127 Marketing Tactics – Most Epic Growth Hacking List and Free eBook

November 21, 2016Marketing

Have you ever searched for All the Marketing Tactics known to human kind in one post?

Is that you? -Then you will love This List.

We curated the best marketing growth strategies from a selection of 2105 articles and the top 100 growth hackers.

All the marketing tactics you’ll ever need are here!

We have tested some of these marketing growth strategies and if executed properly, they have the power to hack, I mean literally hack your business’s growth.

Before you start, make sure to track your progress. Growth hackers eat, breath and love metrics!

Setup (if you haven’t) Google Analytics to track traffic customer activation data.
Then we will need Kissmetrics or Mixpanel to gather data about conversion funnel.
This is a cool bonus tool called HotJar – if you are in early stage, this tool helps to make video recordings of your customer experience on the page to spot bugs.

Pick one of the marketing growth strategies, execute, measure, improve and automate.

Simple as that.

Along the way test your assumptions based on your data and see how wrong (or right) you actually were.

For easy access, we have divided marketing growth strategies into 5 convenient AARRR sections – pirates and growth hackers love ’em!!

If you are not sure what’s AARRR, Dave Mclure will explain.

Pick a hack!

Acquisition
- Social Media
- Content Promotion
- SEO
- Apps
- App Store
- Paid ads
Activation
Retention
- Churn
- Customers

Referral
Revenue

Acquisition Growth Hacks
Activation Growth Hacks
Retention Growth Hacks
Referral Growth Hacks
Revenue Growth Hacks

Acquisition Growth Hacks

Reach the right person every time – the best email hack

Cost: 0$ (the good stuff starts at 49$ per month);
Marketing Tactics type: Small volume but high conversion rate hack;
Expected outcome: Increase email amount and reach for email marketing;
Difficulty level: Easy;

This is great! With this hack, you can export employee emails created for any company’s domain. You can even see how active the emails are.

This tool can do wonders for B2B business sales.

Step by step approach:

Gather the list of companies that could be your potential customers (& their domain names).
Signup to hunter.io.
Check on Linkedin to make sure you are reaching out to the right person – in the email, use a personal detail.
- Depending on your sales cycle you can reach the top decision maker with the first email.
- Note: this is your chance to create a carefully crafted corporate email campaign – do not spam.
- Credit for this one goes to Vincent Dignan from Magnific.

Get your tool on every Product Hunt alike page

Cost: 0$;
Marketing Tactics type: High volume & high ROI hack;
Expected outcome: Increase in traffic and customer feedback;
Difficulty level: Easy;

Product Hunt can get you off to a good start. It’s a good one. Here are 14 more product directories where your tool must be.

Free and with large audiences – a must try for early stage startups!

Step by step approach:

Betalist, Designer News, Lifehacker app directory, Chrome Webstore, Hacker News, StumbleUpon, Reddit, GrowthHackers, HackerNews, BizSugar.
Don’t treat this like a 5-minute task – these tools can be extremely powerful. Put some effort into it and ROI can be tremendous.
- Example: Read how IDoneThis did go from 0 to 5 000 users.
To amplify the results remember you have to get as many upvotes as possible in the first 24 hours – share on SM.

Commenting as a growth hack

Cost: 0$;
Marketing Tactics type: Low volume but high conversion hack;
Expected outcome: Increase in traffic and trustworthiness;
Difficulty level: Medium (hard to scale);

In the realm of Growth Hacking, everyone is familiar with Sujan Patel’s work. This fella was able to generate 513 leads just by commenting on blog posts. Not spamming, nor link building but building credibility and delivering value (so they come back for more).

Step by step approach:

First of all find the relevant blog posts, Google – “blog posts headline” inurl:blog.
Only high-quality blog posts are worth your time –
- Either check how many comments the post has and if it’s more than 5-10, go ahead and find how you can add value.
- Or, use Moz extension to track site’s Domain Authority and comment to sites with DA above 20.
You can also comment on the most popular & relevant Slideshare presentations as well as on Amazon book reviews.
Here you can learn from Sujan Patel himself.

Tell your story on Podcasts

Cost: 0$;
GH type: Medium to high volume;
Expected outcome: Increase in awareness and understanding of your product or service OR building your brand image;
Difficulty level: Medium;

The Graph was made by the good people of Copyblogger.

In the past 2 years the percentage of people listening to Podcasts has rocketed – this is one of the best channels that can help you build your brand or share the “WHY?” of what you sell.

Step by step approach:

The growth of this storytelling approach has been tremendous. Podcasts are no longer the low-quality basement talks but shows that can influence your career.
- 1 out of every ~6 people you see on the street is listening to podcasts.
Search for “(your industry) inurl:/podcast/” on Google. Start scheduling the podcasts
- Make sure they mention the company’s name and/or yours in the title and during the podcast.
Here‘s everything you should know about the podcast as a hack and how to use it.

Be part of a Youtube channel (SEO tips included)

Cost: 0$;
Marketing Tactics type: Low to high volume and eventually high ROI;
Expected outcome: Increase in traffic and trustworthiness;
Difficulty level: Easy;

What’s the main difference between video creation on Youtube and blogging? Videos gain popularity over time but blog posts lose it.

Moreover, Youtube is the world’s 2nd largest search engine and you are not there.?

Step by step approach:

One tip I have heard pretty much summarizes the “Youtube success” (if you can follow it 99.99% of the time you will succeed):
- “Keep uploading!” – CaseyNeistat. Before he reached 3M subscribers, he uploaded a video for EVERY SINGLE DAY. For 3 years straight. That’s hustling.
Gather a group of 3-5 friends and make it happen:
- There are 5 types of videos you can choose between – tips, product demos, testimonials, webinars & vlogs.
- Having a video in your newsletter, blog post or facebook post facilitates engagement and CTR.
- FYI: time spent on your page is an SEO ranking factor and videos usually increase that.
Ultimate guide how to create successful Youtube channel here but Youtube SEO is summarized in this Slideshare (the good stuff starts from slide 16).

Brag when your customers love you

Cost: 0$;
Marketing Tactics type: Low volume/low cost;
Expected outcome: Increase in trustworthiness;
Difficulty level: Easy;

Got a good review, share it! Make it part of your SM strategy. Note: bad reviews will be part of your life – what matters is how you handle them, not how angry is the customer.

Step by step approach:

Put your page on one of the review pages:
- For local businesses: Yelp or Google my business;
- For products: Amazon reviews, Which, Facebook reviews and Trustpilot;
Get the review listing in front of your users and share your “fame”.

Create a daily challenge

Cost: 0$;
Marketing Tactics type: Low volume/low cost;
Expected outcome: Increase in trustworthiness and builds your brand;
Difficulty level: Medium;

I read about a designer, fresh off the college, with very little experience who started creating Logo a day for big brands. Mark Cuban was one of his first targets. Each day the logo price grew by 1$ (1st day = 1$, etc.) soon reaching solid pay per hour.

Step by step approach:

Figure out what will create value for others. Create clever GIFs, add a backlink a day, landing pages, newsletters, infographics with great design– pick one!
Come up with a time-frame and easy to understand pricing mechanism.
Show what you have to offer to the most important influencers in the selected industry. Start free.
Keep creating until it takes off and don’t give up.
- To get started join this daily logo challenge or any other on the WWW.

Create a research of why your product works

Cost: 0$;
Marketing Tactics type: Low volume and high conversion hack;
Expected outcome: Shows the need for your product;
Difficulty level: Medium;

Create a painkiller – pour some salt in the wound and then show you are the cure.

Step by step approach:

Take your product and actually prove that it can do the stuff you are promising. Get social proof from other customers and put it in numbers. Show what improved, by how much, and how your product helped.
Put the findings on one easy to understand A4. Share it, email it, print it, distribute it. Make sure to get it in front of your target audience.
These papers are called whitepapers and they are the best sales decks.
- Here‘s a Wiki-how approach for creating a whitepaper.

Build your brand with PR

Cost: 0$;
Marketing Tactics type: Potentially high volume;
Expected outcome: Increase in traffic, and build your brand image;
Difficulty level: Medium;

For bloggers and journalists, their name is one of the most precious assets. Whenever you get a smaller publication to write for you, your brand gains recognition and you can aim for bigger & bigger publications.

Step by step approach:

Start by pitching your service or product to publicists in your field with 3-5k followers and each time you get a publication – double the follower count.
To get in touch with influencers you can use tools like Ninjaoutreach or Headreach.
Prepare a great “WHY?” someone should write about you before reaching out – you beat the odds, great track record, offer a freebie if they write about you, etc.

Get free PR – make others write for you

Cost: 0$ (Yes, it can be free);
Marketing Tactics type: Low to high volume;
Expected outcome: Increase in traffic and brand awareness;
Difficulty level: Medium;

Help a reporter out – get them a story. It’s a win-win: you, an interesting and charismatic entrepreneur (sell yourself), he/she, a reporter looking for a story. It’s a perfect match.

I was surprised but most of the time demand is higher than supply.

Step by step approach:

There must be something that can WOW a reader and thus be a reason for someone to write about you. Figure out what is this 1 thing.
When you are starting out, it’s a numbers game – bigger outreach scope can produce better results and there are a lot of free sites that want your story:
- HARO – this is a classic one. It’s free but for 19$/month gives you better visibility.
- MyBlogU – Contribute to a story, share a quote or help journalists to brainstorm. Easy to contribute & for most parts it’s free.
- PRnewswire – Put your press release up for grabs. Top site.
- More sites – Source Bottle, Muck Rack, Media Kitty, and Journo Requests.

Integrate with other tools that can serve as an extension to your service

Cost: 0$;
Marketing Tactics type: High volume and medium CR;
Expected outcome: Increase in traffic, customer satisfaction and social proof;
Difficulty level: Hard;

Imagine if Salesforce, Evernote or other cloud tools would offer integration with your tool. That would be pretty neat, right?

That would get your tool in front of their customers and the other way around.

Step by step approach:

Think from the customer’s point of view and try to imagine what service could add to your company.
- Let’s say you have an SEO keyword research tool, integration with on-page SEO analysis tool would makes a lot of sense, right? A huge gain for your customers.
Follow the sales basics, reach out to decision makers, schedule meetings, negotiate and hopefully in a couple of months you will have a deal.

Invest in video marketing – “why?” will surprise you

Cost: 0$ if you re-post – 10$++ if you create;
Marketing Tactics type: Low to high volume and high CR;
Expected outcome: Increase in traffic and customer engagement;
Difficulty level: Medium to hard;

This hack explains why you are making a mistake by not putting a bigger focus on video marketing.

Why?

Data published by Adelie Studies is mind blowing:
- Social video generates 1200% more shares than text and images combined;
- Having a video on the landing page increases conversion rate by 80%;
- Sharing a video on Facebook directly instead of through Youtube will have 10x the reach.
- 62% of Google searches include videos and videos give 157% increase in organic traffic.

Start your own Meetup – interactive way to get emails

Cost: 0$;
Marketing Tactics type: Low volume but high CR;
Expected outcome: Increase in traffic and create personal connections;
Difficulty level: Keep it simple;

Meetups are a great way to interact with others who love the activities you enjoy. Moreover, friends come and go but meetup groups stay (as well as their emails).

Step by step approach:

Figure out how your brand, company or tool can benefit from a meetup:
- Knowledge sharing, informal promotion campaign or a case study with meetup that’s quick and most probably in a bar with a beer in your hand.
You can keep it simple and informal or use meetup as your platform for organizing a decent event.
- Later on, you get attendee emails to further engage with them.
- Here’s an ok guide that covers the basics.

Group your content into a book and sell it

Cost: 0$;
Marketing Tactics type: Medium to high volume;
Expected outcome: Increase in traffic;
Difficulty level: Easy;

If content creation is a large part of your customer acquisition strategy there are high chances that you blog about different niches that are part of one bigger segment.?

Step by step approach:

Let’s say you are an accountant who posts about tax returns, preparing annual reports and invoicing.
- Most probably only accountants would ever consider reading your posts. But if you group them into an e-book and call it “Startup Accounting for Dummies” – you suddenly target much larger group of people.
Group your posts, find which customer segment would be interested to read about it and market the content.
Publish it (figure out if you can charge $$ or use it as a tool to get emails). Amazon Kindle offers great publishing tool. And here are 20 more publishing tools.

