Essential Growth Tactics for Your Startup

4.9

Rating: 4.9/5.0 from 7 users

Your rating:

Let’s dig into this second part: ESSENTIAL GROWTH TACTICS FOR YOUR STARTUP!

Now that your startup idea is in phase with your passion for helping your target market, this article will focus on getting your growth essentials right to get ready for your exponential curve.

And just as in the first part "How to Validate Your Startup Idea", your intention will be key so don’t skip it.

1. Is There a Way to Make Your Product Better If Your Users Invite Their Friends?

Dropbox is a perfect example, as the user is getting a real advantage if he’s sharing the product: more free space.

You got nice photos? Connect with your friends on Instagram to share them.

To borrow Seth Godin’s words:

Nobody wants to have the only email address in the world.

...so back to your project, is there a way you could inject a bit of these growth genetics into your idea?

Keep an eye on what others use for their brand… every time you see yourself sharing something or signing up for a service, what led you to that action? How could you borrow these strategies, mix them between each other to fit your public and implement them into your startup?

If you can do so, it will empower your passionate customers help you drive growth, making it easier to spread the word about your great idea.

2. If You Plan to Build a Blog - Which Can Be a Great Way To Show Your Brand’s Personality - Keep These In Mind:

A blog is time consuming (because creating great content is hard!), so it might not be a good idea to launch yourself into a blog if you can’t spend at least 10-20h a week on it - which would usually be about 1 or 2 articles.

Attracting people to write for you is a great idea, but do you offer enough traffic to convince them to write for you? This could be considered at a later stage.

Switching the roles, guest blogging is one of the best tactics to get traffic on your site. Simple principle: you write an amazing article, but instead of posting it on your website, you send it to another blog that has already an audience, with a link to your website.

If you do so, make sure that link doesn’t drive the visitors to your main page, but rather to a landing page with no other option than to subscribe to your email list… That way you’ll get way more email addresses.

Your blog shouldn’t be about a specific topic. If it is, it will be hard to find other blogs to send you traffic through guest blogging tactic.

For more chances of success, your blog needs to be educative, entertaining and inspiring.

Educative means learning something new and useful, practical.

Entertaining means it could have a cool tone, some inside jokes, or taking a fun angle on subjects.

Inspiring invites sentences like « imagine if you could… », and open up new exciting horizons for the reader.

Have a compelling vision for your audience, and they will love you.

3. Be Aware of the POWER of the CROWD:

The influence of the crowd is getting bigger and bigger. The crowd - meaning you and me, anyone active online - currently give its opinion (on social media, on forums, on articles, on blogs), vote, donate to projects, validate and finance your product, and even come together to create complex projects and solve problems together - like designing and building a 3D printed car.

How can you use it? By putting your content where it might be shared and getting feedback on it, validating and financing your idea on some of these crowdfunding platforms, or even creating your own platform to invite people with a similar passion to join and help build your project. The options and opportunities are there, up to you to combine and use them.

As a side note, keep in mind that as information is becoming available to everyone, transparency about your intentions from the beginning is necessary.

4. Speaking of Intentions… BE ALL IN:

To avoid confusion, to reinforce your identity, to be the landmark of what you stand for, be all in.

People are attracted to personality and to the "WHY" of businesses, so tell them the story, show them what’s your purpose, why you do the things you do.

Telling your audience that you will do your very best to serve them is the best sales tactic. You got to be all in.

Expanding on this vision, don’t create a company, create a movement!

5. How to WELCOME Your ONLINE VISITOR With a FRESH DRINK:

Tired of running from websites to websites, your visitor looking for a solution to his problem finally arrives on yours.

He needs to feel home.

The first impression is the most important, so polish your design and get rid of every unnecessary thing (that is on the way to the important info).

Prefer video to text. If what you do is not super simple and obvious, a bit of explanation might be required, and your visitor probably doesn't want to read much. Place a video on the top of your main page to explain in a clear way what you do. That way the visitor might stay a minute to watch it, understand what you do passively without reading any content, and you can also direct him to take a specific action (CTA) at the end of your video.

Spend more time with your customers. You should meet with your existing customers (not potential ones), and hang out with them for hours until you realize what really motivates them to sign up or buy your stuff.

Once you fully understand this, then it’s easy to target your campaigns, easy to know where to find your customers and when to ask for the sale.

Let’s bring here an advice from Sean Ellis (the marketer who came up with the term « growth hacking »): Watch 10 real people trying to sign up for your service in front of you, to see what is actually happening… you’re going to learn something every time, and you’ll be able to radically improve your website.

Do you have a clear CTA on each of your page? You need to make clear what next step you would like your visitor to take, and avoid confusion from multiple choices, as confusion brings to checking Facebook instead.

Either you want your visitor to browse your articles, share your content or register to an email list, that’s up to you but make that obvious.

Please, adjust the tone of your website to normal people, you don’t write a thesis here to impress your peers or your former boss. The tone should be appropriate to your ideal customers - but also to anyone even not familiar with your activity - and shouldn’t be an industry jargon.

As Albert Einstein once said:

If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough.

And don’t forget these testimonials on the first page… Your visitor might believe what you say, but the words of other people make more sense as they’re by definition more objective. That would increase credibility as well.

6. Find a Way to OVER-DELIVER:

Content is becoming totally free. Music is free, but concerts are becoming more expensive. Personal development advice is free, but organized events are fairly expensive.

People spend more on real life experiences, so even if the sales experience is online, warm up the relationship.

Be friendly, funny at times, surprising.

It can be including an extra product if you deliver goods, it can be sending a real postcard after you’ve done a online course or anything unexpected for your lovely customer… don’t forget that part, and be creative!

Starting and growing a business isn’t easy, but the path to go through these tough times has never been clearer, thanks to the advice of the many that were brave enough to take on the challenge, and persistent enough to succeed.

Author: Jonathan Magnin

I’m passionate about Education, Growth Hacking and Animated Videos! If you feel a presentation video could look good on your front page, or if you just want to connect, you can find me here: