Growth hacking is a term to describe marketing & sales tactics that can help grow small and medium businesses without spending big bucks....
Growth hacking is a term to describe marketing & sales tactics that can help grow small and medium businesses without spending big bucks on large advertising campaigns. Hacking implies that you are cheating in someway, but really it was initially used because lots of marketing experts would tell you you have to spend a lot to get a lot back, which isn't always in the case.
Rather than list out a number of different things you can do to 'hack' your B2B businesses growth I'm going to tell you the same thing I do with every B2B business. Mainly because I have used the same strategy time and again and I've gotten really good at it.
Every company and service is placed in a category by your buyers. Whether or not you want to be in that category is a different question, but identifying the category you are in is really important for when it comes to attracting people to your website.
Buyers use categories in search queries. People don't search for "a company that helps us send better emails", they search for "email marketing software". The messaging part of it comes afterwards. So using your category is important for your inbound marketing strategy.
This is the main point of growth hacking. You attract visitors to your website rather than reaching out to them. Reaching out to prospects (outbound marketing) is time consuming and often yields littler results. If however you can attract people to your website without reaching out individually you can scale much faster without investing more time and money. But how do you attract more visitors without spending big?
This is the lowest cost thing you can do but is often never done by many companies. Mainly because it takes time to write content and time is precious. It also sounds really basic and not very high-brow, that's the irony behind it. One of the biggest things you can do to hack your B2B business growth is write regular blog content answering questions relating to your services, not opinions, answering questions.
Maybe this one is a bit obvious but I have been suprised by how many times I have seen complicated websites that have made page load speeds super slow. Simple things like utilising Google Tag Manager to group your scripts and uploading large images onto your site can impact the user experience and therefore impact things like quality score in Google Ads and hurt your SEO rankings.
Too many companies use page title's to convey their positioning and why they are different rather than saying what it is they are at the basic level. If you're a digital marketing freelancer, say it on your website, don't say you help companies grow - it's too vague and is not what people search for online.
Unfortunately this feels too simplistic for many marketeers and eats into the ego of creating a cool brand positioning statement, but if you're looking at being data-driven and want to grow your business you need to balance both of these things in tandem.
You should always create bespoke landing pages where possible for each of your PPC campaigns. Sending Google Ads traffic to your homepage is a big no-no. Your homepage is designed to aid discovery and research, a PPC landing page needs to super-specific and designed around a specific advert and campaign.
A lot of companies make the rookie mistake of firing up Google Ads and sending all the traffic to their homepage.
A very quick and simple search engine optimisation tip is to ensure your page titles are optimised for your keywords. Your page titles are the blue lines of text that appear at the top of search engine results. Too many companies leave this to be auto-generated by the website CMS, this is when you end up with page titles such as "Home".
Page titles are a very important ranking factor for search engines and they take 30 seconds to edit. I've seen websites jump from outside page 10 to page 2/3 by making this 30 second fix based on accurate keyword research. That is the only caveat with this tip, you need accurate keyword research to be able to make this one work effectively.
If your company targets more than one sector you need to create pages targeting each of these sectors. This is for the simple reason that a lot of searchers are looking for something very specific. They want to work with companies who have specialist experience in a specific sector. So rather than search for digital marketing agencies, they will search for B2B digital marketing agency or digital marketing for law firms as two examples.
Most B2B tech websites result in someone getting in touch in one way or another. But having one clear conversion path makes it easier for your website users. By having too many options you can often make it more difficult for people to convert. With only one Call To Action the next step is clear for the visitor and you are therefore more likely to have conversions.
One small point on this is that you need to ensure that CTA is the right one for your audience. As an example if you sell software that has a licence fee in the tens of thousands you may want to book a demo to discuss it with a prospect rather than sign up for trial, and it works both ways, for a piece of software that is fairly inexpensive, say £20 per month, a free trial can be the right call to action as the friction to buy is very low and the product is bound to be simple enough to use without needing custom set up etc. otherwise it wouldn't be £20.
I'm just throwing this growth hacking tip in here because I have seen it so many times on websites, and never seen it work. Users never stay on your home-page long enough to view your slides, and they never scroll between them.
The slider carousel is the legacy version of website personalisation. If you want to show different content to different buyers you should be doing this through smart auto personalisation rather than a lazy slider.