Create fun to do Surveys

Cost: 0$;
Marketing Tactics type: Low to medium volume and medium CR;
Expected outcome: Increase in traffic, customer engagement and learn more about your customers;
Difficulty level: Easy to Medium;

Everyone loves fun surveys. I have always wondered “Which GOT character” I am!

With this marketing Marketing Tactics, you can learn more about your customers, create fun to do activity for them and generate quite a bit of a traffic while you are at it.

Step by step approach:

You will need a free online quiz and survey tool, such as LeadQuizzes, to engage your potential customers. They also have a free quiz maker guide to get you started.
Involve celebrities and influencers – “see who else was a Jon Snow”, etc.
Design for mobile first (71% participants come from mobile phones), pick a couple of acquisition marketing growth strategies and hack the quiz.
- Credit goes to Andrew Michael, full post here.

Free social media growth hacks

Use influencer marketing

Cost: 0-50$ per post (discounts and freebies work the best);
Marketing Tactics type: High volume and high CR;
Expected outcome: Increase in traffic and social proof;
Difficulty level: Easy;

Social proof for us is a HUGE thing. When “important” person in our field will promote a product or service that often converts with ROI that’s well above 200%.

Step by step approach:

Go through Instagram and search for popular influencers in your industry.
- See what hashtags “belong” to the group you want to target.
- Make sure to build your profile to be “one of them” and use “4-1-1” marketing technique to attract their attention.
More often than not influencers will make it easy for you to contact them.
There are also a couple of tools that can be used to find influencers: Fiverr, Triberr and Ninjaoutreach (pricey but good).
- Here‘s a guide on Influencer marketing that made 4 000$ on the 1st day.
- And here‘s how to use the Ninja tool for that purpose.

Sell on Pinterest with Rich Pins

Cost: 0$;
Marketing Tactics type: High volume and low cost;
Expected outcome: Increase in traffic and sales;
Difficulty level: Medium (Easy if you know the basics of CSS and HTML);

Pinterest has 110 million active users and ~100 billion pins, moreover 71% users are female (more here). Pretty neat stats if your target group mainly consisting of women.

Step by step approach:

Rich Pins provides readers with an option to buy or see your product without even leaving Pinterest.
- You can even do the checkout within Pinterest.
- Here‘s all the info you might need.
The process of setting up Rich Pins might be a bit more technical if you are not familiar with HTML but thankfully now there are extensions that will do it for you:
- In WordPress Yoast SEO will do it for you and here’s the video guide.
- If your sales platform is Shopify this video is everything you need.

Help (never Spam) people on social media groups

Cost: 0$;
Marketing Tactics type: Low volume and high conversion hack;
Expected outcome: Increase in traffic and trustworthiness;
Difficulty level: Medium (hard to scale);

Imagine if instead of spamming people on social media groups you would help them! Matthew Woodward in his first year was able to make 76 000$.

Step by step approach:

Start by selecting the focus social media network (here‘s the age distribution between social media platforms).
Find the relevant groups in your industry and add them to this sheet.
Write down the problems these people are having, create tutorials and guide them to the solution (here‘s how Matthew did it).

Use social media 4-1-1

Cost: 0$;
Marketing Tactics type: Medium volume and low conversion hack;
Expected outcome: Increase social proof and traffic, if you play your cards right, you can go viral;
Difficulty level: Easy;

Give a meaning to your social media posts. According to Andrew Davis your social media routine should follow 4-1-1 principle.

Step by step approach:

Every 6 posts you post on social media should look exactly like this:
- 4 posts should be pieces of content targeting the influencers in your fields – re-posts or with tagging the influencers.
- 1 post should include original, educational content that you have created.
- The last one should be sales oriented – discount coupons, cool deals, etc.
Use Buffer or HootSuite to post the content. Or if you can afford Edgar (starts at 49€ per month), a couple of days ago invitation only policy were lifted.

Engage with Linkedin group users – that’s your golden goose of the feedback sessions

Cost: 0$;
Marketing Tactics type: Medium to high volume;
Expected outcome: Increase in traffic and social proof as well as an opportunity to engage to get constructive feedback;
Difficulty level: Easy;

There are more than 2.1m. groups on Linkedin with professionals who have several years of experience in their fields – they are eager to share their opinion, try new tools and some of those groups are “elite clubs”.

All of these groups can be found in Linkedin by clicking Work icon, selecting Groups, and scrolling down to a Search bar to write relevant keywords.
The active group members more often than not will also have their email address for your inquiries.
These groups should not be spammed because ~50% of the professionals will share their opinion or test your tool, so don’t advertise but engage.

Benefit from WhatsApp’s 1 billion users

Cost: 0$;
Marketing Tactics type: Low to medium volume;
Expected outcome: Increase in traffic and customer engagement;
Difficulty level: Easy to Medium;

WhatsApp has 1 billion active users and I am sure you are not advertising there.

Time to change that.

Step by step approach:

First of all, Facebook doesn’t want you to advertise on WhatsApp so there is not an easy to set up solution.
Create WhatsApp account, add all your customer mobile numbers to Google Contacts, Sync with your phone, head over to web.WhatsApp & create new broadcast (or a group).
- Check this infographic to avoid these 5 mistakes and an interesting article on WhatsApp advertising – here.
- There are also bulk messaging options that I’m currently testing to see if they can be recommended.

Automate (not schedule) your Social Media posts

Cost: Starts at 49$ per month;
Marketing Tactics type: High volume;
Expected outcome: Full (almost) automation of your social media platforms leaving you a lot more time to focus on your business;
Difficulty level: Medium;

The ultimate goal of growth hacking is to automate the processes as much as possible. Now, with the rise of AI, meet Edgar – social media posting automation tool, that helps you to re-post the posts you have in your queue.

Step by step approach:

I will assume that you know which of your posts are performing the best. If you have your data, setting up Edgar will be quick.
The principal behind Edgar is that it learns what content performs the best and blasts out this content periodically.
Just now “invitations only” policy were removed and Edgar is available to everyone – learn here.

Content Promotion Growth Hacks

Create headlines that grab attention

Cost: 0$;
GH type: Low volume;
Expected outcome: Increase in conversion rate, traffic and grabs attention;
Difficulty level: Easy;

Struggling with headlines? Folks from Buzzfeed.com and Sarah Peterson, the Sumome badass, made a guide for headline creation.

Step by step approach:

Buzfeed has made THE list of words that headlines should include to get them shared.
- No.18 will blow your mind – it’s here.
Sumome created a list that will get your headline needs covered depending on the occasion.
- 49 ways to improve your headlines.

Use Influencers to market your content

Cost: Content promotion with Ninjaoutreach.com is 0$ for 14 days (after 49$ per month);
Marketing Tactics type: High volume and high conversion;
Expected outcome: Increase in traffic and people in your network;
Difficulty level: Middle;

We all know how important is to get your content in front of as many influencers as possible but it gets harder and harder cause everyone is doing that.

You must build a network of friends that are happy to share the content and here’s how.

Step by step approach:

You build the list of influencers following the steps laid out in the Social prospecting with the NinjaOutreach tool.
Engage before reaching out: Follow on Twitter (or on SM that makes more sense), 2 tweets, 2 blog comments, 2 blog shares, and the reach out to say Hi.
Before publishing the content see who would be interested in receiving your article.
Then send the influencers who would love to read your piece of art:
- Credit goes to Alex Turnbull from Groove who made 1 000+ subscribers in 24h with this technique (full post here).

Pay to get your content in front of the major publications

Cost: ~10$ per day;
Marketing Tactics type: Potentially high volume and ROI;
Expected outcome: Increase in traffic and backlinks from AAA class publications;
Difficulty level: Easy;

Facebook and Linkedin offers targeting that allows you to target employees of AAA class publications and it works (it’s not cheap tho – for cheaper and a bit more creative option see marketing technique “Mind blowing email hunting strategy”.

Step by step approach:

Head over to Facebook to boost your ad (here) or to Linkedin to create paid ad (here).
- What’s the difference you might be asking? – The price, Linkedin is more expensive but often converts better.
Select the publications that are relevant and would be interested sharing or republishing your article.
- Credit goes to Paul Shapiro.

Get your content spread like a wildfire with these 3 tools

Cost: 0$;
Marketing Tactics type: Medium volume hack;
Expected outcome: Increase in content shares/likes/pins;
Difficulty level: Easy;

This growth hack examines 3 web-based tools that will get your content shared.

It’s a cheap hack so don’t expect much but it gets the job done.

Step by step approach:

Lincolider, Viralcontentbuzz and DripRevolution are the communities with content creators and growth hackers like you.
These communities work as a “share for share” principal. Where the ones who contribute the most have the chance to earn tokens=money.
- Sharing is not compulsory.

Submit your content to content aggregating sites – it’s a free traffic

Cost: 0$;
Marketing Tactics type: Low to high volume;
Expected outcome: Increase in traffic;
Difficulty level: Easy;

There are websites that display A LOT of content and they let people submit the pages they would like to see there and read about them. It’s like your sock drawer just for articles. Moreover, they update real time and when you publish a new post, people will see that.

Step by step approach:

You submit your page to these content aggregating sites and it updates hourly to display your news. Like RSS just without RSS.
Here are the most popular sites (if not all of them) and their submission forms:
- Feedly (submit here), Fark, News360, AllTop, BizSugar, Inbound, Blogarama, BlogCatalog, Discover and PopURLs (submit here). & Paid options: Blokube (~2.5$/month), Blog Engage (~25$/month), BlogSearchEngine (~30$/month), SpillBean (~25$/year)
- 16 content aggregating sites – go ahead and score some traffic!

Republish your content on larger sites

Cost: 0$;
Marketing Tactics type: Potentially a high volume hack;
Expected outcome: Increase in traffic and visibility – double the reach with one content;
Difficulty level: Difficult;

If your target is to reach as many people as possible across multiple platforms with this great blog post you have created – this marketing technique is for you.

First of all, republishing content rarely if at all results in Google penalty. Google’s Matt Cutts, aka Head of Web Spam, said it himself.

Step by step approach:

Before you republish your content to larger publications you might want to wait before the post gathers some backlinks or the article will be outranked.
Publications like Elite Daily, Entrepreneur, Vox, Mashable and many more will be happy to republish our content.
- Here‘s the list of 46 high-end publications.

Flip your content into a presentation

Cost: 0$;
Marketing Tactics type: Potentially a high volume hack;
Expected outcome: Increase in traffic and visibility – double the reach with one content;
Difficulty level: Easy;

Republishing the content has one massive adventage – your reach the loyals of other sites that would not necessarily visit your page.

Step by step approach:

Google Slides is one of the best tools to quickly create a presentation from your WordPress blog post.
- You will need a plugin called “Aspose Doc Exporter” to export your article as a DOC. file.
- Then you upload the DOC. to Google Drive and turn your doc into G-Slides.
Then you can submit your presentation to Slideshare, Scribd, Speaker Deck; for more here are 9 other options.

Republish your content to content platforms

Cost: 0$;
Marketing Tactics type: Potentially a high volume hack;
Expected outcome: Increase in traffic and visibility – double the reach with one content;
Difficulty level: Medium;

There are platforms designed articles – copy/paste can get you a lot of traffic.

Step by step approach:

Write a summary of your post if it’s over 1 000 words or simply copy paste your article and add to these content platforms:
These platforms are known to be great hosts for top-notch content, so use them – Linkedin Articles, Medium, Tumblr, Ghost, Typepad, Soup.io, and Post Haven.

Submit your article as an answer to questions

Cost: 0$;
Marketing Tactics type: Potentially a high volume hack;
Expected outcome: Increase in traffic and visibility – double the reach with one content;
Difficulty level: Easy;

People often struggle to find answers to questions that you have explained in-depth in one of your articles. So this growth hack shoots two birds with one bullet – you help people to find an answer to their question and get traffic to your article.

