This month we had the pleasure of hosting Tiffany DaSilva for a webinar all about unique growth hacking tactics that can grow your business and get your team collaborating. There’s loads to learn from this session, so pay close attention and check out the special coupon code Tiffany offers GetUplift readers for her new growth hacking box.

Transcript:

“So today I’m gonna be looking over the “6 Growth Hacks to Optimize Every Stage of Your Customer Journey.” But before I do that, here’s just a little bit about who I am. I and the founder of Flowjo.co. and I’m also a growth marketing consultant.
I started a while ago, actually, when I was nine years old with SEO and affiliate marketing. I started my first affiliate marketing website at 11 which made a lot of money. If you wanna hear that story, you can add me to LinkedIn and check it out. But during that time, I also became a Full Stack Marketer. So I started in SEO, went to PPC, moved on to CRO, and worked in companies where they needed help with content and email marketing, and it just kind of went on from there. So I’ve touched every aspect of digital marketing.

In the past year, as a growth marketing consultant, I’ve worked with over 20 startups. During my career, I worked for companies like Achievers and Shopify. So I have some big startups under my belt. I also worked for a publishing company right in the beginning. Thanks to all that, all together if you look at the websites that I’ve worked with, I’ve actually worked on over 400 websites from every industry, SaaS, to B2B, to e-commerce, I’ve done it all.

Growth Hacking Defined

So let’s just move on to a little bit about what growth hacking is. And I know that you’re seeing a lot of growth hacking defined, but I still find when I meet people that they don’t really understand what growth hacking is. So I went on Wikipedia and I found this lovely definition:

“Growth Hacking is a process of rapid experimentation across marketing channels and product development to identify the most effective, efficient ways to grow a business.”

It’s a little bit lengthy and I don’t like to read big things like that. So the most important areas, you’ll see, is the “rapid experimentation” part and the “most effective, efficient ways to grow a business.”

If we were to probably define the reason why you are here today and the kind of growth hacking that you’re looking for, there’s a few items that I wanted to point out:

1. Mentality – with growth hacking it’s not corporate. You’re not in a place where you wanna move slow. You probably have this thought that, you know what? I’ll touch whatever I need to touch to get to the end result. Whatever marketing tactic I’m gonna do, we’re gonna blur the lines between the digital marketing channels. And sometimes when you’re one person inside of an organization, you have to touch everything and do that. Your mentality is a lot different than the corporate where I just do one thing and this is my job, and if it’s outside of that, I’m not gonna worry about it.
2. Time/Speed: Sense of urgency – When you’re thinking about the kind of startups and associations that are more apt to growth hacking, everything should have happened yesterday. So you’re probably feeling that as well.
3. Money: And a lot of times, it’s not like in a corporation where you’re given a budget and you have to constantly put in a report to ask for a certain amount of money. If you’re in a startup, especially one that’s just been funded, you have to spend now, and you have to get results now. So the kind of money situation in a growth hacking environment is very different than if you’re in a big company or an enterprise company.
4. Goal: Your goal is probably big, hairy, and audacious. Usually, when people come to me because they want a growth hacker, they’re looking for 100% increases in revenue or increases in leads. And it’s usually like, “We’re already late,” like, “We should’ve done that last quarter. Can you make that happen in the next two weeks?” So there’s always this kind of big goal that they’re trying to hit, so it’s leading to that the sense of urgency, and leading to the feeling like you need to spend money right away.
5. Testing: All of this puts you in a situation where you have to experiment. Fail first, and then try again. So with this growth hacking mindset, you really need to be okay with testing something out for a month or six weeks, and really trying to figure out, “Okay, does this work?” Yes or no. If it didn’t, that’s fine. Is there a way you can change it and start over again or are you gonna scrap the experiment entirely and try something new within that stage that you’re in?
6. Prioritize – When you’re in the growth hacking mindset, you also have to really prioritize. There’s gonna be so many options because you have all this freedom in this place that’s not corporate with a sense of urgency. You want touch everything, and you’re constantly feeling guilty that you’re not. So when you’re a real, true growth hacker, you are really looking at prioritizing things and getting like the one or two things that you’re gonna experiment with to try to get the results that you need.

