This blog post is not a lecture on the greatest growth marketing hacks. Instead of spending time on growth hacking theory, here you will find practical solutions.
The essence of growth hacker marketing is to start implementing matter-of-fact tips. If you are the head of growth in your company, this is your growth hacking workbook.
Vital Growth Marketing Hacks for Every Business
Scaling looks difficult only if you don’t know how to scale a virtual team. If you’ve never run a digital business, you scratch your head with endless unknowns.
But before you get into growing your business online, you have to be clear about the five key elements of all scalable businesses.
The answers to these five questions will be your smartest and most powerful growth marketing hacks that matter always and for every business. Make sure to personalize them and write them down.
Those questions are:
- What is my business goal?
- What business strategy will take me to my goal?
- Who are my clients?
- What problems do I solve for them?
- Which services/products do I offer?
The clients you want, the services you offer, and the problems you solve are essential for defining your strategy and reaching your goals., Therefore, you have to be absolutely clear about them. You have to know where you are going to get there. The following growth hacker marketing tips are your tools to get you there without a struggle.
Head of Growth: Apply These Practical Growth Marketing Hacks to Virtual Teams
With the pandemic crisis, small and mid-size business owners were pushed to think beyond their comfort zone. Growth hacking left traditional offices and moved online to remote teams. Most leaders were left without the means and the tools to scale a business digitally.
If you find yourself dumbfounded about growth hacking tips, start by rethinking your business with these non-nonsense marketing hacks.
1. Understand who your client is and what they need.
You have to know who you sell to, and not only on the surface. You have to know your client on-the-dot so that you solve their problem, and they pay you for solving their problem. Don’t make assumptions, research, and create customer profiles. Look for problems that haven’t been solved, and define why precisely your virtual team will be the right one to solve the problem.
2. Set up a quality standard.
You need a quality standard to deliver quality consistently. You cannot scale a business by giving only random great results to your clients. Identify the standard you are happy with and stick to it, setting it as an example for your virtual team.
3. Develop a digital leadership system.
The first person to deliver quality is the leader or, in this case, whoever is the head of growth. It is your job to craft guidelines about the expected quality and keep your team accountable for reaching them.
4. Deliver consistent quality.
The easiest way to keep people accountable is by being transparent and clear about those standards upfront when you hire them.
You have to know what you want from your virtual team members. Otherwise, you will get inconsistent results and you won’t be able to blame your team for them because they just reflected on your ambiguity.
In fact, when you know exactly what you need from your team members, it will be a breeze to find the right people with the right skills.
Learn how to write a clear and structured product requirement document.
Having the right team is among the top ten growth marketing hacks for business growth. Make sure you have one.
5. Don’t chase huge clients.
While it seems logical that big clients will bring big money, this can be a trap for scaling. Many digital businesses approach scaling in this way. However, winning big clients has specific caveats:
- There is a huge competition
- Price is the major factor
- There are long sales cycles with slow growth results
- You rarely get honest feedback for a lost deal
With big clients, you do lots of prep work and end up with a rejection email. Therefore, you don’t get a chance to improve because you don’t know where you went wrong.
6. Find smaller clients.
It is better to name this growth marketing hack: “find the right-size clients”. Smaller clients rely on your support and guidance as a digital leader. They will more likely find the services of your virtual team beneficial.
>>> If you lose a huge client, it can undermine your whole business.
>>> In contrast, working with smaller clients enables you to scale up in times of unprecedented growth and scale down when a crisis hits in times of uncertainty.
7. Get very clear about your offer.
Be explicit about your offer. Don’t wander on the market trying to service everything and everyone. You will be clear about what you offer if you know your goal and how to strategize to get there.
8. Don’t blindly follow the “one product” principle.
The simple path to revenue growth is to develop one product and wait for profits. Unfortunately, this can easily set you up for failure.
It is the age of disruption. You can’t sit on your laurels too long. One product can be difficult to scale. Make your offer service-based. Even if it is one product, you have to be ready to improve the service around that product to scale. You can do that simply by enhancing the product or by pivoting to innovating the service element.