Step by step approach:

Each answer to the question must be carefully catered to deliver value and answer exactly this question. Link to your post goes either at the end of your answer or only if the person asks for it.
Here are the sites where you can scout for questions to answer Quora, Yahoo Answers, and Wiki-how.

Share your content’s URL to these traffic boosters

Cost: 0$;
Marketing Tactics type: Potentially a high volume hack;
Expected outcome: Increase in traffic and visibility – double the reach with one content;
Difficulty level: Easy;

We gathered list of sites where people go to search for great articles.
Moreover, to share your post all you have to do is – submit the URL.

Step by step approach:

Here are the top sites where you can submit your article:
- StumbleUpon, Reddit, Growthhackers, HackerNews, Inbound.org, BizSugar.
For most of these tools first 24 hours are the most important to generate the buzz. So make sure you ask your closest business friends to like or upvote your post submit.
- In this case, going to Fivrr and asking someone to give you the boost also works well.

SEO Growth Hacks

Audit your SEO – SEO is not a gut feeling but science

Cost: 0$;
Marketing Tactics type: Medium volume & medium ROI hack;
Expected outcome: Increase in organic traffic;
Difficulty level: Hard;

When was the last time you did SEO audit? Never, right? Because proper SEO audit is just so expensive.

Yeah, same here!

With this guide, you can DIY – save money and get traffic.

Step by step approach:

SEO audit consists of 3 parts – technical audit, on-page or content audit and off-page audit.

Improve your On-Page SEO

Cost: 0$;
Marketing Tactics type: Low volume hack;
Expected outcome: Increase in organic traffic;
Difficulty level: Easy;

SEO starts with keyword research (I will assume you know that. No? Ok, here‘s the guide.) and then sprinkling these KWs in all the right places.

Here’s how!

Step by step approach:

It’s actually really simple, your focus keyword should appear in – H1 and H2 tag, your KW should be 0.4% to 4% of all the words, in at least one alt tag and in URL as well as sprinkle the content with KW synonyms. That’s it, easy, right? The best guides on this topic are here:
- Ahrefs made a research and analyzed 2M KWs to show what matters the most when it comes to On-Page SEO.
- Backlinko folks took a different approach and designed the “perfect” blog post structure – it’s here.

Do No.1 ranking factor – Get Backlinks

Cost: 0$;
Marketing Tactics type: High volume & medium ROI hack;
Expected outcome: Increase in organic traffic;
Difficulty level: Medium;

According to analysis of 1M ranking factors No.1 & No.2 ranking factors were getting a lot of and high-quality backlinks. So backlinks are the most important thing in all this SEO conundrum.

Here’s how to catch all the backlinks.

Step by step approach:

After years of SEO experience, at the moment I use only 2 techniques – Ninja technique and Skyscraper technique (check 3 startup strategies bellow).
This is probably the most covered topic in the SEO field. On the World Wide Web these are The articles for the inspiration:
- 42 great link building techniques here;
- The biggest guide out there can be found here;
- & here‘s the biggest list of link building tools.

Make Google to ignore some backlinks

Cost: 0$;
Marketing Tactics type:Low volume & medium conversion rate hack;
Expected outcome: Increase in organic traffic;
Difficulty level: Easy;

By link disavowal you let Google to know which backlinks of yours to ignore. This can significantly increase your traffic. (see more here).

Step by step approach:

There are two options:
- The 1st option is with the Google disavow tool (Moz guide available here).
- The 2nd option is with Linkody (guide available here). This way you can save a bit of your time as with Google you would have to track backlinks manually.
With Linkody you will be able to see LNF (Link Not Found), 404 pages, Landing Page Errors, Unreachable Sites and all your landing page errors, that will allow you to fix all the issues on the spot.

Use videos to score backlinks

Cost: 0$;
Marketing Tactics type: Medium volume hack;
Expected outcome: Increase in organic traffic;
Difficulty level: Easy;

There are clear benefits why site owners and influencers would choose to link to a video – that’s easy to perceive information. But there are two things you should know depending on which video hosting platform you are using.

Youtube: This platform earns all your backlinks. But there is a marketing technique to fix it.
Wistia: Your site earns all the backlinks.

Step by step approach:

Youtube: Get the URL of the video and copy paste it as one of your competitors in Linkody dashboard.
- In a couple of minutes, you will be able to see all the websites that have given you a backlink.
- Then you have to reach out to these websites and ask them to redirect to your website instead.
Wistia: It allows you to control the embedding process thus you have to do none of the above and you can focus on marketing the content.
- Video shares = backlinks.

Skyscraper technique – this is how we do it

Cost: 0$ (or 9.90$ for the Webmasters Plan);
Marketing Tactics type: High volume, low cost and high conversion rate hack;
Expected outcome: Increase in traffic and networking;
Difficulty level: Easy;

Let’s say you wrote this “one of a kind” piece of content.

Now, imagine if you could find all the articles that are linked to similar posts and contact them. That would be cool, right? Well, you can.

Step by step approach:

Find all the articles that are somewhat related to your article.
- You have written 300 mind blowing tricks to do XXX. So, find all the articles that are inferior to your post. Google it.
Add the domains hosting these articles to your Linkody account as your competitors and let the tool will find all the links.
For each article, filter by its URL to find all the links that point to it.
Export these links to CSV and do the outreach with the tool of your liking (I recommend Ninjaoutreach).
- In case if you are struggling with this marketing Marketing Tactics – let me know in the comment section.

App Growth Hacks

Promote your Android App in Google search with AdWords

Cost: 0.01$ per view and at least 5$ per day;
Marketing Tactics type: Mid to high volume and high CR;
Expected outcome: Increase your App installs;
Difficulty level: Hard;

Let’s say I need a hotel in NY and so I “google it”. 1st result that appears is directly from Booking.com APP, a click on it brings me straight to the Play Store where I can download the App.

Want to learn how to set it up?

Step by step approach:

The concept of making this happen is really cool to say the least. Watch this 2 minutes video to get the details. And it works both to increase the traffic and later to re-engage with the users (see “Re-activate your Android App users with AdWords”)
Here is a detailed guide to make it happen (20 quick steps).
- If this is your first time with Adwords – make sure to schedule a free Skype call with Google Adwords little helpers, they are really helpful.

Promote your App (& promote on your App)

Cost: Can be free for Android but for iOS they give you 100$ credit and then you pay (currently available only in U.S)
GH type: Medium to high volume;
Expected outcome: Increase your downloads;
Difficulty level: Medium to hard;

These solutions are designed to help your App to be discovered.

Step by step approach:

For Android:
- AdModb allows you to cross-promote your app free of charge. It’s a win-win kind of a deal. Read more here.
For Android and iOS:
- AdMob Mediation is Google’s solution (AdSense for mobile) that lets you display ads on your App, read more here. Similar solutions are offered by Smaato.
For iOS:
- Apple’s solution is Search Ads, it helps your App rank higher – more here. Costly but you get a free credit to kick it off.

Post your App on these 100 directories – 100 hacks in 1

Cost: 0$;
Marketing Tactics type: Medium to high volume and low CR;
Expected outcome: Increase in traffic, exposure and amount of backlinks;
Difficulty level: Easy;

Justin McGill made a list of 100 App directories (both Web and Mobile) for you to go all crazy and get your tool free exposure.

Time to do some posting!

Step by step approach:

You can find the list here – getting your tool there will give you the exposure and backlinks (both do-follow and no-follow), which is organic traffic.
Go through the list and submit your app to these directories one by one. Free traffic and a lot of users testing your creation.
- Don’t forget to thank Justin.

Get your App a couple of prizes – win the “Oscar”

Cost: 0$;
Marketing Tactics type: Medium to high volume;
Expected outcome: Increase in traffic, exposure and social proof;
Difficulty level: Easy;

App prize niche is saturated at the moment and everybody wants to build the Oscar for Apps. Think of these events like Podcasts with prizes and a lot more money spent on branding. Interesting, right?

Here’s how you can benefit from this.

Step by step approach:

When you Google “App Awards 2019” there are 127m. results & here are the best awards from the first 2 pages:
- BestMobileAppAwards, GlobalMobileAwards, AppGrowthAwards2019, DrivenxDesign, MobileVillage – there is a lot more.
No matter if you win or lose, you will have that cool badge to insert on the bottom of your web page. That, my friend, is a massive sign of recognition.

ASO (App Store Optimization) Growth Hacks

App store optimization – it’s SEO, just easier

Cost: 0$;
Marketing Tactics type: Medium volume hack;
Expected outcome: Increase in downloads;
Difficulty level: Medium;

In the SEO world to get your content organic traffic you would do keyword research, on-page content optimization and get backlinks. App Store Optimization is similar.

Step by step approach:

Find the most popular KWs how people would be searching for your App and implement them in:
- Name;
- Description;
- Localization.
Instead of backlinks, you need downloads and reviews. Ultimate guide here.

Create an explainer video for your App

Cost: 50$-….$;
Marketing Tactics type: Low volume hack;
Expected outcome: Increase in downloads by ~20-35%;
Difficulty level: Medium;

App videos can increase your downloads by 20% for iOS and for 35% for Android (of average).

Step by step approach:

Get experienced animators from Fiverr that will create your video for ~50$.
Submit the video on App store and enjoy the traffic.
- More about how your App can benefit from an explainer video read here.

Do the cross-category promotions

Cost: 0$;
Marketing Tactics type: Medium volume promotion ;
Expected outcome: Increase in ranking and organic traffic;
Difficulty level: Medium;

Let’s say you have built “Uber for nannies” App and you want to promote to “tips & baby tricks” App, makes a lot of sense, right? Here’s how.

Step by step approach:

Start slow, reach out to Apps with downloads similar to yours and slowly climb higher.
- Moreover don’t be afraid to go out of your industry – target similar age range, similar location segments and slowly expand.
Here is a platform to facilitate cross-category promotions – Smaato.

Get at least 5 “5 star” reviews

Cost: 0$;
Marketing Tactics type: Low volume and medium conversion rate;
Expected outcome: Increase in ranking and downloads, as well as your rating will appear to everyone;
Difficulty level: Easy;

For your rating to appear to everyone you need at least 5 different reviews and this will decrease acquisition costs by a large margin. On App stores social proof = reviews.

Step by step approach:

It’s simple! Call your mom, father, brother, sister and your friend. Done, now you have 5 reviews.

Paid Ad Growth Hacks

If you have some cash to spare, this section will show you 15 marketing growth strategies for paid ads that will get you a nice return on investment. And while you’re at it, consider using an ad management tool like HubSpot to take advantage of your data to better inform your ad campaigns.

Craft the perfect Facebook ad

Cost: ~5$ per day = ~20% revenue growth MOM;
Marketing Tactics type: High volume and high ROI hack;
Expected outcome: Increase in traffic;
Difficulty level: Easy;

Adespresso guys looked into 37 259 most successful facebook ads.

& here’s how to craft the perfect facebook ad!

Step by step approach:

Perfect length of the headline is 5 words;
Median for the text length is 14 words but link description – 18 words. The analysis of how add should look like can be found here;
- How to pay 0.005$ per click – here;
- & 10 useful add tips from Moz guys – here.
- As well as detailed Facebook’s targeting guide – here.

Must Read: List Of Best Push Ad Networks For Advertiser

Grow your fan base with Youtube

Cost: 100$ – ….;
Marketing Tactics type: High volume and high CR;
Expected outcome: Increase traffic;
Difficulty level: Easy to Medium;

Wondering how to get your product or service in front of those super famous Youtube stars? It’s costly but there is a tool for that and it’s worth the $$$.

Step by step approach:

FameBit is the tool where all those cool Youtube superstars search for marketeers.
You sign-up and search for the Youtubers that make sense for your brand and product. Be ready to pay because the good ones know their value.

Create Product Listing Ads on Google

Cost: ~5$ per day;
Marketing Tactics type: Medium volume and high ROI;
Expected outcome: Increase in traffic and visibility (available only in certain countries);
Difficulty level: Medium;

Wondering how to get your products up there? It’s actually only a couple of hours of work.

Step by step approach:

Shopping ads are available in 22 countries as of October 2016, full guide – here.
To learn everything there is to know watch this 0:47 seconds video.
- If you chose to use this marketing technique make sure to read this. Google released Assortment Reports showing you what products you are missing, competitor prices, etc. It’s amazing! They did market research for you.

