The one thing that’s always on every marketer’s mind is growth. It used to be that marketers had the luxury of slowly and steadily building up programs that had room to grow over the course of months, or even years. Fast forward to 2017 and no one has time for that anymore.
Nope, today’s marketers know that they can’t afford to wait months or years for an initiative to mature; they need exponential growth and they need it now. The best way to achieve this is through growth hacking.
Growth Hacking
Before we get any further let’s take a second to pause and expound on what growth-hacking actually is. In addition to being the marketing world’s favorite buzzword, growth hacking is a means of experimentation (or hacking) as a way of moving marketing metrics consistently up.
According to Entrepreneur, growth hackers pull from multiple disciplines to extract insights and identify the right messages for the right target audiences. In many ways, growth hackers are professional experimenters. They use critical thinking skills, product engineering experience, and creativity in tandem to define new solutions options to increase traffic, revenue, or both.
Yes, growth hackers are the mad scientists of their teams, always questioning and challenging existing marketing practices to improve performance. In recent years, growth hackers have been able to add another tool to their arsenal: mobile devices. Yes, that’s right, mobile devices are a growth hacker’s best friend. Here are a few tried-and-true mobile marketing strategies to growth hack your way to success.
Go Local
Because mobile users never let their devices stray too far, you can send them location-based offers when they’re near a location that sells your service or product. The hook, however, is convincing your customers to opt in to location-based targeting.
When they download your application or sign up on form on your mobile site, be sure to clearly indicate that if they opt in for geo-targeted messages, they’ll have the chance to reap major rewards and discounts.
In fact, a recent Microsoft study found that consumers are willing to share their location if they know there’s the possibility of gaining exclusive access or promotions. The study reported that 89.3 percent of consumers would share data for location-based discounts.
Once you’re audience is opted in, you can test multiple strategies. You can even test strategies beyond simple location messaging. A local New York ice cream shop, Van Leuween asked customers to install the PayPal app on their mobile devices. Once customers did this, the shop sent special rewards or promotions whenever the customers entered a certain radius.
Mobile Searchers
Mobile searchers are looking for immediacy. When they pull out their devices to find information on a product or service, they’re often looking for easy and accessible options.
Push Your Message
If you’re running a mobile application, push notifications are essential to staying top of mind among users. However, in order to continuously push your message out, you must get users to opt in first.
To increase opt-in rates, consider using a Push Pre-Permission Strategy. Doing so will allow you to request push notifications before an operating system prompt appears. This tactic also allows you to customize your messages to match the tone of your application.
If your copy is overly formal or corporate, users will be turned off; they’re used to seeing messages pop up on their smartphone screens in conversational tones and anything more formal will just be jarring.
Surprise and Delight
Surprising and delighting your audiences can keep your brand top of mind. Take Google for example; people automatically visit Google’s search engine day in and day out – it’s almost by rote at this point.
But Google didn’t want to see their hallmark page become stale and unmemorable, so they started implementing Google cartoons to celebrate specific events or personalities.
Now when a user heads to the search engine and sees a drawing of a cat or an animated illustration of a soccer field, they’re caught by surprise and taken out of autopilot. You too can keep site visitors interested by adding quick graphics or minute updates.
As VentureBeat indicated in their mobile growth hacks rundown, unexpected surprises are an assured way of increasing word-of-mouth marketing; when customers receive an unexpected “treat” from a brand, they’re likely to tell others about the experience.
Leveraging Mobile
Growth hackers know leveraging mobile marketing techniques means speaking to consumers where they’re already living: on their mobile devices.
Today’s consumer often doesn’t stray five feet away from their mobile devices, and mobile marketers should be using every available resource to grab consumers’ attentions while their scrolling through their phones.
This post was originally written by AJ Agarwal on Startup Grind, the global entrepreneurship community.
Startup Grind is a Silicon Valley-based organization that educates and mentors entrepreneurs through monthly business events and speaking series in cities across the globe
