Nestor Gizrel Ong

Four Proven Growth Hacks for Modern Businesses

The world of business is fiercely competitive and extremely unpredictable. Even with the millions of dollars spent on forecasting risks and mitigating their impact, some companies’ resources still dry up which forces them to go bankrupt. Others are fairly lucky. Some success stories seem impossible to be true, but they are. When one company goes up, others go down. No hard feelings. All of these are not considered uncommon in business.

But this begs the question: what did those successful companies do to make them what they are? How did they grow (slowly or exponentially) over a period of time? Are there some secret hacks that small-time entrepreneurs should know so they can share in this success?

You will soon find out the answers to these questions. In this article, we will discuss what makes a modern business different. Like what is the modern business environment that makes it hard for traditional business models to survive. We will then proceed to discuss four proven growth hacks and we will integrate examples so you can visualize these hacks even more.

Next, we are going to discuss concepts that – while they may not be considered as hacks – can be used to grow your business. We will also include success stories or case studies of businesses that are able to push their way up the top without breaking a sweat. So let us get right to it.

What are modern businesses?

Modern businesses are characterized by their use of technology to improve their operations and profitability. For most modern businesses, efficiency is key. Without efficiency, costs could skyrocket. This could hurt their prospects of gaining profit and achieving growth.

Modern businesses are also not just concerned with using technology, it also has to consider using the best technology. As the needs of modern businesses evolve, tech companies evolve too. Hundreds of tech companies come and go, offering software or systems or platforms to address the needs of businesses. Some of them are great at what they are doing. Others just fail.

There are more things modern businesses have to factor in when making business decisions. They have to consider their customers’ needs as well. Because the business environment has continuously evolved over time, it is expected that customers’ needs and preferences will. These days, customers are all about speed and quality of service. Fail to do that and you may lose that customer forever.

These highlights the reason why it is imperative for businesses to be careful in choosing the best technology and shaping the best work practice. Because in the age of technology where everyone is almost interconnected, word spreads like wildfire. And a bad reputation could cost you your business.

Four proven growth hacks

Here, we will discuss the four ways to significantly grow your business at a minimal cost. We will talk about tactics and strategies that have worked for others and may work for your business. Most of them will talk about marketing in general. That is the establishment of long-term profitable relationships with your customers or clients through the selling of products and services. So what is the first hack?

1. Build a community around your brand
In this first hack, we will discuss seven concepts that primarily deal with marketing. And all of these are linked to the idea that you have to establish a network, a community that continues to patronize your brand. This will be crucial to the survival of your business. Without a solid customer base, your business will struggle to find that steady source of income to keep its operations running. That is why building loyalty around your brand is considered as the most important goal that you should have. But how do you keep your community loyal and engaged? Check these out:

a. Social Media

Social media sites are one of the most popular marketing platforms these days. And rightly so. On Facebook alone, there are an estimated 2.41billion active users who are using the platform. That’s almost one-third of the global population. This connectivity allows information to spread quickly – and word-of-mouth communication is a marketer’s best friend.

If you know how to build a community on social media sites like Facebook and keep them engage and loyal, you are virtually dealing with billions of people. This can be the breakthrough that your business needs.

Forming Facebook groups, keeping followers of your Facebook page engaged, or giving special discounts can be the ways to nurture this community. If positive feedback is given by a user, it can quickly spread around and drastically change your game for the better.

b. Relationship Marketing

Relationship marketing has been used traditionally as a way to build loyalty and retain customers. It started with just knowing your customers’ names until it evolves into giving them promos that you do not normally offer to people. This helps build the relationship from being strangers to acquaintances to friends.

Today, relationship marketing is widely used in digital platforms. CRM or customer relationship management software is deeply grounded on this concept.

And its ultimate goal is to build loyalty and engagement over time.