Run a killer Display Network campaign on AdSense sites

Cost: ~5$ per day;
Marketing Tactics type: High volume;
Expected outcome: Increase in traffic and visibility;
Difficulty level: Medium;

Every time you visit a website there are banners where you can see different ads, it’s a high chance those are Display Network ads – Google has 2 million different sites in this network.

Step by step approach:

The looks of the ad can make or break your conversion, so learn from these 50 killer ads that made millions.
Google’s Adwords run intense bidding war to decide which ad to show. Here are 21 different bidding strategies to get your ad in front of people so you don’t waste money.

Advertise on Linkedin – the right place for B2B marketing

Cost: 10$ – ….;
Marketing Tactics type: High volume and high CR;
Expected outcome: Increase traffic and brand recognition among professionals;
Difficulty level: Easy to Medium;

It’s not hard to imagine what kind of a tool could be sold to the audience who is using Linkedin on a daily basis. Report on Linkedin data and their 128m. users – here.

Step by step approach:

You can target Linkedin users by advertising on the news feed or groups.
Then you go extremely in detail “to zero in on your audience”. The cost per ad starts at 10$ per day, so they are pricier than Facebook but that also means that less people are tired of everyone advertising on Linkedin (higher CTR).
- Ultimate guide on Linkedin advertising can be found here.

Use Snapchat to get in front of 18-34 year olds

Cost: 5$ – … per day (they just slashed the CPC in half till 2017);
Marketing Tactics type: High volume and high CR;
Expected outcome: Increase in traffic;
Difficulty level: Medium;

Snapchat’s fan base among 18-34 year olds are incredible. In USA 41% use this tool on a daily basis while TV is watched only by 6% in this age group.

Step by step approach:

Snap Inc. is constantly working on ways to help brands engage with users:
- Snap Ads, GeoFilters, Lenses, Discover Channels and Live Channels.
- Influencer marketing – Brand takeover, Promotions, Unboxing and Product placements. For more info, see this infographic.
Snap offers you the chance to learn from other brand success – here.
Get on a Snapchat, film something that resonates with your brand and put it out there, see what happens. It’s cheap, you have nothing to lose.

Advertise on Instagram – a must read

Cost: 5$ – … per day;
Marketing Tactics type: High volume;
Expected outcome: Increase in traffic;
Difficulty level: Easy;

Instagram is the social platform where design plays a huge role, so before you start advertising make sure your account is a work of art.

Step by step approach:

Select 2-3 colors that you will use throughout the posts, use 1-2 filters repeatedly or none at all, post 3-4 types of images (quotes, recipes, etc.), keep it short & always use your #hashtag, include URL in your bio.
- When that’s done you are good to go. Full Insta-starter guide is here.
The way to advertise is very similar to the one on Facebook. Everything you would ever need to know on this topic by SocialMediaExaminer – here.

Promote your Pins (integration with rich pins is a must)

Cost: 5$ – … per day;
Marketing Tactics type: High volume and high CR;
Expected outcome: Increase in traffic;
Difficulty level: Easy;

Before deciding on your growth channels I would advise experimenting as much as possible. Who knows maybe Pinterest has the highest ROI – the potential is there.

Step by step approach:

To integrate enable rich pins, view marketing technique “Sell on Pinterest with Rich Pins”.
If you are familiar with Facebook ads, it’s as simple as that.
- Pinterest gang has made an amazing guide, it’s available here.

Sell with Twitter (and use its buy button)

Cost: 5$ – … per day;
Marketing Tactics type: High volume;
Expected outcome: Increase in traffic;
Difficulty level: Easy;

According to TBG Digital, CTR for promoted tweets in Search was 88% higher than Tweets in Timeline but Timeline tweets had 29% lower cost per engagement.

There are 3 options on how to use Twitter’s advertising opportunities.

Step by step approach:

Advertise your Tweets in Search – this works much like AdWords and is great to drive performance. Great post on how to dial your targeting settings here.
You can also get your Tweets up on the Timeline in front of your target audience.
Moreover, you can add to your Tweets a buy button. How-to guide here.
- Your products must be on Twitter’s partner e-commerce platforms.

Run ads on Reddit – it’s a tough nut to crack

Cost: 2.5$ – … per day;
Marketing Tactics type: Low to high volume and potentially high ROI;
Expected outcome: Increase in traffic;
Difficulty level: Easy;

This is the platform that no marketer or growth hacker can fully understand. It’s hard to predict who will succeed and who won’t. That’s exactly the reason why you should give it a go.

Step by step approach:

Neil Patel covers this hack from head to toes over here.
Click here if you are ready to create an ad.
- Reddit as of 18.09.2016 offers ad targeting based on site visits (read more here). If you go ahead and test the feature make sure to share your experience.

Advertise on StubleUpon

Cost: 5$ – … per day;
Marketing Tactics type: Medium to high volume;
Expected outcome: Increase in traffic;
Difficulty level: Easy;

StumbleUpon is ProductHunt’s lil’ cousin. If ProductHunt has been a powerful source of traffic for your company, this is a must try hack.

Step by step approach:

To set up these ads it’s as easy as 1,2,3 – choose your audience, select interest and budget. Done!
- If you think a guide would be nice – it’s here.

Create Bing Ads – before you smirk, check the picture

Cost: 5$ – … per day;
Marketing Tactics type: Medium to high volume and higher CR than for Google ads in USA;
Expected outcome: Increase in traffic;
Difficulty level: Easy;

Bing-oo!!!

Step by step approach:

It’s very suspicious how much this looks like AdWords – you do KW research, zero in on targeting, create your ad and select its type. Then you are good to go.
Neil Patel strikes again and if you follow his ultimate guide all your Bing questions should be answered.

You must give a go to Yahoo Gemini ads

Cost: 5$ – … per day;
Marketing Tactics type: Medium to high volume and potentially high CR;
Expected outcome: Increase in traffic;
Difficulty level: Easy;

Yahoo in the search engine land takes the 3rd spot (that of course if you count Youtube). Give it a go – if you target countries where Yahoo is a runner up to Google’s engine.

Step by step approach:

Yahoo to differentiate offer appealing interface and ease of ad set-up. UX is a bit different than it’s with Bing and Google but basics stay the same – KW, ad set-up and payment.
- Your ultimate guide with 50$ coupon is only a click away – here.

Facebook hacks

These marketing growth strategies are fresh out of Facebook HQ, ROI is unknown. Revenue from Facebook ads will stabilize mid-2017 and 2016 was a year of 4 new advertising services.
Disclaimer: Growth Hacking examples below might be still in the testing regime and not available in your country. Get ready, they are coming.

Drop Paid Ads in Facebook groups

Cost: Low as it’s in the test regime $;
Marketing Tactics type: Medium to high volume;
Expected outcome: Increase in traffic and CPC might be higher than expected as it’s freshly out of HQ;
Difficulty level: Medium;

Was launched around October 2016 in Australia, Canada, Ireland, and New Zealand.

Step by step approach:

Readers from the region where this option was launched are encouraged to share some details in the comment section below!
CPC is unknown as well as if they pay a cut to the group owners.? Might be the time to create some groups. Techcrunch coverage here.
1. Disclaimer: This hack might not be available in your region.

Insert Mid-roll ads on Facebook’s live videos

Cost: Unkown;
Marketing Tactics type: Medium to high volume;
Expected outcome: Increase in traffic and CPC might be higher than expected as it’s freshly out of HQ;
Difficulty level: High;

During June 2016 Facebook signed deals with 140 publishers (Youtube superstars and Vine creators) to blast out live content and month later they confirmed that Ads are coming up as well.

Step by step approach:

Social video generates 1200% more shares than text and images combined.
Ads will be 15 seconds or less and the full article on the rumors is available here.
- Disclaimer: This hack is available for a small group of publishers.

Activation Growth Hacks

Guide people through your funnel with these tools

Cost: Free trial is available for all of the tools but plans start @ 19$ per month;
Marketing Tactics type: Low to medium volume and high CR;
Expected outcome: Activate your website visitors and increase conversion rate;
Difficulty level: Medium;

It’s human to arrive at a conclusion that this tool/service/company is too complicated if it takes more than a minute to “get it”.

Now with customer engagement tools we can guide people through our piece of software and make sure they perform exactly the actions we want.

Step by step approach:

UserEngage – Offers probably the best customization and targeting out there. It’s a game changer. Plans start at 49$.
Customer.io – Have a great free plan and an impressive set of triggers. Paid plans start at 100$ per month.
LiveChat (19$/m.) and Intercom (53$/m.) are worth the mention as well.

Facilitate trust with these psychological triggers

Cost: 0$;
GH type: Low volume but high CR;
Expected outcome: Increase in conversion rate and grow your mailing list;
Difficulty level: Easy;

People are flawed beings and even the trust can be hacked.

Here’s how!

Step by step approach:

Brandon Redlinger wrote about 5 cognitive biases and heuristics (we mention 4 of them) that can build trust in your product:
- Ingroup Bias – we like to trust people that we perceive similar to ourselves.
- Mere-exposure effect – we develop trust for products that have been exposed to us for large amounts of time.
- The Authority Heuristic – simply put, we trust our heroes.
- Scarcity Heuristic – as items become more limited, we tend to want them more.
Here you can read all about it and how to use these biases in your advantage.

Use these scarcity hacks to rocket your sales

Cost: 0$;
Marketing Tactics type: High volume and high CR;
Expected outcome: Increase in conversion rate;
Difficulty level: Easy;

There is nothing worse when you are shopping for something and a few seconds later you realize that somebody else bought the item. ARGHHH!!!

Here’s how your e-commerce business can benefit from this hack.

Step by step approach:

One word – Amazon Prime. People pay 79$ per year to have access to stuff sooner than others. Create VIP offers for your best customers.
Limited time offers can boost sales by 226% – here‘s a code snippet anyone can implement.
- Next day shipping countdown and seasonal offers (last chance to order) to “hurry up” your site visitors.
Increase conversion with limited availability, low stock notices and exclusivity.
- Want to learn more about these activation hacks, read SumoMe post here.

Learn from these 250 companies how SaaS pricing should be done

Cost: 0$;
Marketing Tactics type: Medium volume;
Expected outcome: Increase in conversion rate;
Difficulty level: Easy;

Customers can be paralyzed by choice. Make it easy to choose by knowing what they need.

Step by step approach:

First of all, at this point of your growth hacking journey, you should have enough data to draw a detailed profile of your customers – do it.
- Understand what your customers are looking for.
Money back guarantee can increase your sales by ~30%. Don’t offer more than 4 packages. Test, test and test!
- Findings of 250 pricing packages – here.
- More growth hacks for your SaaS company? Click here.

Create a Layer Content

Cost: 0$;
GH type: Low volume but high CR;
Expected outcome: Increase in conversion rate and “selected goal”;
Difficulty level: Easy;

Imagine, you are reading this really exciting article or even better watching a video about a topic that you love. And all a sudden – it stops!

Step by step approach:

Create the content. Create something that would be interesting for your target audience to read, watch or listen to.
Then trigger the pop-up in the most exciting part.
- Sumome offers pop-ups, signup buttons, etc. for content.
- Wistia drops pop-ups, buttons and everything one might need on their Videos.
- Twitter has a similar feature for tweets, read more here.
This technique works best to grow your email list.

Offer A Free Course on how to use your tool

Cost: 0 EUR;
GH type: Low volume;
Expected outcome: Increase conversion rate and decrease churn;
Difficulty level: Easy;

You have a good service or product, right? It does this amazing thing, correct? But here is a problem – it takes a while for people to realize that.

Imagine, if you could go from “let’s see what this thing can do for me” to “s%^t, this is awesome” in a couple of minutes.

Step by step approach:

Start by letting people to schedule a quick Skype call with you and walk them through the tool.
- With Sumome you can create a pop-up invitation to have the Hangout session;
- With Youcanbook.me you can allow them to schedule a meeting with you.
Record the meetings and you will know what people struggle with.
You can learn areas of improvement and put together a free course from the video materials or video FAQ you got while talking with your customers.
Publish these videos on (as the courses on a specific subject) SnapGuide, Guides.co, Quora, Wiki-how, Lynda, Udemy, Skillshare and etc.

