Are you ready to hack your growth?
But first things first: What exactly is growth hacking?
Techopedia has this to say:
Growth hacking is the use of “logic processes and technology toward a specific end goal, in this case, customer retention and sales.”
From Huffington Post:
“Growth hacking is about scalability – ideally, you want your marketing efforts to bring in users, which then bring in more users.”
Sounds like a good thing, right?
So let’s ask that question one more time: Are you ready to hack your growth?
You should be, unless you want to wait around for years.
Below are five tools to turn your business into a giant this year:
Benchmark
Email marketing is as powerful as it’s ever been.
Because of the growing popularity of inbound marketing and corporate social networks, people have prematurely announced the death of email marketing. This isn’t remotely the case.
Further, email marketing can be used as part of an inbound campaign. It’s not as though these two approaches are mutually exclusive.
Email marketing can hack your growth in a number of important ways. For one, it sends your message to however many people you have on your email list.
With an email tool like Benchmark, you can create follow-ups based on events. If someone replies to your first email, say, a cold email, you can send a predetermined second one. If they fail to reply this time, again, you can send a specifically tailored message.
All this allows you to automate an important part of your marketing campaign without ever lifting a finger once you have it all set up.
Going forward, you can focus your attention on other growth activities while Benchmark handles the email heavy lifting on your behalf.
Benchmark can also do all kinds of marketing processes for you and comes with the benefit of 24/7 support.
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Mention
Every company needs social media these days.
This is especially true of smaller organizations. Social media platforms are a means to even out the odds between you and your larger competitors.
Unfortunately, social media marketing isn’t as easy as it seems.
What often happens is that a small business owner starts on Facebook or Twitter and soon ends up overwhelmed. You may argue that overwhelm, in this case, is a good thing, a whole lot better than nobody caring about your brand.
Point taken.
However, there are some situations you’d rather not see yourself entrenched in:
- Find it impossible to keep up with your social media presence.
- Let other priorities fall by the wayside.
- Waste money on someone else to manage this important feature of your company.
This is where Mention can save the day.
The app is designed to keep track of every time someone mentions you on social media sites and notifies you when a mention comes through.
That’s not all though.
You can set filters with Mention so only the most important messages get to you. After a while, Mention learns which messages are important and which aren’t worth wasting your time with.
Dropbox
Nothing allows you to hack your growth quite as much as adding new employees.
When you’re first starting out, it’s easy to forget how helpful other people can be until the day you finally hire one or two, even if they’re just freelancers.
Still, employees aren’t an automatic benefit. A lot of people had to learn the hard way that they can quickly become burdens.
To be fair, sometimes, this isn’t entirely the employees’ fault. As the one in charge, it’s your duty to help your staff maximize their potential.
Dropbox, a document management tool, can help with that. It’s a cloud-based environment where members of your team can store whatever they want in terms of images, spreadsheets, documents, and other files.
You may have previously worked on documents with people via email:
- Someone sends a draft of a blog post, report, or contract.
- Responsible people make their revisions and send the document back.
- The sender compiles the revisions, makes a final copy, sends it back out to the team, and hopes everyone is happy.
This is clumsy, at best. And, at worst, the time-consuming back-and-forth can result in lost business and opportunities. Remember, this is the 21st century. Processes have to be handled in the most efficient manner possible or you risk losing customers to the competition.
With Dropbox, everyone can collaboratively work on the same file or document, and you get a log of who did what. Because it’s cloud-based, people can access it from anywhere in the world and from any device.
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Trello
People may think that because you run your own business, you must be 100% organized every single time.
It’s okay, though. We know the truth. We know that it’s easy to get distracted at times and to even drop the ball from time to time.
Cut down on the instances of that happening with Trello.
This project management app allows you to create boards for every project you’re working on and lists the relevant tasks involved.
You can leave yourself plenty of reminders leading up to the final due date as well.
If you need help from your staff, with the push of a button, you can bring in employees, assign them tasks, and check in on their progress.
With Trello, it’s easy to eradicate errors you may accidently cause when you’re stressed or just not thinking straight.
Sidekick by HubSpot
Finally, small businesses should be investing in Sidekick by HubSpot.
For a free tool, you don’t ever need to worry about failing to make the most of your potential customers when they email you:
- Every time you receive a message, Sidekick shows you the sender’s social profiles, making it easy to learn more about the individual in no time.
- It allows you to track email opens and clicks, and schedule emails to be sent at a later time.
Sidekick integrates with Salesforce, harmonizing data sharing between the two apps.
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Final word
There are various ways to hack your company’s growth. Whichever technique you prefer, one thing is non-negotiable: technology use. Take advantage of the five tools we listed above and you’ll be amazed by how much your company can accomplish within a short period of time.
How about you? What other tools do you like to use?
The post Growth Hacking: 5 Tools You Need To Grow appeared first on Cloudswave Blog.