When you deepen your relationship with your customers, promoting new products, or letting them try new services no longer becomes difficult. And most of the time, you will no longer have to actively reach out to your customers as they will willingly reach out to you. This is one of the benefits of a good relationship marketing strategy.

c. Loyalty - Membership Programs

Not different from the concept discussed above but implementing loyalty or membership programs can boost your growth in no time. People like a sense of community. When they become a “member” of something, the feeling of connectivity ensues and loyalty becomes easier to obtain. Pair this up with membership discounts or promos and you will see your sales instantly skyrocket. This is why a lot of businesses are offering loyalty cards now. Sometimes even for free.

d. Video Marketing

For a lot of experts working in the marketing industry, video is the way to go. This is because the video is a great way to capture and retain the attention of their viewers – which are crucial in an environment where businesses are competing for their target customers’ attention.

Promoting your business through videos helps establish rapport, trust, and loyalty among your target audience. It is key to customer retention and business growth.

e. Referral

Not different from the concepts discussed above, referral (in relation to relationship marketing and loyalty (and membership) programs is done to grow your customer base.

By rewarding your customers for bringing in a customer for you, you are incentivizing the behavior that heavily contributes to the increase of your sales and thus the growth of your business. Referrals can be rewarded with freebies, discounts, or exclusive items coming from your business.

f. Brand partnerships and collabs

Partnerships with other brands that are in line with the nature of your business (or your project) can be mutually beneficial to both parties – you and your partner(s).

With partnerships, you are taking your businesses’ strengths and infusing them together to give a much more powerful impact when executing a promotional plan. Collaborations with influential personalities can also take a project to a higher level since this boosts your brand recognition. Brand partnerships and collabs often offer more benefits than harms – especially when you are dealing with partners that have a good reputation.

g. Influencer Marketing

Speaking of collaborations, influencers are growing in numbers these days. Influencers are people who have built an image or reputation enough to garner a number of “followers,” those who keep on getting updated with the influencer’s lifestyle and content.

Influencers are a fair game – they help you drive more sales by promoting your product or brand within their sphere of influence. They work just like the usual “word of communication,” except that influencers often charge you for promoting your business. Influencers are growing less in power these days, according to a lot of studies, but they still have power nonetheless.

All of these things can be helpful in growing your business. Remember, building a community that keeps on supporting your business is key to its survival.

2. Be data-driven

Being data-driven means that you know how to gather data and where to gather them from. Your marketing campaigns will eventually have results regardless if they are a success or not. These results will dictate your next steps and will help guide you on your way to growth.

For example, if a sales channel is not working as expected (and is maybe costing you higher than the average), cut it out and focus your resources on the other channels. The data that you will gather from your campaigns will help you decide what to do next. Some marketing tools (often integrated into CRM software) can help automate the gathering and interpretation of this data.

Some tools can even go as further as tracking your other campaigns (blog posts, webinars, and social media) and help you monitor how much revenue is streaming from these sources.

3. Transparency is key

This is a piece of advice often repeated by expert digital marketers – and it exists for a reason. The internet is full of strangers and crimes are often committed due to the mask of anonymity. This makes a lot of customers distrustful towards any content from the internet. This includes promotional materials from businesses.

To break this wall and quickly establish trust among their communities, successful brands often have to be transparent. This can be done in a lot of ways. You can be transparent with your ingredients, your labels, the sources of your materials, the team behind your business, or even how much you are earning from your customers.

Transparency helps your business stand out from the competition and it also helps your business gain your customers’ trust and loyalty. This helps you boost your sales and profit – which are surefire ways to grow your business.

4. Use digital tools to boost efficiency and cut costs

The story of how our ancestors use rocks and wood to build fire is not new to us. We have also heard how they shaped their rocks into hoes and how much these have helped them grow food for consumption or craft tools for hunting. Tools are supposed to make our jobs easier for us. And digital tools are no exception.

Digital tools can come in many forms. They can be software designed to generate leads and convert sales. They can be a web-based application where you input data and you get a finalized report. Some technology even allows you to automate the communication between you and your customers.

These tools are supposed to assist, if not totally replace, manual labor. They are made to remove the boring tasks such as the manual input of data, the manual retrieval of data, the manual crafting of email, and so you can, instead, automate these tasks in just a few clicks.

Digital tools such as CRM software platforms have various functions and features. In fact, if you type in CRM on the search box of a search engine, a list of CRM products will come out, advertising as the best of the best. Use these tools to help your business efficiency, which helps cut costs and boost your profit.

You can study their features if they are compatible with your business’s needs or even search for reviews from their customers so you can get the best product.