Re-targeting Growth Hacks

Re-targeting (or re-marketing) ads give marketeers and growth hackers the opportunity to re-activate people who in one way or another interacted with the service but left without the purchase or forgot about your app.

Create re-targeting ads with Adwords

Cost: 0.05$ to …. per view (Min daily budget >5 EUR);
GH type: Medium to high volume;
Expected outcome: Active the cold leads;
Difficulty level: Hard;

Fun fact: for most of us it takes 3 interactions with the brand to click on the ad.

So re-targeting ads are a must! Who to target can be extremely detailed.

Step by step approach:

Setting up the re-marketing ad for the first time will take time but it is made easy with this guide.
- Follow the steps and you will start activating the cold leads within a few hours.
There are re-targeting options such as people who searched for your product name, people had page clicks, sessions or longer av. session duration than XX (or people who converted) – If want to learn more this guide is a must read.

Create re-targeting ads on Youtube

Cost: 0.1$ to …. per view (Min daily budget >10 EUR);
GH type: Medium to high volume;
Expected outcome: Activate the cold leads;
Difficulty level: Medium;

Youtube ads actually are watched (till the end) by millions of people on a daily basis.

Moreover, you pay only when people watch the whole commercial, you can target the people who have already visited your website as well as by topics, interest, location, etc.

Step by step approach:

To learn why to advertise on Youtube, watch Jim Habig being eaten by a bunch of puppies (if you watch one puppy video a day, this is the one)
Set-up is quite painless – go to your youtube account, click on get started with AdWords and then the setup follows as if you would be creating the ad in AdWords.
- Information on how to set up the ads can be found here.

Create re-targeting ads on Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin

Cost: >5 per day;
GH type: Medium to high volume;
Expected outcome: Activate the cold leads;
Difficulty level: Medium;

This one is a bit different. If before people just had to visit your page for you to re-engage with them, then now you have to have them in the website’s database.

Step by step approach:

There are 3 SM platforms that support re-targeting ads:
- Facebook: A great guide by HubSpot peeps – here, and Noah Kagan‘s guide to getting 200% ROI from re-targeting ads – here.
- Twitter: the guide starts by the end, I guess Twitter doesn’t deserve its own guide.
- It can be done also on LinkedIn but there isn’t a detailed guide and I haven’t tested it myself. Linkedin tends to be pricier but with a much higher conversion rate. But if you want to learn more, read here.
If you want to combine Twitter and Facebook re-marketing campaigns PerfectAudience is the best solution, +you get 100$ credits to start.

Re-activate your Android App users with AdWords

Cost: 0.01$ per view and at least 5$ per day;
Marketing Tactics type: Mid to high volume;
Expected outcome: Re-activate the users that have forgotten they have your App ;
Difficulty level: Hard;

Let’s say I need a hotel in NY but my old brain forgot that I already have a Booking.com App so I “google it”. The 1st result that appears is directly from Booking.com APP, a click on it brings me straight to the App with all the hotels in NY.

Step by step approach:

The concept of making this happen is really cool to say the least. Watch this 2 minute video to get the details. If you are struggling with re-activation, this is a must hack.
Here you can read more on how to re-engage your Android App users.
- There is a lengthy how-to guide that can be implemented rather quickly.
- This hack can be used also to get App downloads – “Promote your Android App in Google search with AdWords”.

Conversion Rate Growth Hacks

Get rid of unexpected costs – main cart abandonment issue

Cost: 0$;
Marketing Tactics type: Low volume and high CR;
Expected outcome: Increase your conversion rate and decrease your bounce rate;
Difficulty level: Easy;

Stunning 56% of website visitors will bounce when you present them with unexpected costs. One of them will be 99% of the time.

Step by step approach:

When you set your price, people expect to pay exactly THAT MUCH.
- When you add $$$ and $$$$ for X, Y and Z exactly before the checkout, it makes no sense. Do you really think people won’t notice?
- Amazon & Airbnb also suffer from this issue!
Present people with product & service prices upfront and communicate that properly. According to Statista this is the No.1 reason why people bounce.
- More cart abandonment fixes for e-commerce – here.

Use these CopyWriting rules to clearly communicate your value proposition

Cost: 0$;
Marketing Tactics type: Low volume and medium CR;
Expected outcome: Activate your visitors, increase your conversion rate and communicate your value proposition clearly;
Difficulty level: Medium;

If you are struggling with customer activation and you have a large bounce rate 25% of the time your website is hard to understand.

Nobody will spend more than 30 seconds scrolling through your site or app if it’s unclear where to click or what your offer.

After reading these 3 articles you will become the master of copywriting.

Step by step approach:

Copywriting is all about A/B testing and one thing you should know is that you don’t know if your site’s copy is as good as it can be until you have the numbers to back it up.
These changes in copy can be borderline magic – a must check for inspiration!
Boost your copy with these power words and of course keep in mind the tips from GH “Improve your On-Page SEO”.
Here you will find 31 concrete tips on how to improve the structure of your content.
- & here 31 brilliant landing page examples of how to structure your content.

Improve your website’s speed

Cost: 0$;
Marketing Tactics type: Low volume and medium to high CR;
Expected outcome: Increase your conversion rate and decrease your bounce rate;
Difficulty level: Medium;

According to Statista 24% of the time, people leave because a website crashed and 21% of the time because a page is loading too slow.

A major issue that’s actually can be easy to fix.

Step by step approach:

For this you must have Google chrome. Then click CTRL+Shift+J, select “Network” tab from above and hit F5. In few sec. loading time will appear in the footer. Then if you click on the time tab in the header and sort it by duration you will see which files are loading the longest:
- Main reason – Images are slowing you down, guide how to compress your pics – here.
- Reason No.2 – Java Script, compression is a bit more complicated – guide here.
- Reason No.3 – Your Fonts, it’s a painless procedure if you are not afraid of CSS – more here.

Improve your UI/UX with these 125 genius hacks

Cost: 0$;
Marketing Tactics type: Low volume;
Expected outcome: Increase your conversion rate and decrease your bounce rate;
Difficulty level: Medium;

If you struggle to understand why Helvetica is so much better than Comic Sans welcome to the club. I would never figure it out by myself if I wouldn’t be told what’s good and bad for UI/UX.

If this is also your Achilles heal, spend a couple of minutes going through these UI/UX hacks.

Step by step approach:

Nickkolenda.com gathered UI/UX patterns for you to control users’ attention, guide users toward the end goal, maintain flow, maximize compatibility and help users to overcome errors.
- Judge for yourself if you agree with the article (as it’s not based on data) but it really is a must see to optimize your UI/UX – here.

Create a Free shipping

Cost: 0 EUR;
GH type: Low volume but high CR;
Expected outcome: Increase conversion in rate and order amount;
Difficulty level: Medium;

Amazon did it 10 years ago by segmenting customers – people who can wait and those who cannot. Result: order amount rocketed. A must for e-commerce stores.

Step by step approach:

This is all not that easy because you will have to increase the prices for your products. Find the equilibrium.
Set the minimum order amount for free shipping and you can be sure that the average order amount also will increase.
Test, measure and improve.

Become trust-worthy – this is brain f%&k

Cost: 0$;
Marketing Tactics type: Low volume and high CR;
Expected outcome: Increase your conversion rate and decrease your bounce rate;
Difficulty level: Medium;

88% of customers trust online reviews as much as peer recommendations. 63% of customers are more likely to purchase from your website if you have reviews. Every 10 reviews can add 0.5% to your conversion rate (more here).

Impressive, right?

Step by step approach:

0 to 10 reviews add 1% to your conversion rate. So, fake it till you make it. Amazon, Yelp and Facebook are a great source of detailed reviews.
- Don’t make it too positive and admit your flaws – here‘s why.
Explainer video embedded in your website lifts conversion by 69% but the same video in pop-up by 100%. More @ Neil Patel’s Slideshare here.
Your trust badges are turning people off. If they don’t know it, they will not trust it. If you want 1 badge, Norton Secure is your best bet, 35.6% trust it (more here).
- Money back guarantee badge can increase revenue by 32.57%.

Email Marketing Growth Hacks

Money has an equation depending on how you have structured your business. 1000 people who visit your website – 100 of them will be interested and 1 will buy what you are selling.
Every 1 000 emails are equal to 1 sale (more or less). So, large mailing list is a must. And so is a good email marketing tool, like HubSpot, so you can easily personalize your emails at scale.

Create a better Email Marketing Campaigns

Cost: 0$;
Marketing Tactics type: Small volume;
Expected outcome: Increase in conversion rate;
Difficulty level: Medium;

With 4 billion accounts worldwide and 25% being business related, emails are one of the most powerful platforms out there.

Email marketing nowadays, with so many accounts, is an art where you must stand out. Here’s how to improve your open rate and CTR.

Step by step approach:

Personalization with a name isn’t anything new, don’t overuse it. Personalize using other details people have shared with you – company name, birthday, try using FW: or RE:.
First time opens 65% of the time are via mobile phone – so mobile first is a must.
Include funny cat GIF – just because.
- 500.co with 66% Open Rate is the Lebron James of email marketing – their post on how to structure emails is here but 7 secret tips to make emails better are here.
- Need inspiration? Here are 500+ templates from the best in the field.
- Diversify the types of emails you send – here are 40 tips to do that.
- Or ask these guys to help.

Use pop-ups to get emails – there are 3 options

Cost: 0$;
Marketing Tactics type: High volume;
Expected outcome: Increase in amount of emails;
Difficulty level: Easy;

Pop-ups have revolutionized the way how we pile up the emails and it still works (already getting annoying but works).

Step by step approach:

Show pop-up a couple of seconds after you enter the page: It’s a classic that does the job.
Pop-up on exit: Getting a bit more interesting, right? As soon as the person moves the cursor to exit, the pop-up appears. Combine with scarcity hack and watch them subscribe.
Show pop-up mat for one of your “Ultimate guides”: When you have spent 10 seconds reading “Worlds Largest marketing technique List” it’s clear to me that you might need help with execution – pop up appears.
“Need help?” pop-up: If the customer is madly scrolling up and down on your page, he/she might need a help.
- To make 1, 2, 3 or 4 a reality – click on the numbers. No coding required.

Give perks in exchange for an email

Cost: Few cents per email;
Marketing Tactics type: High volume and high CR;
Expected outcome: Increase in amount of emails;
Difficulty level: Medium;

Emails are a powerful currency, you might as well offer cool stuff and great user experience in exchange for them. To get ideas, see these newsletter examples.

Step by step approach:

Create fun campaign in exchange for an email:
- Competition: Enroll with an email.
- Freebie: Get some 1 cent prize from Alibaba that your customers would love & trade for an email.
- Discounts: Discount for an email (add a timer or show it’s limited).
- Pre-sell: Move quick, set up a landing page, invite people, email for a % discount on the product.
- Join the club: Email for an “exclusive” VIP club invitation (your mailing list). Name few big names who are also there.
- Create a 30 day challenge: Ask for an email for “motivational” purposes.
For more, Sarah Peterson & Sean Bestor created 85 badass ways to build your email list – it is really good.

Build your mailing list with Facebook and Twitter

Cost: 0$ with Facebook, 1-5$ per day with Twitter;
Marketing Tactics type: Low to Medium volume;
Expected outcome: Increase in amount of emails;
Difficulty level: Easy;

Would be cool if people could join your mailing list from your Facebook page or a Tweet. Yeah, it would, and it actually takes 10 minutes to set it up.

Step by step approach:

Facebook: QuickSprout University’s Brian Dean made a few minute video to show exactly how it’s done – watch here.
Twitter: Mailchimp has created a thorough guide on how to gather emails with Tweets (or Cards) and it’s beautiful, see here.

Retention Growth Hacks

Acquisition and Activation is a walk in the park. If your retention sucks – you are as good as dead.