So growth hacking defined, here’s all the reasons why you’re probably here.

The 6 Growth Stages of Every Business

So what is the growth journey?

I believe at some point, all of you are in one of these six stages:

1. Think – This is more of a brainstorming kind of a time when you’re looking for new ideas. Are you trying to get the team together? We’ll talk about these things a little bit more in depth later. But for now, it’s kind of getting unstuck in solving a big problem that you might have together.
2. Acquire – When you’re in the acquire stage, you want to be everywhere, you’re looking to gain leads and really just fill that funnel as much as you can.
3. Convert – Now that you’ve filled the funnel, let’s get them to act. How can we get to from a lead to a customer as fast as possible with the most information that they can have?
4. Retain – How can we keep them coming back? How do you get your customers to really love you enough that they’re gonna stay with you?
5. Advocate – How do you get them to love you so much that you get them talking about you to other people? What are the different ways that you can make that happen?
6. Cash In – And ultimately, getting paid at the end of the day, really cashing in.

Some of you might say -“You know what? I’m only in the acquire and convert stage.” or, “I can’t even think about retaining customers, that’s for someone else.” And really, you have to think about things like, “If I can get my customers that I already have to stay with us, that means cash flow over time.” That means that anything, anyone new that’s coming into it will mean more revenue on top of that. And also, if you’re spending time trying to get your customers that you have to refer you to other people, that’s a cheaper lead. And that’s also, they’re all warmed up and they’re ready to spend. So it’s a much easier lead to get for your marketing and sales team. And ultimately, you’re saving money there.

Defining what growth stage you’re at:

So, you might think that you are in the acquire or convert stage, but sometimes you have to really step back and go, “Okay, do we have a good customer base and can we start looking at them now?” So, just something to think about when you’re trying to figure out what stage of the growth journey is.

Before we get into this, think about, “where am I struggling right now? What’s the area that I really wanna look in depth?” And I would grab a notebook and just kind of write that down so that, you know, there are so many ideas that sometimes we get. So we wanna do everything at once, but I really, really urge you to stick with one area and then move on to that when you’ve kind of hit whatever goal that you wanna reach.

If you’re struggling and you don’t really know, what is your analytics telling you? Do you have a lot of leads coming in? Are they turning into customers? Or are you just getting no traffic at all? And you don’t even know what’s going on, and you really just need to sit back and think about the problems that you guys are having because you’re kind of in the dark right now? So really look at your analytics to see what they’re telling you. And ultimately, what’s your company’s goal? In the beginning of the year, or whatever your year starts, your CEO or founder might be telling you, “Okay, this is what we need to do by the end of the year.” And what happens sometimes is, you know, all this stuff happens, all these events happen, and people forget. Okay, that was supposed to be our goal, do we still have that goal? And if I were you as a marketing person or a growth person inside of an organization, remember what the company goal was and stick to it. Because even if everyone else is kind of changing the goals around you, no one’s going to say that you did a horrible job if you set out to hit the company’s goal and you did. So when you look at what your company goal is, which area of the growth journey will really help you get to it?

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Growth Stage: Think

Let’s first look at the “think” side of things, and let’s go a little bit deeper into that.

So what’s in it for me?

• Problem/Challenge: When you’re in the kind of the “think” stage of your growth journey, you really have some big challenge that you’re facing. Maybe people aren’t as open to a product that you have, maybe you just can’t seem to not only get leads or convert, maybe no one just seems to be interested in your product. Maybe when you go out and write content, it’s just not speaking to people. What are the different challenges and problems that you might be having? And do you need to bring in your whole team together to try to solve it.
• Goal setting: Sometimes when you’re in this kind of think stage, you haven’t even come up with a goal yet. So what you want to do is bring your team together. So the think stage is ultimately a lot about bringing your team together and try and think out certain problems. So that might be that you need to start setting goals if your company hasn’t done so. Or sometimes, you need to reset goals if, let’s say, you got funded, let’s say, all of a sudden you got a ton of money that you can spend, you might want to reset your goals as a group.
• New Product Features: Sometimes you don’t know where to go next and you need to come together and create a new product feature based on, what customers are asking for, or just where your product will naturally move onto.
• Bluesky thinking: Sometimes you just need to think outside of the box to come up with some crazy new ideas within the company. People are always looking for that next Airbnb, Craigslist type of Growth hack, and what I have found is sometimes the best way to get those crazy bluesky ideas is to bring a bunch of people in the room that are either university students or recent grads, give them some pizza, tell them you have a problem, and let them come up with a solution. And sometimes you’re gonna get these off-the-wall ideas because they don’t even know what the barriers are, they don’t know what they don’t know yet. So I love getting those ideas and I never say, “No, that can’t happen because of this,” I just wanna hear them because you never know, when you’re kind of going through the process, if something is possible or not.
• Team building Exercise: Sometimes you just want to bring together people for a team building exercise. Some of the ideas that I created for the Flowjo think section are just about kind of bringing people together, getting people to kind of be comfortable speaking in front of each other. And really, when it comes to having to solve a problem, you know that everyone feels comfortable enough with each other because of these types of building exercises that they’re willing to kind of speak out and share their new and interesting ideas.