There are other concepts that are worthy of being considered. Here, we will discuss e-mail marketing which can help you nurture your leads and convert more sales. But let us summarize what e-mail marketing is.

E-mail marketing is the art and science of sending curated content to target readers for the purpose of establishing profitable relationships with these readers over time. This content can be crafted for brand awareness, lead generation, or even sales generation.

To successfully launch your e-mail marketing campaign, you need to do the following:

1. Craft a subject line and preview text that your target readers won’t be able to resist
2. Know what to do with the right person
3. Use the right tools for your e-mail marketing campaign
4. Personalize Your E-mail and Make a Segmented E-mail List
5. Include interactive content in your e-mail

Companies like Uber, BuzzFeed, Starbucks, Nike, The Verge, and Adobe have been doing these for years and they are successful at it. In fact, some of these companies have attributed their success in lead generation and sales conversion to doing e-mail marketing.

You should also check out these six tips from digital marketing experts to grow your business:

1. Hire the best people you can afford
2. Know how to build trust
3. Offer something that has actual value to people’s lives
4. Invent and Reinvent
5. Follow the 90/10 rule
6. Understand your competition

These are useful tips to help you navigate your way in a digitalized business environment.

Success Stories - Case studies on how these hacks led to business growth

Ever wondered if any of these hacks have been done before and if they were successful? Check these case studies we compiled for you:

Disney’s use of social media is no secret – and they are proud of using any available channel to reach out to their target audience. Although we can’t directly attribute Disney’s success to its usage of social media alone, Disney’s partnership with Make a Wish Foundation only helped it build loyalty among its community.

Disney challenged social media users that it will donate US$5 to Make a Wish Foundation for every photo of them featuring Mickey Mouse ears and a hashtag #ShareYourEars. This led to Disney donating US$2M, which means over 400,000 participated in the challenge.

If there is one thing that people are so wary about these days, it’s food – and Whole Food knows this. Not only are they transparent to their customers, but they also practice transparency internally, as an organization. Since 1986, information about salaries has been shared freely and this reportedly led to an increase in employee productivity and retention in the company.

5. Buffer’s use of transparency

Buffer is also a popular example when it comes to transparency. The platform for social media has an open salary policy and an open Trello board where everyone can see what they are working on. Every e-mail sent out by a member can be seen by the other members as well.

6. Wells Fargo’s use of tools like CRM

Despite the recent events, Wells Fargo arguably remains as part of the top companies globally. It claims to be the seventh most profitable company in the U.S. and it keeps track of US$1.9T in assets and about 70 million customers. That’s a lot.

To keep everything organized, Wells Fargo uses tools like CRM to help them focus on more important tasks (while keeping their customers happy) as well as save time and energy in general. According to them, because of CRM technologies, they were able to save more than 5,600,000 hours of extra work. Again, that’s a lot.

Now we can’t wait to see you grow!

We have given you all these lists and examples that you can learn from, now we can’t wait to see you in action!

The four proven growth hacks have worked wonders for the companies we’ve derived them from. We’re sure it would for you too. Now start building communities around your brand. Use social media, build genuine relationships, establish loyalty, create engaging content through videos, reward referrals, collaborate, and partner with influencers.

All of these are proven and tested to help you establish a customer base that will keep on supporting your business – as well as bring others to the community so you can have more customers. This is a surefire way to grow.

Don’t forget to also act according to data – all the numbers and digits that you have gathered from your campaign results to everything your tools are giving you. They will guide you and help you decide your course of action for the following days to come.

Also, remember that transparency is key. In a world full of deceitful marketing tactics and schemes designed to maximize profit at the cost of the customer’s interests, transparency serves as a breath of fresh air. It’s something new and it helps you stand out from your competition. Transparency can be done internally and externally. Do it internally and it helps you retain employees and set them to be productive. Do it externally and you will have customers easily trust your brand and help it grow.

Lastly, use digital tools if you can. They are designed to take off a large part of your workload so you can have more time to do more productive work. It also gives the job more meaning – as you are expected to do more action and less tedious, mechanical work. And while we’re at this, make sure to choose the best digital tool you can find. Read reviews and study the products’ features – they’re worthy long-term investments.