Improve retention – if you do THIS right, you won’t need the rest

Cost: 0$;
Marketing Tactics type: Medium to high volume and high CR;
Expected outcome: Increase in retention;
Difficulty level: Hard;

User signs-up and what then? Answer these question to know:

Week 1 – Can you get your users to use your product more than once?
Mid-term – Is there a usage pattern (why/when they use it)?
Long-term – How can you make your product indispensable?

Step by step approach:

Figure out the answer to those 3 questions – it will take time and a lot of tests.
- Tweak features, create retention hooks, work on product quality.
- Did it resurrect users?
- To see every step Hubspot’s Sidekick took to straighten their retention line – see this Slideshare.
You must do behavioral cohort analysis and compare it with your retention analysis.
- How your retention graph compares with the retention graph for people who performed a certain action. Find out which cohort has the highest retention and know which action they took. Make it part of your onboarding.
- Here you will find everything you will ever need to know on how to analyze your retention.

Perfect your customer life cycle

Cost: 0$;
Marketing Tactics type: Medium volume;
Expected outcome: Increase in conversion rate and retention;
Difficulty level: Hard;

Do you take care of your customer experience from when he or she see your add till 30/60/100 days after the purchase?

Every customer’s touch-point must be thought through and every interaction should put a smile on their face (and not annoy them).

Step by step approach:

Talk with your customers to understand: how did they found you, why did they click this button instead of that, what made them come back, etc.
- Map each interaction with your product or service (touch-point).
- Then add the emotions customers felt next to each step they took.
Now discuss each of the touch-points. Is there anything users are missing?
Discuss how you could improve user experience from one step to another.
- Full post on experience mapping here.
- Check the marketing technique “Guide people through your funnel with these tools” for tools to guide your customer from one touch-point to another.
- Here you can find 5 most successful emails that brought the customers back from the dead.

Improve the way you do the free trial – 30 days don’t convert

Cost: 0$;
Marketing Tactics type: Medium volume and high CR;
Expected outcome: Increase in paid subscriptions and higher conversion rate;
Difficulty level: Medium;

Team @ ProdPad made a clever way to activate their subscribers and in the mean time teach them how to use their tool.

This hack guarantees the increase of paid subscriptions.

Step by step approach:

Nobody needs 30 days to understand that they don’t need your tool.
- Start by breaking down your 30 day trial into days. What you expect people to do in these 30 days so they would stick around and pay?
Some people learn by doing, others by watching. On-board with a video, walk them through with a step by step guide.
Give your customers 7 days of free trial with a chance to earn more free days if they follow the on-boarding guide and reach the “AHA” moment.
- More details on this brilliant approach here.

Make sure user onboarding is purposeful

Cost: 0$;
Marketing Tactics type: Medium volume;
Expected outcome: Increase in conversion rate and retention;
Difficulty level: Easy;

AppCues team categorizes 327 user onboarding templates into 9 UI patterns. After viewing these tips it’s guaranteed you will find a way to improve your company’s onboarding.

Step by step approach:

AppCues guys looked into Welcome messages, Product tours, Progress bars, Simplifying account creation and etc.
- Full-post is a must read & it’s here.
If your onboarding needs improvement and your coding skills are “not there yet” – make sure to check out this list of 42 onboarding tools that will help you out.

Onboard users via Hangouts with a P2P walkthrough

Cost: 0$;
Marketing Tactics type: Small volume and high CR;
Expected outcome: Increase in conversion rate and retention;
Difficulty level: Easy;

Who better to explain how to use the product or service if not the founder of the company?

It’s a feedback session where you have the chance to teach all the tips & tricks.

Step by step approach:

Signup to one of the tools from YouCanBook.me, NeedToMeet or Calendly.
Create a quick pop-up that is triggered after sign-up with an invitation to book a meeting with you.
On-board, educate and gather user feedback. Moreover, you can record your meetings and turn them into a video FAQ.

Delight your customers – put a smile on their faces

Cost: Few cents per user;
Marketing Tactics type: Medium volume;
Expected outcome: Increase in brand awareness and create die-hard fans;
Difficulty level: Medium;

Did you know that 80% of your revenues come from 20% of your customers? They are your “a must keep at all costs” segment – so treat them like that.

Step by step approach:

Offer seamless customer support and interact with them – see “Listen to your customers no matter where they are talking about you”.
- Aim for first contact resolution.
Surprise your top 20% with written thank you cards, offer a free upgrade, call them for their birthdays to sing a happy birthday, send a gift, discounts, create a Slack group for all your VIP.
- Delight even your ex-top-20% and facilitate that the most popular users promote the service.
Sujan Patel created a great guide on delighting customers, check out here.
- It’s 11 step approach that is summarized at the bottom of the post.

Get your App Indexed to reactivate your users

Cost: 0 EUR;
GH type: Low to Medium volume but high CR;
Expected outcome: Re-engage with your App users;
Difficulty level: Hard;

Let’s say you created a Recipe App, someone downloaded it but is still running a search on Google about “how to cook lasagna”. When your App is indexed, the Lasagna recipe will show up as the No.1 search result and will bring the person directly to the right window in your App.

Here’s how to set it up.

Step by step approach:

Make sure to watch this video about App indexing benefits.
If you have ever indexed your web page, then this is a lot more difficult. But as you can probably imagine a lot more beneficial.
- Free up your week and get down to App indexing business. Here‘s the guide for both iOS and Android (dev. background is required).

Send written thank you cards – outsource for scalability

Cost: Low (if outsourced) to medium (if done in-house);
GH type: Medium to high volume, medium cost and high CR;
Expected outcome: Increase in retention rate and rocket the word of mouth;
Difficulty level: Hard;

Hear me out! I have talked with a couple of people who have done this and it WORKS 99% of the time. People love this (period).

Step by step approach:

Depending on the stage of your company, it might be worth outsourcing this.
- South East Asian agencies are a cheap option (there is 1% chance that it will go wrong);
- These startups have automated this technique and they are great.
If the scale allows you to do it yourself, go for it. It might require a bit of hustling to find all the addresses but there is nothing you can find on Google or Yellow Pages.

Use notifications that are triggered by people’s behavior

Cost: Medium to high;
GH type: High volume;
Expected outcome: Increase engagement and retention;
Difficulty level: Hard;

Running App that knows when you should buy new shoes. Games that notify you about the release of a comic book or TV-show. Options are unlimited!

Step by step approach:

Figure out what’s the one thing you can track while people are using your tool.
- Steps, last order date, last log in date, clicks?
Send clever personalized notifications depending on their behavior.
- “It has been 20 days since you ordered snacks for your dog. Your neighbor did it yesterday and we think that your dog is planning to move.” – make it fun.

Offer a “step by step ” video guides of something you are good at

Cost: 0$;
GH type: Low to medium volume;
Expected outcome: Increase engagement, retention and your credibility;
Difficulty level: Hard;

Digital publishing is one of the most profitable industries out there with low overhead you can make this hack into a decent revenue stream.

Offer your customers easy to understand guides to the problems they are struggling with. This works great with fitness, health, recipes, etc.

Step by step approach:

Figure out how to do what you do repeatable and teach your customers (for inspiration see GH – “Offer A Free Course on how to use your tool”.
- Be the authority people are looking for.
- See example here: Moz guys make teach SEO every Friday.
Then publish these video guides as the courses on the specific subject on SnapGuide, Guides.co, Quora, Wiki-how, Wikipedia, Lynda, Skillshare and etc.
- If you receive a lot of positive feedback you can start charging money.

Automate inquiry responses with Chatbots

Cost: 0$;
GH type: Low volume;
Expected outcome: Increase in engagement and decrease in churn, 50-70% of customer inquiries can be handled with Chatbots already today;
Difficulty level: Medium;

Customers want their inquiries to be answered within 1-3 minutes and when their issue is serious enough you can be sure that they will leave if you cannot live up to their expectations.

Now with the rise of chat-bots inquiries can be answered instantly and creating your own chatbot is free.

Step by step approach:

There are a couple of options how to approach this issue. Widely used solution is Intercom. But my favorite (aka free and customer friendly) option is Chatfuel.
You signup (it’s free), import your FAQ (more question synonyms the better) and add your responses. No coding required. Whenever your customer asks questions someone has else already asked, the response appears automatically.
- Facebook is turning their chat into advertising channel (currently beta) so make sure to redirect as many inquiries as possible to their ticketing system.

Certify your users

Cost: 0$;
GH type: Low volume;
Expected outcome: Increase engagement and K-factor (virality).
Difficulty level: Medium;

Imagine if people would put a badge of “Certified (your product) specialist” on Linkedin profile, in email signature and on business cards. Pretty cool, ha?

Step by step approach:

If your product is mainstream you can follow Hootsuite approach and certify users on the skills they desire to have.
If your product is complex and widely used you can follow Salesforce approach and certify users as “advanced” users of your software.

Churn Growth Hacks

Reduce your Churn with predictive analytics – this is magic

Cost: 0$;
Marketing Tactics type: Medium volume and high CR;
Expected outcome: Increase in paid subscriptions and higher conversion rate;
Difficulty level: Hard;

If you can predict the reasons behind your churn rate, you can make sure people stick around. Makes sense? With this marketing Marketing Tactics Codeship managed to retain 72% of their at-risk users.

Step by step approach:

Identify predictable reasons why customers cancel and add them to this excel sheet.
- Translate these predictors in the data rules. Ex.: Churn Predictor – Didn’t understand the tool; Data rule – Last log in > 30 days ago.
Count how many times reasons why customers cancel occurred throughout the time.
- Count till you reach large enough population of customers who canceled – that is 100, and add them to the excel sheet.
- Identify the biggest predictors of churn.
Prevent these predictors from happening.
- When a customer hasn’t logged in for 30 days after sign-up, send an email with examples showing how the tool can be used.
- Automate with the tools from the marketing technique called – “Guide people through your funnel with these tools”.
- To bring your customer back from the dead you must see these 101 email writing tips.

Learn from the customers who are canceling (and why)

Cost: 0$;
GH type: Low volume and high CR;
Expected outcome: Decrease in churn and increase in customer feedbacks;
Difficulty level: Medium;

What about your cancellation experience? Do you know why customers cancel? Does the experience prevent people from canceling? If it’s a “No” to 2/3 of the questions, here’s how to improve.

Step by step approach:

First of all follow you must figure out the WHY behind the cancellations.
When they click on “I want to cancel” – give them options:
- I run out of the free trial without testing the tool, Too expensive paid plans, Didn’t fully understand the product – those are nearly 60% of the cases that improved cancellation experience can prevent.
- Moreover, there are apps that can do this for you, no coding required – Typeform, Qualaroo and Polldaddy.
If customers have questions offer them to have a chat with you or book a meeting with you.
- A No is a No, if the Project ended, let them go.
- An inspiration for better cancellation experience from ProfitWell – here.

Customer Communication Growth Hacks

Improve your “Welcome email” – make people feel special

Cost: 0$;
Marketing Tactics type: Medium volume;
Expected outcome: Increase in retention and brand awareness;
Difficulty level: Easy;

Email from a founder, I remember when that was something new..

These days you will have to do way more to surprise your subscribers and make them stick around. Few ideas down below.

Step by step approach:

First of all, that’s the opportunity to say hello and start the conversation.
- Let them know what features the company is working on, ask if that would be helpful, invite to share feedback and just chat.
- The trick is to imagine that you are starting a conversation with a person face to face.
Give them your WhatsApp, Snapchat QR, invite to your VIP Slack group – get personal and make them feel special.

Celebrate the feature releases like it’s 1999

Cost: 0$;
Marketing Tactics type: Medium volume;
Expected outcome: Increase in retention and brand awareness;
Difficulty level: Easy;

Feature release can be one of the most powerful ways to make your brand shine and make your users feel special.

Step by step approach:

Intercom, the tool we suggested in “Guide people through your funnel with these tools” Marketing Tactics example, is one of the best tools in the market to communicate new feature releases.
- As soon as the customer who has been away for awhile logs in, the message will pop-up telling “what’s new”.
If you have a “feature request” button or you have dummy features on the page for testing purposes, you can add rules that trigger messages if people have requested a new feature.
- Imagine how special you would feel if the feature you requested was just released!
- Groove has a great “feature to market” strategy – read here.

