girlfridayz dot com does all this for you and more. Great reminder post Neil

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