‘The Domino’ Growth Hack

This is one of my favorite growth hacks.

1. State The Problem with your Team
2. Ask Everyone to Brainstorm one way to solve it for 5-10 minutes
3. Ask group to pass papers to their right (or left!)
4. New Person has to read the idea and expand it. (No Knocking it down!)
5. Do this a couple of times.

• Pro tip: When you’re done, you can use this list to start your brainstorming session and figure out how to solve your problem as a group!

What I love about this is you’re gonna get some really interesting ideas. And when you start breaking it down with your group, and you guys all list all the different ideas that you’ve come up with, you now have two or three people within the group that are kind of fighting for the same idea that might not have been there to start out with, but because they’ve added something to that idea, they feel like they’re a part of it.

Another thing that I like about it is sometimes you’re stuck in a group that you have someone who’s really quiet and you have someone who’s really loud. A lot of the times, you listen to the loud person, but you don’t necessarily listen to that quiet person, and ideas will end up happening because you got it from the loudest person in the room. In this situation, everyone has an equal chance to come up with an idea and other people get to weigh in on that idea and expand on it. So you’ve already created these little clusters of groups of each other so that everyone kind of gets a chance to speak out.

And another way that I like to do is, let’s say that you do have a brainstorming session where everyone’s being asked to put an idea on the board, I always ask people to brainstorm first and then actually hand in their papers to everyone and make sure all the papers are all the same color and read them out so that that loud person in the room gets to be equal than the quietest person in the room. Because what I found too was a lot of the quiet people in the room are the people that really digest things and listen, and so they might have a completely different perspective than the loudest person in the room. So when you’re doing this thinking exercises with your group, really think about, how can I make this the most equal environment for everyone to speak? And how can I make it fair so that everyone’s ideas get heard? And it’s not about, the most important person in the room or the loudest.

[easy-tweet tweet=”Try this growth hack to get countless ideas for growing your business” user=”getuplift_” template=”qlite”]

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Growth Stage: Acquire

What’s in it for me?

So when you’re in the acquire phase, you’re pretty stuck on trying to increase leads, really find that target audience, use completely different sources. So you might have really focused on SEO and organic traffic in the beginning, but you might be thinking, “Okay, I really need to acquire. It’s time to look at different sources, time to look at Facebook advertising, time to look at re-targeting.” So you’re just looking for different ways to bring in as many leads. Or leads if you are, you know, a SaaS company or a B2C company, or just people that are interested in your product, if your e-commerce or B2C so that you can grab them and, not grab them, but bring them in, tag them, and re-target them later. So you’re…this is kind of both sides of it.

And how to create really diverse campaigns. So what are different ways that we can acquire people and bring them in? Is it working with someone like Talia with an incredible webinar and seeing new people that you normally wouldn’t see? Is it kind of looking at FAQ of different questions that people have within your space and then really building it out for organic purposes. So there’s different ways to acquire.

The ‘Stairway to Influence’ Growth Hack

Everyone is always talking about looking at different influencers in our space and how you have to go after them, however what people end up doing inside of an organization is kind of haphazard. Every once in awhile, they get a tweet from an influencer and think “this is amazing. Let’s just keep onboarding them,” or “let’s find someone that they know.” All these types of things, but they’re not really, they don’t have a plan around it. So when it happens, they’re not really ready for it.