Find real occasions to contact your customers

Cost: 0$;
Marketing Tactics type: Large volume and high CR;
Expected outcome: Increase in retention, engagement and brand awareness;
Difficulty level: Easy;

There are 100 reasons to email your customers who are dripping away and not a single one of them is the reason how many days they haven’t intersected with your software.

Step by step approach:

Card expiration is a reason to send a reminder and let customers know what they will be missing out. Birthdays are a reason to send Thank You cards.
- Holidays: Christmas, Eastern, etc. Did you know that every day is a holiday?
- Cross-sell and up-sell increases your conversion rate by 3-5%.
Attentive.us is a cool tool that delivers news of every customer straight to your Slack or email. Contact your customers when there is a reason to do so.

Create “Premium accounts only” Slack group

Cost: 0$;
GH type: Low volume & low cost;
Expected outcome: Increase in retention and make people feel special;
Difficulty level: Easy;

Make your top 20% feel special and give them the sense of belonging because by the end of the day they are responsible for 80% of your revenue.

Step by step approach:

Create a “special” Slack team for the finest of your users.
Share new product updates, give them 24/7 support and drop some cool news they might enjoy.
- Logistics of this strategy are discussed in this post by Buffer’s Aja Frost.

Listen to your customers no matter where they talk about you

Cost: Ideally 95$ per month but there are cheaper options;
GH type: Low volume;
Expected outcome: Increase in retention rate and always respond to your customer inquiries;
Difficulty level: Easy;

Imagine if you would have ears listening on every social media out there. Whenever your customers want to interact, you are there. Sounds like a must do, right?

Here’s how!

Step by step approach:

Plerdy is a conversion rate optimization platform for SEO professionals, marketers, UX experts and website owners. With Plerdy, it’s easy to track, analyze and convert visitors into customers.
Cheaper alternatives – Hashtracking (50 EUR per month) and Tagboard (Free).

Engage with your customers on Twitter

Cost: 0$;
GH type: Low volume;
Expected outcome: Increase engagement and sell to people who are looking for your service or product.
Difficulty level: Medium (hard to scale);

Twitter might be struggling with its stock prices but as a digital marketing tool, it’s doing an amazing job. Moreover getting in touch with your customers couldn’t be easier.

Step by step approach:

Head over to search.twitter.com:
- Find people who are looking for your product or service. If you have a recipe App, find people who are struggling with cooking pizza, are hungry or “high”.
- Filter by city, add/exclude specific words, etc.
Engage (Reply).
Here‘s the worlds largest Twitter Advanced Search Guide. It’s pretty good.

Referral Growth Hacks

This is the red zone. Don’t try these marketing growth strategies if your product or service still “sucks”. It’s enough that you and some of your customers know that.

Make your customers refer their friends – we have the code to set it up

Cost: 0$;
Marketing Tactics type: High volume and high CR;
Expected outcome: Increase in referral and coefficient K;
Difficulty level: Hard;

Remember the amazing launch/referral campaign of Harry’s (think Dollar Shave Club)?

They got 100 000 pre-signup emails. Moreover now this code is an opensource. All you can see in the picture is up for grabs.

Step by step approach:

Tim Ferriss, aka the four hour work week guy, covers in depth what Harry’s code can help you to accomplish – here.
And here is the code to make your own referral program – with a basic CSS & HTML knowledge you can create referral the program that already was a success.
- Can you repeat the success?
- Build reward program with attractive prizes.
- Be ready for increase in fraud – people will try to hack the system.

Branding is a marketing technique – there is a recipe

Cost: $$$;
Marketing Tactics type: High volume;
Expected outcome: Increase in brand awareness and word of mouth;
Difficulty level: Hard;

Mat Braddy the ex-CMO of Just Eat wrote a great piece on storytelling. Read to understand how branding can become a part of growth science.

Step by step approach:

The goal is to become the leading brand in your industry: drink – Coke, smartphone – Apple, etc. But how?
- Braddy’s approach and how he made it happen @ Just Eat – read here.
- Note: A guide is more “the way how to think about branding” than detailed step by step approach. Nevertheless, it’s a good start.

Unlock the organic growth by understanding your users

Cost: 0$;
Marketing Tactics type: High volume;
Expected outcome: Increase in customer satisfaction and improved value proposition;
Difficulty level: Hard;

Sean Ellis, the growth guru of Dropbox and CEO of GrowthHackers shares a great way to understand why people use your product as well as how to use this to amplify the organic growth.

Step by step approach:

He suggests that you should ask a series of questions to your “must have” users.
- What is the primary benefit? What was the original intention of using the tool/service? Would you recommend it? How did you describe it?
Then improve the content on the website and communicate the benefits clearly.
Last but not least, offer the main benefit free as part of your referral program.
- The full post can be found here.

Use multiple channels to get referrals (plugin is included)

Cost: 0$;
Marketing Tactics type: High volume and high CR;
Expected outcome: Increase in customer satisfaction and referrals;
Difficulty level: Hard;

Depending on your target customers, inviting friends via email might not work. What if your customers prefer Phone book, Twitter, Facebook or Snapchat instead?

Diversify!

Step-by-step approach:

Create bulk invitations across multiple channels (and test if it works) – email, phone contacts, facebook, etc.
- They only need to uncheck the ones they don’t want to invite.
- Prepare the message they will send to their contacts.
- Allow customers click only one button to invite all their contacts.
You guessed it, I have a tool for you that can do this – no coding required. It’s YesGraph.
- They also prepared this Slideshare with 27 referral tips & tricks to better utilize their tool. Full blog post – here.
Offer your main benefit your users seek free of charge or discounted in exchange for their friends

Create viral content – yes, we have THE “how-to” guide

Cost: 0$;
Marketing Tactics type: Low to High volume;
Expected outcome: Increase in traffic ,engagement and shares;
Difficulty level: Hard;

The reason behind WHY content goes viral consists of so many variables that we tend to think it’s all up to luck. Very few of us start creating content with virality as the main goal.

Here we broke it down into a road-map.

Step by step approach:

Idea: Brand related – which topics are popular, have received a lot of coverage, covered but not perfect (or old), good topics but little coverage.
- Must be exclusive and newsworthy as well as emotionally appealing;
- Inspire from other epic success stories. How to do the topic research – here.
- Can your content make people look interesting or funny if they share it?
Content creation: Go through company data, desk and field research, studies and publications.
- Readability and design plays a large role in the creation.
Promotion: Some say that’s 80% of the work. Grow the URLs (+emails) that would be interested to promote your piece while you are writing – say thank you to the article authors.
- View marketing growth strategies in “Content promotion hacks” section for content promotions.
- Credit goes to Kelsey Libert from Frac.tl, full post here – a must see.

Run a digital treasure hunt & fun contests

Cost: 0$;
Marketing Tactics type: Low to High volume and high CR;
Expected outcome: Increase in traffic, engagement and shares;
Difficulty level: Medium;

Gleam.io is an App that helps to run the coolest competitions.

Peugeot sent their Pinterest visitors to search for missing puzzle pieces all around the web. Result 50 000 interactions.

Step-by-step approach:

You can make your customers do everything from liking, following, pinning your website or posts to searching the web for missing items.
- Here’s how!
Stop “Like, share and comment” contests. Instead award the last who shared or liked your page, guessing games, award the users that engage the most with your brand, #hashtag photo contest, ask to share creative ways how people use your product – get out of the box.
- Stream your contests on Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, Youtube & Twitch.tv (for gamers) – more the merrier.

Make the SM superstars feel special – know your customers

Cost: 0$;
Marketing Tactics type: Small volume;
Expected outcome: Increase in referrals and social proof;
Difficulty level: Easy;

Do you know your social media superstars?

With a single comment they can make or break your brand. Do you want to risk it?

Step by step approach:

First of all figure out who are your customers that carry the most influential power on the WWW.
- Make them feel special, offer freebies, if resources allow create KAM program for them, your VIP Slack group is a good idea for their support.
App called IFTTT can help you to set the “if” rules. “IF” people subscribe or follow you, use specific hashtag, tag you, THEN you comment, follow back or set a reminder to interact with these people later.
Interact with new subscribers on their most popular SM channel, comment, like share or tag them in a post. Just say thank you for choosing your service.
- Invite them to participate in expert roundup or share the way how your tool has helped in exchange for free subscription.

Pay influencers to refer your service to their followers

Cost: 5-20$;
Marketing Tactics type: High volume;
Expected outcome: Increase in referrals and social proof;
Difficulty level: Easy;

Don’t aim too high but there for sure are influencers that will pretend that they LOVE your product or service.

Step by step approach:

You can either scroll through SM and get your hands dirty, or use these wonderful tools built for this purpose:
- Fiverr, Socialblade, Boomopolis, Triberr and Ninjaoutreach (pricey but my favorite).

Make every page, every achievement shareable

Cost: 0$;
Marketing Tactics type: High volume;
Expected outcome: Increase in referrals and social proof;
Difficulty level: Medium;

There are so many features that can be made share-able and trust me – if peeps share the sandwich pics, give customers something to be proud of and they will tell their friends.

Here are some ideas where you can attach the share button.

Step by step approach:

Make the pieces of your page share-able:
- The Thank You page, product basket, how much money spent, content and small quotes, attachments and images.
If you implemented the gamification hack “Gamify user interactions and award the leaders”, here are some shareable achievement ideas:
- Each purchase is a level-up, create shareable leader-board, time spent on the page, amount of reviews/ comments created, pages visited, videos watched, courses attended, shares made – give the achievements clever and funny names.
- Make users do specific tasks that have the highest corralation to higher retention rate. See GH – “Improve retention”.

Charge with Tweets – here’s why

Cost: 0$;
Marketing Tactics type: Low to medium volume;
Expected outcome: Increase in activation and engagement;
Difficulty level: Medium;

Average Twitter user has 208 followers, for active users that number is 3-5 times bigger. How much do you pay to get in front of that many users at the moment? Does it make sense to charge with Tweets instead of cash?

If yes, here’s how!

Step by step approach:

Click to tweet and Pay with a tweet are the tools to get your tool in front of their followers.
It might be a good idea to blast this hack together with one of the acquisition marketing growth strategies to amplify the results. Works great in emails.

Revenue Growth Hacks

As Dave McClure said: “I have no f*&king idea, figure out how to make money with your product!”

At this point of your growth hacking path you should know which acquisition channels are the best in terms of volume and conversion. You have figured out how to activate and retain your customers as well as get their friends to join.

If that’s the case, the key to get more revenue is to pour more money in acquisition strategies that convert the best.

The main issue with Revenue growth is either you don’t have more money to pour in the acquisition or your revenue is starting to plateauno matter what you do.

Here are some marketing growth strategies to solve that.

Raise an investment from Angels

Cost: 0$;
Marketing Tactics type: High volume & low conversion;
Expected outcome: Increase in external fund and decrease in founder equity;
Difficulty level: Extremely hard;

There isn’t a magic recipe to make this happen, it’s incredibly tough. Remember, it will take 8-12 hours a day.

I am a strong believer that you have to figure out which are your highest converting acquisition channels before raising the money. The further you can get the easier it will get. For hardware companies it is a bit different but there are crowdfunding sites to make it easy for you.

You might be saying – “I need money to start”. Well, in this caseyou are structuring your Co. the wrong way. You will not have the time to focus on anything else besides raising an investment – so don’t do it before you make money. I thought I have 25 hours a day and I can do it all but boy was I wrong. There, of course, are exceptions and if you can prove me wrong – I salute you.

Step by step approach:

Create a flawless slide deck. The best slide deck structure is here and 30 best slide decks – here.
Find the investors relevant for your industry and reach out. One by one. There is no better place to find investors than Angel.co.
Try to schedule a call and keep them in the loop. Deliver monthly updates of your KPIs. Investors rarely say “No” and raising a money of average takes 6-9 months.
Have the pitch deckready (not the same as a slide deck). Best guide on what matters in the pitch deck @ TechCrunch here.
- Good luck and remember – you lose only when you give up.

