One of the hottest trends in the marketing world right now is “growth hacking” – a process of rapid experimentation across marketing channels and product development to identify the most effective, efficient ways to grow a business. So what are some of the best ways to growth hack your B2B lead generation process?
Hack your search strategy
One of the best ways to growth hack is to re-engineer a process and make it work for you. Take SEO and paid search, for example. Let’s face it – there are only so many companies that can fit on the first page of Google search results for organic search, and when it comes to paid search, it’s awfully expensive to pay up for the best search terms.
So, instead of trying to use a lot of arcane SEO tricks to get yourself higher up in the organic search results, one option is to find out who’s at the top of the Google search results for your industry and then find a way to partner with them. You’re essentially piggybacking on top of their success, and it could be far cheaper taking out an ad on their site rather than actually trying to outbid them on Google.
Hack your social strategy
You may already have a Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn presence, but do you have an Instagram, Snapchat or YouTube strategy? It can be tough work to build up these platforms, and one growth hack that some companies use is turning their account over to an influencer for a limited period of time. In essence, you’re letting them work their magic for your account for a weekend, a week or even longer.
Say, for example, you have an upcoming conference coming up that your company is sponsoring. This would be a great opportunity for Twitter but, alas, there’s nobody on your staff who can send out tweets during the event. Well, you could reach out to Twitter influencers and ask one of them to “guest host” your account. In theory, they would promote this on their Twitter account, meaning that you’d get all of that built-in lift.
Hack your website experience
There’s a lot that you can learn from the world of B2C marketing, and that includes the way companies work to personalize every aspect of the customer experience. In short, every customer who lands on their website gets a different experience, based on past actions they’ve taken. They might be shown a subsection of items they’ve already browsed, or some of the default options may already be updated and changed. Often, they’ll see their name somewhere on the page and some kind of “Welcome Back” message. And they’ll often get an email message soon after leaving the site.
That’s the kind of hyper-personalization that websites need to aim for. Of course, you want to do it as cheaply as possible (otherwise, it wouldn’t really be growth hacking, would it?), and that’s why many companies are turning to marketing automation software that can capture all of that information and automatically send out emails to potential prospects when they’ve taken certain steps to show that they might be a “hot” lead. If done right, it can really win the attention of potential prospects – and cost far less in terms of resources and time than trying to reach all those prospects directly.
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Dane
Dane Cobain is a published author, freelance writer, book blogger, poet and (occasional) musician from High Wycombe, UK. Before going freelance, he worked as a social media marker, now specialising in writing about publishing, technology and marketing.