So this acquiring campaign is really to know who your influencers are and really create a plan for each step of the way. So one thing that you need to do is actually sit down with your group, and after they’re ready for this meeting, tell them what you wanna do in the beginning, but bring together a group of people and ask them to come up with influencers that are the easiest to approach to most difficult.

• Fans and followers: This requires looking at fans and followers. For example, do you know the list of your fans and followers? Do you know all the areas that they’re in? Are they in the normal Facebook and Twitter? Or are they on Pinterest? Are people talking about you in a forum? Some are on Reddit. So really understanding where your fans and followers are.
• Next, look at your super fans. Who tweets you often? Put those names down on a board so that you know. Really understand why they’re super fans, maybe approach them and ask the questions of what makes them, so interested in your product, and make them feel even more special than they probably feel just to redeem yourself all the time.
• The small somebodies. These are the people who might not be really influential in your space, but for some reason, they have an amazing following and are following where people are tweeting at them constantly. So, you want the attention from those small somebodies because if they’re gonna tweet out something, they’re gonna have this group of people who are very interested in what they have to say and they’ll do whatever they say.
• And then you have your professional influencers. These are the Talias. These are the people that everyone knows that are big in their space. They might be a little bit more difficult to approach, but when they do get approached, and they do share information about your service or product, there’s a lot of people out there who are gonna listen.
• And then your journalists, celebrities, and other companies. For example, if you’re in a marketing space and HubSpot talks about you, that’s gigantic, like you’re probably gonna get a lot of eyeballs on your product. Or if it’s celebrity, but we know celebrity endorsements tend to work really well and journalists, I mean, getting a newspaper writing about your magazine is not only great for your brand awareness but also a nice little SEO perk. It’s amazing for SEO and getting a link back to your site will actually increase your rankings. So sometimes these things are good in two different aspects, not just in growth and brand awareness.

So once you have that list of influencers from the easiest to approach to the most difficult, start to really look at it and say, “Okay, how are we gonna plan this out?” This is, and you’re probably, once you kind of write down who your fans and all these people are in one stage, you’re gonna wipe out the white board and you’re gonna start again.

So you’re gonna say, “Okay, for our fans and followers, what can we give them?” Are there discount codes? What can we do to make them turn into super fans? And on the super fan side, can we invite them to conferences with us? Is there something special that we can send them that brand merchandise that will make them happy? Or is there a special, an ultra-special discount just for people like them? And then the small somebodies, again, is there like free, some kind of free thing that you can send them? Or can they beta test something that you haven’t and review it for their group? And professional influencers, I mean, just getting, maybe it’s doing a webinar with the professional influencers. Or is it doing that kind of speaking with them at a conference? Or there’s all these different ways that you can meet up with the professional influencer. And then journalists, is it pitching an idea? Or celebrities, usually paying them. Or just companies, maybe creating an API or something to kind of gain their attention.

Remember that the fans, followers, super fans, small somebodies, that’s a pretty cheap group of people to go after. Once you start getting the professional influencers and especially the top part, you’re probably going to be spending some money. It’s not a bad thing to create a budget for it, but just know who that budget is gonna go to. If your small somebody starts saying, “You know what? you’re gonna have to pay me to do something that’s outside of a free trial or a beta,” then that’s not your goal. And it’s probably not gonna be worth it, but if you’ve already decided that your professional influencers and the celebrities, you are willing to pay for, then you have that budget that’s ready. So this is the one idea of how to get influencers for every step of the way to be interested in your product.

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Growth Stage: Convert

What’s in it for me here:

1. Increase sales and sales purchases. So you’ve already acquired the leads, how are we gonna get them to actually buy from you?
2. Decreasing the cost to sales. So how do we decrease cost per conversion here? If you are already paying a ton of money for leads coming in, you know, maybe there’s different ways that we can tweak it to make sure that you’re not spending that much.
3. Understanding who your customer really is. I mean, Talia talks a lot about, emotional targeting and that’s what leads to conversion. I think it’s really important because you have to not only understand who your customer is, but how people think in general to be able to convert.
4. Hack the funnel. The more you convert these people and you start looking at your whole funnel of the entirety, maybe there’s ways that you can you can remove certain steps. Maybe you have a checkout process that’s just asking too many questions or a form that’s asking for too much information, how can we hack that down to make it easy to get people in the door and then we worry about converting? We’ll look at converting them in different ways later.

