Growth hacking is all about growing your business rapidly with a limited budget. The term came about from startups who needed to grow their fledgeling businesses as quickly as possible with limited resources. These startups typically achieve this growth by taking advantage of low-cost alternatives to traditional marketing that can be extremely effective when done well.
Using a combination of techniques including social media, viral marketing, and SEO to increase brand awareness and conversion rates as quickly as possible is the basis of growth hacking in marketing.
When you apply these techniques to your content marketing you can achieve massive growth through content.
- Content hacking can help boost your marketing efforts in a short time on a limited budget.
- Good content hackers are data-driven, innovative, and constantly optimising their content.
- Analysing your own successful content and that of your competitors is a start for driving content growth.
Content Hacking Basics
The key to content hacking is to think outside the box and look for ways that you can leverage your content and take advantage of your reach to attract more social shares, drive more traffic to your site, and boost your conversion rate.
Content marketing is more effective than many other marketing channels and it costs very little.
To growth hack your content marketing include:
- SEO – Google’s algorithm is always changing. Successful content hackers stay up to date with these changes and know how to craft their content in order to use them for their own benefit.
- Data analysis and optimisation – successful content hacking strategies are almost always data-driven. By carefully analysing your data, you can look for optimisation opportunities and manage your content strategy for growth.
- Recognising opportunities – a good content hacker will always be on the lookout for the next opportunity. Something like being the first to publish a breaking news story in your industry could be your key to achieving explosive success.
- Understanding virality – viral content is one of the cornerstones of content hacking. There’s no sure-fire way of ensuring a piece of content goes viral, but content hackers will do their best to maximise the chances of this happening.
- Originality – content hacking is all about finding your own unique path and not copying what everyone else is doing. Only those who experiment and think outside of the box can become true content hackers.
Growth hacking is a methodical task. By experimenting and assessing each trial, you are able to discover what is working to accelerate the growth of your brand.
There are some ideas that you can explore to consider for moving your content from stagnant to thriving.
1. Analyse Your Existing Content
One of the most effective and easiest ways to drive growth is by working out what you’re currently doing right.
Some examples of parameters that might define your most successful content include:
- Most traffic
- Most conversions
- Most inbound links
- Most likes and shares on social media.
Once you’ve identified this content, you need to reverse-engineer your content strategy for this particular piece of content and see if you can replicate it.
- What makes it so popular?
- How did you promote it?
- What do your CTAs look like?
Reverse-engineering content can also be an incredibly successful SEO technique. The information you get from Google Analytics and keyword research tools has limited usefulness. Instead, look to your content to get some insight into what your audience is looking for.
2. Analyse Your Competitors
You need to understand what your competitors are doing well.
There are various ways you can go about this – keyword research and competitor analysis is a good start. Just looking at who comes up on the first page of Google for your targeted keyword terms, and how they’ve crafted their content, can help to inform your own content strategy.
Buzzsumo helps you to find the content in your industry that’s getting the most attention on social media and identify trending topics.
Not only can you see what type of content is performing well, but you can also see who is sharing this content. This means you can identify influencers in your content niche and come up with a plan to get their attention.
3. Optimise Your Headlines
People often write a Google search the same way they speak. Questions in headlines and tips are SEO gold, so include them. However, these things also change over time, so keep up to date with trends and consider rewriting headlines for evergreen content so that your site rates highly in searches.
Your headline should tell people what they are going to read. And rather than following the simplified and casual ‘rules’ created by bloggers and marketers, you should respect your audience and give them journalism style of writing, including honest headlines, a pyramid style of writing. Your blog is not an elaborate mystery novel – it is information that you are sharing with your potential customers. They should not feel they have to dig for information or read 200 lines of mindless blogging to get to the answer they want.