Validate your hardware idea with Crowdfunding

Cost: $$ + success fee;
Marketing Tactics type: High volume, high cost and high conversion;
Expected outcome: Increase in trustworthiness, grow your fan-base and rise money;
Difficulty level: Hard;

To validate the prototype for software companies we have paid ads but for hardware – it’s crowdfunding.

There have been so many campaigns to learn from that you can create the perfect campaign yourself. This hack is also a great way how to create die-hard fans for your product.

Step by step approach:

ConversionXL folks gathered 19 growth hacking strategies to create successful crowdfunding campaign.
A great post from SumoMe shows how two entrepreneurs raised 15 000$ in 28 hours (after 3 months of hard work).
If too busy to spend time on campaign – outsource! Agency 2.0 is your little helper with an impressive track record.

Re-invest in R&D – constantly work on upgrades

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Cost: $$$;
Marketing Tactics type: High volume & ~high conversion;
Expected outcome: Increase in competitiveness;
Difficulty level: Hard;

If your revenue is starting to plateau I am 99% sure your profits did not go to R&D.

To make your side-project into a business – you have to reinvest money back into the business or sales will decline.

There are two types of R&D – internal and external.

Step by step approach:

Internal: work on your product or service extensions inside the company. Talk with your customers and analyze your competitors, see what’s out there and how you can improve.
- Here is a great guide on how to structure your R&D budget and targets.
External: acquire product or service extensions, sometimes it is cheaper and less time consuming to acquire a company that has the features you are lacking.
- That makes sense when together your market share is twice as big.
- Here’s a good example of how a company went from 150k to 2m. users in 5 months, investing their growth money in acquiring a competitor.
By now you should have considerable base of customers:
- Internal R&D: It’s a good opportunity to cross-sell or up-sell.
- External R&D: It’s a good opportunity to cross-sell to old and new users (up-selling might backfire).

Cross-sell your digital art & creatives

Cost: 0$;
GH type: Low volume;
Expected outcome: Additional revenue stream;
Difficulty level: Medium;

Trying to figure out if your customers would be willing to pay for your music, book or whatever digital copy of what you have produced. Wonder no more – set up a store and let the numbers do the talking.

Step by step approach:

Set up an account @ Gumroad. It’s a work of minute (with the right plugins Shopify and Woocommerce can do the same).
Upload your digital art or other creatives and start selling.
- To generate the traffic to your new store – check the acquisition hacks.
- Gumroad will do the rest.

Create partnerships as a product extension

Cost: 0$;
Marketing Tactics type: High volume;
Expected outcome: Increase in brand awareness and competiveness
Difficulty level: Medium;

Instead of building a feature or acquiring a company who has built this feature – you can simply make a partnership with the company that can offer an extension to your service.

This is not a long-term solution but can be a great hack while you are still bootstrapping.

Step by step approach:

AppSumo, in it’s early days, offered a solution for the early stage entrepreneurs “all-in-one” in an impressive package – see example here.
- This can give you great competitive advantage in the early days.
View marketing technique “Integrate with other tools that can serve as an extension to your service” for a different perspective on this strategy.

Measure, analyze, improve, then automate

Cost: 0$;
Marketing Tactics type: High volume & high conversion;
Expected outcome: Constant growth of your KPIs and the service itself;
Difficulty level: Hard;

Data talks with you and you need to listen. You will be surprised what you can find out from staring at the numbers (objectively) for countless hours.

Step by step approach:

To analyse your acquisition data: Google analytics for dummies.
To analyse your activation data: How to analyse customer behavior with Kissmetrics (large blog post) and Mixpanel (video guides).
And to analyse your retention, view the following Marketing Growth Strategies:
- “Improve retention”.
- “Reduce your Churn with predictive analytics”.
Analyse the progress of your referral hacks:
- See how the social media shares are converting with referral paths.
- A great (and cheap) tool for tracking SM shares and also backlinks is Linkody (an unbiased suggestion).

Learn how to improve – A/B testing 101

Cost: 0$;
Marketing Tactics type: Must be a high volume or the data will not be trustworthy;
Expected outcome: To validate your hypothesis.
Difficulty level: Medium;

If you are searching for a magic pill, this marketing technique won’t be the one.

Now it’s time to optimize your revenue by A/B testing – this technique makes science out of it.

Don’t A/B test if your sample size is under 100k (even then think twice). & if you still want to learn but don’t have the data?
- Here‘s the analysis of 1M$ worth of display ads and A/B testing takeaways.
- Here‘s the analysis of what works with on-page design.
Peep‘s from ConversionXL put together A/B testing guide that covers it all – a must read!
Once you decide to A/B test, these are the tools that will get the job done – Optimizely and vwo.

Now it’s your turn..

Thank you for sticking around till the end.

Piling up all these marketing growth strategies was an incredibly rewarding experience. I really hope this marketing tactics list will help improve your business.

Let’s share the wisdom:

Which is the most innovative marketing strategies you have heard of recently?
Which marketing tactic is your rising star?

I am looking forward to your comments!

& remember – sharing is caring.

30 thoughts on “127 Marketing Tactics – Most Epic Growth Hacking List and Free eBook”

Puranjay says:

February 13, 2017 at 15:26

Hey Helvijs,

I normally don’t do this, but the depth of your post kinda made me comment.

See, I recently put together a very similar page on growth hacking tactics which I thought was THE definitive list of growth hacks

Then I spotted this. I didn’t think anyone would outdo my page, but you kinda did 🙂

Love this – amazing work!

P.S.: Here’s the page in question: http://growthsimple.com/resources/growth-hacks/
1. Helvijs Smoteks says:
  
  February 16, 2017 at 17:38
  
  Haha thanks Puranjay. We worked really hard on this post. I hope it comes in handy.
  
  You have some good stuff in your post – great job.
Gaurav Heera says:

February 16, 2017 at 11:14

Hello Helvijs,
Awesome tutorial for students and new blogger about SEO. Great information shared to follow a qualititive SEO process, these 128 high converting growth hacks are really awesome. Your article is very informative and descriptive. You have described very simple and effective too.
Thanks for sharing this precious information. Keep posting such kind of article.
1. Helvijs Smoteks says:
  
  February 16, 2017 at 17:41
  
  Thanks Gaurav.
  
  I hope the post comes in handy.
  
  What’s your Top 3 marketing growth strategies?
George Hopkin says:

March 18, 2017 at 11:27

One more to check out: jreqs.com – #jreqs collates the dozens of of media and PR requests for input and assistance posted to Twitter around the clock.
1. Helvijs Smoteks says:
  
  May 16, 2017 at 18:09
  
  Not sure, George Hopkin, how your site is related to Growth Hacking – mind elaborating?
ABHIJEET ANAND says:

March 30, 2017 at 09:48

Hello Helvijs,

Well I really liked your hacks. Your content is very useful and I would love to try these out.

Well I have a page on facebook up and running.

We pick some growth hacks strategies on acquisition every thursday, some retention hacks every tuesday, some pitching hacks every saturday.

https://www.facebook.com/indiagoesglobal/
Pls do visit and provide your valuable feedback. I will definitely want to connect with you on this and want to know more.

Keep your awesome work up and running
thanks,
Abhijeet
1. Helvijs Smoteks says:
  
  May 16, 2017 at 18:12
  
  Hi Abhijeet,
  
  That’s a really cool concept – keep up the good work 😉
  
  Check out also our SlideShare, I bet it would be really helpful to have a quick summary of each growth hack.
  
  If you need any help with it – you know where to find me 😉
Peterson Teixeira says:

May 29, 2017 at 21:39

How are you Helvijs?

Man, nice work. Seriously. You introduced me to some new, powerful links (tools and articles). Thank you. I improved my Resource Page.

PS: I even put this article of yours on my resource page (petersonteixeira.com/resource-page) on the section “External Articles” which I recommend everyone in business and marketing to read.

All the best,
Peterson Teixeira
1. Helvis Smoteks says:
  
  June 8, 2017 at 15:21
  
  Thanks mate, Doing well.
  
  Glad you liked the list – we are putting together an ebook with few additional growth hacks – if you liked these, you will love those.
  
  Will keep you posted 😉
Dara Lin says:

August 31, 2017 at 06:04

Growth hacking is the process of experimenting marketing channels to identify the most effective ways to grow business. This growth hack list is a powerful lists, and I love to try some of the tools mentioned. Thanks for this Helvijs. Well done. .
1. Helvis Smoteks says:
  
  August 31, 2017 at 09:31
  
  Great to hear you like the list, Dara.
  
  Totally agree with you – Growth Hacking is all about figuring out what is this growth driver for your company. I hope these Marketing Tactics helps CallboxInc to rocket the growth.
Vishant says:

November 28, 2017 at 13:09

Nice !
Growth also Depends on lead Generation so focus on lead generation is must and on lead generation tool. I have used few similar lead generation tool like AeroLeads, RainClutch, and Rapportive these helped me a lot in my business development campaign.
Tiffany says:

January 15, 2018 at 03:39

These are great tools and I’m definitely trying the others! Collaborating with influencers is the best growth hack for me as a business owner. Since they have large audience on their social media accounts, I get big exposure and boost my sales, also website traffic. I always use the influencers directory of Phlanx.com – it’s free and very easy to use. I highly recommend it!
Mark Evans says:

January 19, 2018 at 14:04

This is a terrific resource. One of the challenges faced by many entrepreneurs looking to grow their businesses is they don’t know where to start or how to do it. As a result, they often do nothing or struggle. I added your post to my weekly blog post.
Boris says:

July 29, 2018 at 07:54

It’s funny the top 5 tips were exactly the ones we followed when launching Cogsworth.
jacky says:

August 18, 2018 at 16:54

Hi there. This is a great resource. Thanks for your hard-work!
Vedigitize says:

September 29, 2018 at 08:08

Some really useful slides here. I’ve been looking for something like this to help with a research piece I’ve been working on.
Jonathan says:

January 17, 2019 at 12:23

This is gold! Thanks for sharing, will definitely try those tips! I mostly use influencer marketing for growth and audience reach, the problem is the issue of the rising number of fake influencers. I’ve been a victim once to the experience wasn’t so great. Using auditing platform can definitely help out, tools like Influencer Auditor is definitely helpful.
1. Helvis Smoteks says:
  
  January 25, 2019 at 16:16
  
  Great to hear you found these growth hacks useful – happy growth hacking 😉
Emma says:

January 17, 2019 at 15:23

Nice!
ShaneTcampbelll says:

February 21, 2019 at 12:10

Great post.
Thanks for sharing this information. There are lot more things with which one can give a lot of benefts.You have mentioned many tips about it which is very helpful for me.

Thanks once again !!.
Ritika Goswami says:

June 10, 2019 at 07:40

Such Good Information Given Really Helpful Keep Providing More
1. Helvis Smoteks says:
  
  June 14, 2019 at 14:08
  
  Will do!
Email Verifier says:

July 29, 2019 at 11:40

This is gold! Thanks for sharing, will clearly try those tips! I mainly use influencer advertising and marketing for boom and target audience attain, the hassle is the difficulty of the rising number of faux influencers. I’ve been a sufferer as soon as to the revel in wasn’t so wonderful. Using auditing platform can definitely assist out, gear like Influencer Auditor is sincerely beneficial.
RAHUL GUPTA says:

September 15, 2019 at 10:17

Hello Helvijs,

Marvelous tutorial for students and new blogger about SEO. Extraordinary information shared to pursue a qualititive SEO process. This growth hack list is a powerful lists, and I love to try some of the tools mentioned. Your article is very useful and engaging. You have depicted very basic and compelling as well.

A debt of gratitude is in order for sharing this valuable information. Keep posting such kind of article.
1. Helvis Smoteks says:
  
  September 30, 2019 at 08:54
  
  Hello Rahul! It is great that we could help you with the guidance and valuable tools that we use ourselves.
Priyanshu Rawat says:

October 8, 2019 at 14:34

Thanks for sharing, keep doing good work.
Ravi Kanth says:

October 24, 2019 at 05:24

Thanks for sharing the post. The way you narrated the post is very good and understanding. Please let me know for the upcoming posts.
DEEPAK SHARMA says:

October 28, 2019 at 19:37

Great Article. Thanks for posting such an informational article

Comments are closed.