‘Identify Upsells and Downsells’ Growth Hack

Many times people think it’s all about getting the sale and they’re not really thinking about the number that’s attached to it. If you’re looking at creating an offer at different levels of commitment, there’s different types of people.

Like me, when I walk into a Nike store, I get a little carried away. I might want sneakers when I walked in there, but you best believe, I’m gonna leave with yoga pants, a sweatshirt, maybe one of the T-shirts that say Nike that I’ll never use. Obviously, I’m easily a very high committed individual when it comes to Nike. But when I’m buying, let’s say, accounting software, I might want the bare minimum until I can figure out what exactly I want. For example, last week I was getting QuickBooks and while I was going through the process I was like, “Listen, I don’t even understand what half this stuff means, I’m gonna go and get the least amount of thing that I possibly can. So I looked at, probably, the lowest level of purchasing because I just wasn’t, I didn’t have that level of commitment.

So when you think about your product, maybe it’s time to think about what products would really go great with what I’m selling. Is there an added guide book? You’ve seen it before, where someone is offering, a bonus that’s worth \$100, and it’s a guide book or a book that you actually get in a mail, or something extra. So look at those kind of upsells. If you’re in e-commerce, maybe there’s things that go well together. Maybe if you’re selling, try to look around and see, if you’re selling this sweater, you want the necklace that goes with it, that’s an upsell. So really thinking about what you sell, whether it’s, B2B or B2C, and finding different things that you can group together.

Or downsell. If people don’t wanna buy it, what’s the smallest thing that they can buy or do to keep them invested? I think it is really important just to get that “yes,” that one yes, and it may turn into a bigger yes. So if people aren’t ready necessarily to buy something, you can extend their trial, let’s say, maybe you can extend their trial for half the amount that they were gonna pay for just the first month. And then from there, work on bringing them to be a full customer once they get used to your software. It’s really important, like Talia just said, to get your foot in the door and also get them a little bit invested in your product. And they’ll look at you differently because you were willing to do that for them.

Now, bring your team together, create a plan away from the computer. Usually we start looking up for upsells and downsells online. And one of the big things about growth hacking as we said, is urgency. However, the worst caveats of finding information online is spending two or three hours delving into upsells and downsells and realizing all you’ve wasted half your day and gotten nowhere.

So really create a plan away from your computer on how you’re gonna do this. And if after, you’ve found areas that you probably need more information about, then you can go back to your computer and actually research it, but with the team this is a great way to kind of get your ideas in play.

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Growth Stage: Retain

Once you have those customers, your goal is really keeping them close. And what’s in it for me here?

1. Retaining your customers, you are reducing churn.
2. Increasing profitability because the more you keep customers on, and keep bringing new customers on top of that you’re gaining poor money across the years. So it’s really important to make sure that you can hold on to your customers as long as possible. Or if you’re in the e-commerce business, keep them coming back and interested in any of your other products that you may have.
3. Be more than a one night I stand, especially goes for people that are selling kind of one-off things products or e-commerce or even some of the kind of apps out there that, you know, you might purchase once and people never really think about it again. You wanna be more than that one night stand, and keep them interested and keeping loving your product because it’s important for the next stage of the growth journey.
4. Increase the likelihood of that word of mouth referrals which is kind of our next thing. But it’s really important, not only to maintain, get the cash flow from new customers but also increase it was very worth leads and people eager to buy.

The ‘Make it Lite’ Growth Hack

This is mostly for software companies. Ask yourself the question, “Will users lose time, effort, and data by canceling your service?”

Are they gonna lose a ton of blog posts? Are they gonna lose some tweets that are really important to them? Are they gonna lose the analytics of what worked and what didn’t work? If the answer is yes, then create a “Lite” version of your product.

This is a discount for your product, 50% to 75% off, super discounts. And all it does is it allows users access to your data without being able to change it or use your software. So they would just be able to log in, look at this data they have, maybe copy and paste it, use it for something else but it’s there and it’s available for them. So they’re not necessarily saying “No” to you but they’re just keeping that door a little bit open for you.

