18 Clever Growth Hacking Strategies from the Biggest Brands in the World
“Visualize a way to make a specific part of your world a better place for all those living in it and not just yourself. No matter how great your business concept is, it can only attain true commercial success if it is beneficial to more people than just you.”
― Michael C. Fanning
― Michael C. Fanning
Growth hacking is a method of identifying the most successful ways to expand a business through experimentation. Marketing, development, design, engineering, data, and analytics are all part of the process. Instead of following the traditional processes, a hacker finds a quick, creative, and cost-effective way to achieve growth, which is why it’s called growth hacking.
Below, you’ll find 18 growth hacking examples to inspire you for your next campaign. These examples cover old and new strategies from the biggest brands in the world.
18 Clever Growth Hacking Strategies from the Biggest Brands in the World
01
Puma
Ask yourself who, when, where.
Puma asked Pele to tie his shoes before the kickoff and Pele did it. As expected, the cameras focused on Pele and his Puma’s and made people realize the world’s best footballer wore a Puma. According to the book ‘Three Stripes Versus Puma’, Pele was paid $120,000 to crouch and lace his shoes. This might be the best case of influencer marketing until this day.
02
Unsplash
People like to be praised and be the center of attention. You can benefit from other people’s audiences.
Unsplash has a corner named ‘Collections’. They ask influencers (mostly micro-influencers) and invite them to pick their favorite photos and create a collection. Then Unsplash promotes the collection on the website, newsletter and social media platforms. The chosen influencers will often share their collections with their followers. And Unsplash gets free exposure + tons of user-generated content.
03
Vitaly Uncensored
A Growth hacker doesn’t always follow the rules. You can sometimes break them as long as it is bringing you growth.
Vitaly Uncensored is a strange adult jokes platform. And people barely knew they existed until the Champions League final in 2019. Until Kinsey Wolanski (co-founder and girlfriend of Vitaly) caused an international stir after running on to the pitch with a swimsuit written ‘Vitaly Uncensored’ all over. Vitaly Uncensored now has more than 32 million registered users and has raked in up to £3m in advertising as a result. And she was fined just £13,000.
04
Ahrefs
Make a list of conferences and offline events that you can join. And think of how you can direct the conversation to your brand.
They’re the most popular SEO tool and don’t use Google Analytics. Neither do they use the Facebook Pixel. Instead, they hacked the most prominent SEO conference (Brighton SEO) with a 10 cent coffee cup. Imagine how much attraction they had at the conference.
05
Gmail
Knowing behavioral psychology is a great asset for a growth hacker. Even a little psychological trick can be the foundation of a new growth hacking strategy.
If you were an early adopter of Gmail, you’d remember this one. You could only create a Gmail account if a friend invited you. And every referrer had a limited amount of invites, which made it more exclusive and triggered the fear of missing out (FOMO) marketing technique.
06
Please Don’t Tell
If you can make someone feel special with a big secret, you can create a community of privileged brand advocates.
A person accidentally discovers a secret passage door in an establishment and was treated with a card with a message: ‘Please Don’t Tell’. As you may relate, that person has felt like he discovered the most astounding secret in the world. He then talked about this experience to all of his friends and it caused a social chain reaction.
07
Zynga
Try to approach popular marketing tactics from a different angle to create your own growth strategies.
You must remember the era of FarmVille, MafiaWars or Zynga poker. These were the Facebook games that made addicts out of our friends, parents and loved ones. Zynga re-engineered this by offering three choices to the user: grind, spam or pay. Well, since people didn’t want to pay to continue playing games, they started to terrorize their friends by spamming them with invitations.
08
CD Baby
Differentiate your e-mail marketing strategy or copywriting efforts. Sometimes it is as easy as to put a smile on your customers’ faces.
Derek Sivers, president of CD Baby spent 20 minutes writing a masterpiece for an order confirmation message and it exploded on the internet. This content got forwarded thousands of times, CD Baby got gazillions backlinks and new customers.
09
Tiger King
Be creative with your brand name. It could be interesting to include terms that people are already searching for.
To get more visibility to his tiger show and steal Carole’s (his biggest competitor – Big Cat Rescue) audience, Joe Exotic started a new show under the name ‘Big Cat Rescue Entertainment’.
10
Fortnite
In growth marketing, it’s equally important to keep your current customers happy and transform them into your fans. (Focus on retention)
Fortnite was completely free. It has huge in-game updates, which they called ‘Seasons’. They regularly launched new game modes for a limited time to create ‘Fear of Missing Out’ (FOMO). And gamers kept coming back to not to miss this one-time experience. Meanwhile, they monetized the game by selling in-game items like character and weapon skins or dance moves.
11
Crimibox
People always fall for personality quizzes.
Crimibox asked several questions in a chatbot and helped them find out their inner detective. At the end of the quiz, they offer them to solve a murder case and direct them to the crime scene. This scene was Kickstarter. Crimibox increased its subscriber number from 2K to 10K in 15 days and successfully launched on Kickstarter!
12
Shazam
Invent a new habit that sparks curiosity.
It encourages you to hold your phone up to speakers. And this move gets everyone curious like “Why is she lifting her phone to the speakers?” So yes, this is nothing but a word-of-mouth marketing strategy at its best. 1 billion downloads definitely mean something.
13
Uber
There is always room to fit in with your product and outsmart the competition. Understand your competitors, customers and the environment to come up with smart tactics.
Hailing a cab after a night out is a pain in the ass, likewise in bad weather conditions. Uber knew that, and at the beginning, they focused on these key events. How could a brand single-handedly take down the traditional taxi business? By knowing the enemy and the customer. They also picked a subtle fight with yellow cabs by highlighting the areas where Uber excels like; easy payment, lower prices and no more taxi-hailing.
14
Hotmail
Leave a signature trail of your brand everytime a user uses your product.
Hotmail placed a default signature line to every outgoing email and invited receivers to create a free account. Afterward, Apple and others used the same e-mail marketing strategy to spread awareness and grow their customer base.
15
Hubspot
Many brands create little add-ons, apps and tools that solve a problem for their target audience. Afterward, they launch it on platforms like Product Hunt to get free exposure.
Hubspot created a free tool that measures your site’s performance by grading key factors like SEO, mobile performance and so on. Then it gives you tips to optimize your site. People shared this tool with each other, it got many backlinks and quite a lot of attention on social media platforms as well.
16
Airbnb
Your target audience is already hanging out somewhere on the internet, find them and think of new ways to transform them into your customers. Don’t expect value if you don’t provide value.
Airbnb leeched its competitor Craigslist’s blood and used them as a distribution channel for a long time. They encourage their audience to cross-post their listing on Craigslist with a link back to their Airbnb profile. Next, they contacted existing Craigslist hosts and asked them to sign up on Airbnb.
17
Dollar Shave Club
Think of a problem in your industry and, use content marketing, show how your product could solve this issue. Especially video marketing is an effective way to show your brand personality and deliver your message.
Picking a fight with a strong argument is a deadly growth hacking strategy. Dollar Shave Club used video marketing to declare war to razor industry giants by asking simple questions.
18
Dropbox
One, If you can give extra value, you can make the onboarding process fun and rewarding for your users. Two, design a double-sided referral program. Offer something to the referrer and the referee.
Dropbox is known for its creative onboarding process and referral program. The marketing strategy is quite simple. The product itself offers storage space in the cloud and they reward people with more space by gamifying the onboarding process. You refer Dropbox to a friend, he / she signs up and you both get 500MB extra storage. 1 stone, 2 birds.
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