9. Serve the need of the contact person.
No one will buy from you if you don’t provide value for their business.
But there is more than just offering a good price. Serving the need of the business can be improved by serving the need of the contact person. So, look into ways you can improve someone’s challenges by adding value to the team. Often, all you need to do is to persuade a contact person that you will make their life easier to win that contact person’s boss as a new client.
The growth marketing hacks of scalable businesses include adding value to the whole client team.
10. Standardize processes.
You don’t unique pieces of art but a service or product with consistent quality. Therefore, you need to standardize processes. Standardized processes:
- Help your business efficiency grow
- Make things easy for you and your team
- Prepare your business to take on new challenges
- Produce growth as a result.
Process standardization is not only a solution to your products or services. It applies to assembling your virtual team, too.
11. Dual-track your scaling.
When you have clear standards for processes, you can either:
- Automate or
- Assign different people to do the same tasks
Software automation is one solution. But if you need a new person to do the same task on your team, you can use clear processes and workflows to find a replacement.
The same wisdom of growth hacker marketing applies to sales processes. Regardless of where you need to scale or in which way, up or down, having standards will create an easy way forward.
12. Hire the right people.
When you have set up business processes, you can apply the same process and assign the same roles to people with different skills, regardless of the product of the department you want to scale.
Efficient recruitment relies on finding people with the right skills for the services you deliver.
For example, do you really need to hire a salesperson? A smarter growth marketing trick would be to see what sales skills you need and implement them into your marketing team. If you concentrate on skills, you can create flexible and scalable processes for virtual teams.
13. Assign virtual squad roles.One way to grow by skills is to define virtual squads. The remote squad hierarchy will look like this:
- Marketing Squad: responsible for bringing in sales qualified leads
- Sales Squad: responsible for new closed deals
- Client Squad: responsible for client satisfaction
Client satisfaction is a scalable metric you can perpetually use to expand your business by improving your service or product quality.
Learn more about how to set up the marketing-sales-client cycle.
14. Measure performance by tracking metrics in pipelines and funnels.
Yes, you need numbers.
Consistent and precise quality standards linked to a service that your expert team delivers are the base for setting up metrics and measuring success.
15. Coach and support, avoid control.
Successfully reworking the strategy and implementing functional changes in roles and processes requires coaching, leadership, and support.
Don’t fall into the role of closely monitoring your employees. Moreover, you won’t be able to – use tools to track results and act upon them.
16 . Choose software for structured workflows.
Finding adequate software can be a pain. But you will need one if you want to scale.
Telling you that you need marketing automation software is not a huge secret of growth hacker marketing. After all, you need a tool to see who is eligible for buying, set up a meeting, and understand the client problem. Testing different tools can be one way to remove the weed from the chaff.
17. Research your lead qualification criteria.
Lead qualification criteria are insights about connecting you with the people most interested and willing to buy. You need to know your potential customers just as much as you are precise about your virtual team roles and skills.
This knowledge is the task of your marketing team and a part of the marketing-sales-client squad cycle.
18. Develop a strategy template.
By applying the above growth marketing hacks, you should create a business strategy or redesign your old one into a completely new remote team strategy.
You have to be able to answer all questions and fill out all sections in the strategy template. Otherwise, you are loose on your goals, and you don’t know your business as much as you think you do.
19. Define growth hacking tools.
Finally, it is time to wrap up all conclusions about your strategy, goals, services, people, standards, and processes into neat digital tools.
The main challenge is that you need more than just a marketing automation tool. But if you do your research with due diligence, you will find appropriate growth hacking tools. Google, HubSpot, Salesforce, Asana, and Xero are just several examples of affordable or free tools that provide value at scale, just as you scale your business.
Many of them give you an overview of all processes relevant not only to people and skills but also to products, services, and clients, enabling comprehensive insights into how well you have matched the supply and the demand in our virtual team.
No one said that growth hacker marketing is easy. But if you do the hard work by resetting your business based on these powerful growth marketing hacks, you will see results in no time.
Learn to grow and scale your business with virtual teams and global freelancers with our FREE Virtual Team Starter Pack!