Shopify does this really well. Let’s say you’ve built an e-commerce but you’re not ready to move on with it or you do not even know if you are, maybe you haven’t got your products right, or you don’t really wanna cancel, but you don’t really wanna turn it on, they have a very “Lite” version where it holds the account for you so you don’t lose any of your data, but you’re paying a super low amount. I think it might be for \$50 or something like that. So this is great because at the end of the day, if you create an e-commerce and let’s say you canceled but kept it on hold, are you really gonna go to the competitor when it’s time to rebuild or look at that e-commerce site again? Of course not, you’re gonna go back to that company that you’ve already been paying money for and hold it. And it’s also going to increase your chances of having them come back and actually use your software in the future. And it makes you look good because if you’re willing to let people hold on to their data, they feel like they haven’t wasted that time and energy. So if there’s a way that you can create a “Lite” version of your product, go for it.

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Growth Stage: Advocate

Advocate increases conversion rates in sales. So this is all about getting your customer to speak on behalf of you to other people. So this is getting your referrals and getting warm leads from other people. And what does that do?

1. Increases your conversion rate because people are coming in, these leads are coming in and then they’re more likely to buy. So that increases your conversion rate and your sales, as a result.
2. Saves you on marketing and sales time. It’s not like you’re going to have to pay for them through a Facebook ad or like your sales team is going to spend a lot of time meeting with them a bunch of times, trying to push them along through the funnel. They’re there, they’ve already talked to someone else.
3. Decrease the time to purchase. This is a great way to shrink down the normal time that it takes for someone who’s just heard about you to purchasing from you.
4. And it’s a good way once these people start coming in and you start learning about them. You might find a similar audience or a new demographic that you never really thought of because this is who those your customers are actually hanging out with.

‘Know When to Ask’ Growth Hack

When we ask people for testimonials or referrals, there’s software out there that asks on behalf of you. However, remember automation works, but spontaneous and personal is always best. So find the right opportunity to bring people in.

If a customer reaches out to you and they’re just like, “You know what? I just love your product, I think your product’s amazing. I just wanted you to know that.” Now’s the time to maybe ask them, “Do you know anyone who might be interested? Can you offer a testimonial?” This is the right time. Don’t wait for your DRIP campaign to ask them, and don’t feel like you can’t ask them. They’re that interested in you, they’re your super fans.

Look at those opportunities and use them for what they’re worth. And really ask nicely, don’t be like, “Well, then you have to give me a testimonial,” or “How come you haven’t referred to me lately? What have you done for me lately?” Type of thing. Really just ask nicely, “Can I have a testimonial, or referral, or introduction to someone that they might be related to.” In order to get started on this advocate, you should already have an introductory link or a landing pitch that speaks to what you do that’s ready for referrals, maybe a referral package or discount that they can look at or maybe have a landing page that offers not only a referral discount for the person that’s giving the referral but also their friend that they’re referring. So just be ready for that before you start being able to take in those opportunities.

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Growth Stage: Cash In

What’s in it for me? It’s pretty self-explanatory. We all wanna be as Scrooge McDuck over here with his vault of gold.

‘Expanding your Reach’ Growth Hack

A lot of the times we might be making money, we’re doing well, but we’re kind of hitting a plateau, and it’s at this point we need to find new ways to expand our reach.

1. 1. Geographical/Demographics – One way is geographical or demographics. Looking at different locations, maybe you’ve been targeting men the whole time and you realize females are a big part of your demographic. Maybe it’s an age that you weren’t expecting or just looking at those different areas.
   2. Adjacent Industries – Maybe you’ve created an API or informational guide for an adjacent industry or some something that you can link your product with. Maybe it’s time to look at their audience and see, not only talking with the company and maybe partnering with them but even just looking at their audience and seeing if you can send ads to them and see if you can get any of their attention.
   3. New Platforms – If you’ve been working, let’s say, only on Apple or iPhones, can you work on Google phones as well? Can you create a new platform, maybe looking at Pinterest, the buy button for e-commerce instead of just doing it on Facebook? What are new platforms that you can extend your reach on.
   4. App/Mobile Experience – Maybe you have a company (it seems like it’s unheard of but it might happen) or a business, a small business where a mobile experience might actually be useful that you might not have thought of, or maybe there’s a better mobile experience that you can bring people through before they go into an app that you already have.
   5. Fulfillment Options (Ecommerce) – If you’re e-commerce, looking at different fulfillment options. One of the things I was surprised with my own product Flowjo was that I had a lot of people from Europe that were interested in purchasing it without really just targeting US and Canada, and I started looking at fulfillment options right away and seeing, “Is there a way to fulfill in Amazon, UK instead of just Amazon, US and Canada?” So definitely, looking at different fulfillment options is a good way to expand your reach.
   6. Home Delivery (Small Business) – If you’re a small business or have a brick and mortar store, can you do home delivery? It could be as simple as something like that. Are there ways to expand on your deliverability or even adding a small touch to gain new people’s attention.

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Summarizing Growth Hacking

Look at which area of the growth journey you’re in.

Where are you struggling?

What’s your analytics telling you?

What’s your company’s actual goal?

Do all these before you decide which area you think is the most important.

I suggest going, leaving this and really thinking about these questions and letting them process for about a day to really think, “Okay, do I really need to acquire or should I be getting my customers to advocate for me?” for example. It might not be what you think.

And how can you make it work for you? So how can I make these different hacks work in different areas of the growth journey? Really focus on one problem.

At the end of the day, you have your goal that you’re trying to hit. Focus on that for a few months. Take the quarter to really see if you can move the needle in this one way. Instead of spending one week on acquire, one week on convert, one week on advocate, you’re never going to really experience any real growth unless you focus on one problem.

Create a goal when you start up. You might have your company goal, but in three months, what are your expectations? And what is considered a good expectation? A very good and excellent, or horrible? Write that down before you start, that will help you decide at the end of that period of time what you’re focusing on it. Did this really work? And how well did I do?

Sometimes we think we’re failing because we didn’t hit that big goal that we wanted, but maybe you’re still at the good level, maybe that gives you the confidence to know that although you didn’t push the needle as much as you wanted to, you did get to a good level with your boss, or with your leaders.

See it through, don’t give up. If you’ve decided on certain experiments and trying different things out, don’t cut out and get distracted by whatever’s happening. Startups move so fast, there’s always something interesting. And what I found by being in them is that the people that have really focused on the one or two things, and kind of just took everything else out of the mix are the ones that got the biggest results at the end of the day.

[easy-tweet tweet=”See it through, don’t give up on your tests. Those who stay focused, succeed.” user=”getuplift_” template=”qlite”]

Remember that even though they are called growth hacks and they have a sense of urgency, they still take time to execute. You could maybe do it overnight, but it might not necessarily show rewards for a few weeks to a month. So try to remember that these growth hacks do take time to develop.

If you’re looking for more hacks like these and you like the way this was set up, I’ve actually created a that gives you all these different categories inside of the box with 100 different growth packs within them.

In this box, you’ll learn how to brainstorm new ideas, acquire new leads, convert leads to customers, retain customers and reduce churn, get customers to advocate for you, and find new ways to cash in. And for all of Getuplift readers and listeners, I will give a 25% off discount code if you go to . I’ll send you the code by email.“

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Questions

Talia: “Yes. Wow, I enjoyed that so much. I’ve told you, I actually have my own Flowjo box and I love it so much because I get to see all these insane ideas that I haven’t seen anywhere else. I really enjoyed it and I told you that my favorite thing about it is just that you get the teams together to work. Usually a lot of people try to think of things on their own and it’s much harder to do that than as of group together. “

Q 1: Hansel: How do you carry out proper research? For example, if you have to pitch for a client in the eyewear industry.

A 1: “Usually, when I’m thinking of a new idea for a new pitch, the last thing I do is go online and try to find stuff, to be honest. First, without any information possible, I bring everyone (hopefully also people in there that actually use the product) into a room and we start looking at if we were using eyewear, for example, there might be people who know that field and know a little bit about it, there might be people that don’t have any idea of what the industry is like or what it’s like to have to buy eyewear or anything. And it becomes this information session where those people who have never dealt with it are asking certain questions. You know, writing those, someone is taking notes and writing the questions that those people have. And on the other end, you have people who are kind of experts because they’ve been through it, answering those questions and thinking about some of the issues that they have.

When you get that, first run no one’s researched, everyone’s just giving their information or giving questions that they have. You really get that gut reaction of what you think would work. And then from there, you start researching, looking at what are the competitors doing, what are the different benefits that they’re saying. Because a lot of the times, well, I find especially software, let’s say, accounting software, I might have written down what my problems would be and what would stop me from getting a chance in software or what would make me purchase accounting software, but when I go on to their website, all they’re showing me are features. Nothing is talking about the benefits or the things that I’m interested in. So by doing this kind of research meeting before you’re getting at the emotions behind the product, you’re trying to sell, rather than what the features or benefits are.

And then once you learn what the competitors are doing, you’re looking at analytics and looking at what that’s telling you, what is the different content that they might be most interested in. Or you can look at Buzzsumo to look at what people are talking about in that industry as well because you might find some interesting content there that you can use. And then what people would search for to get to it. So that’s the kind of research, all together, that I would do. But in the beginning, it’s really about bringing your team together away from the computer.

Talia: I love that you talk about the whole idea of not talking about your features or the pricing, but actually what’s in it for me. As you know, that’s my biggest focus when it comes to customer experience and generally anything to do with research, and any design that you put forward, I think, I feel it’s so imperative to have the customers’ value right in front of them because that’s the only way to capture their attention. So I love that idea and that’s also why I also liked your comment before about the foot in the door technique because it really is about getting people to take small steps and then, later on, you can get them to take additional steps. But that’s a great way to get started. So just showing people their value, helping them take one small step and then later asking for what you need to retain them.

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Q2:  The next question that we have is my own. What part of the growth hacking journey are you in right now with Flowjo?

A 2: Right now, it’s been mostly about acquiring. I’ve been looking at making sure that I’m being available in as many different places as possible, whether it’s doing a webinar like this, or be on Product Hunt last week or going to Facebook groups and offering them different discounts.

I spent weeks, and Talia knows this trying to make sure that that day we launched on Product Hunt was as beneficial as possible, and really looking at what are every single angle or what are all the different people that I could look at to acquire leads in that way so I could fill my funnel and capture them either through re-targeting or email later on.

So acquiring has definitely been big, but eventually, I’ll be like, and it’s gonna start moving in a couple of weeks making sure those people who were interested actually converts. So trying to get them back in and really focusing on that. And then when I come up with the SEO box in a few months, it’s about making sure that not only am I doing the acquiring process again, but making sure those people, those customers who I had are actually coming back and trying to rebuy from me because they like the growth hacking box so much.

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Q3: Talia: How do you get your clients to buy into the growth hacking approach when they had a different idea on how marketing should be done?

A3: People usually come to me with already wanting growth hacking. I’m usually the one saying “It’s not what you think,” or “We’re not gonna do Airbnb, Craigslist.” We need to have a little bit more consistent tactics that have worked overtime depending on what your product is. So I get a lot of kind of the opposite, but what I found for people that might be coming for me for digital marketing is I still have a bit of a growth hacking approach to everything I do. I mostly am trying to sell them on the fact that, “Okay, you need these results by the end of the year and we need to make sure that this actually happens. So let’s focus on this one area of the journey for now and spend the next three months doing it, this is all stuff that I need from you or I can take it on myself depending on where you think that your team is at. And we’re going to try to get, you know, this is the expectation I have and let’s do it.

So I try not to use it if people sound a little bit more conservative, I don’t use the term growth hacking, I use growth marketing where I’m focusing on growth. But that usually kind of changes their perspective and they’re more open to it, especially when, for me, I’m coming at them with, I growth hacking for SEO, I growth hack with PPC. I mean, I do have all these different strategies that I use across all the different channels.

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Talia: “So how can people reach you?”

Tiffany:

1. Follow @FlowjoCo on Twitter
2. Go to Flowjo.co website and you’ll find me there
3. Follow me on twitter @bellastone

Talia: Okay. Awesome. Well, thank you very much, Tiffany. It was so much fun having you on.

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