Any B2B business owner knows that growth is the key to success, and growth hacking is a sure-fire way to optimise that growth.
This is doubly important if a company needs to generate huge growth and is dependent on a tight budget, let’s say, an early-stage startup or first-year small business. Numerous industry leaders such as AirBnB and Dropbox had an early boost due to the success of their growth hacking campaigns.
What exactly is Growth Hacking?
Growth hacking refers to any campaign that is focused on the growth of your company. The aim is to bring in as many customers or prospects whilst spending as little as possible.
B2B Growth Hackers use creative and analytical processes to generate and retain new customers.
Their focuses usually include content marketing, product marketing and advertising. They use strategic methods within these types of marketing to improve site traffic and online visibility.
But Growth Hacking doesn’t just bring in clients; you can also find the most effective channels of communication for your customers so you can leverage stronger connections, analyse their purchasing patterns and draw conclusive analytics that will inform your strategy going forward.
It’s not just about getting your business started; it’s about keeping it going.
Growth hacking might sound like a magic formula to success, but it really isn’t all that mystical. Its success is based on having the correct tools to optimize your strategy.
Growth hacking tools can measure the performance of your marketing campaigns across different platforms. You can then use the information you gather to find the best ways to engage your audience and inform your wider strategy.
But where do you start?
If you’re trying to keep costs down and only manage SaaS subscriptions that will have an impact on your bottom line as well as your growth, it can be hard to know where to invest. We’ve put together a list of tried and tested, top hacking tools that B2B companies can use to elevate their growth hacking and reap the benefits.
1. Buzzsumo
Buzzsumo is a great tool for generating social media and competitor analysis which will help inform the content of your marketing strategy.
The company has put together a comprehensive selection of categories that allow you to track social media trends. It’s easy to use toolset, with basic free content and more in-depth analysis available when you upgrade.
You can isolate keywords, topics and what search questions people are looking for as well as a categorised summation of the trending topics across different platforms.
They have options to drill down on backlinks and to research influencers across platforms and see who is a distinctive thought leader on specific topics. They also have a search bar to input a targeted competitors URL to give you a clear outlook on where you need to be optimising.
This knowledge is invaluable in building your content strategy as you can give your team the upper hand in predicting trends. Armed with this knowledge, you can generate more relevant content, increase your social media shares and generate conversions with informed CTAs.
Their features will save you and your team huge amounts of time that would have been spent researching across platforms to save you countless hours and streamline your workflow.
2. Drift
3. Calendly
(Photo credit: Calendar.com)
Calendly is a simple solution to a process that can sometimes take up far too much of your precious time. Scheduling.
This platform cuts down on time spent pinging scheduling emails to your team members, and to clients by streamlining the entire endeavour with an easy-to-access form.
Once you’ve connected your calendar, you’ll be presented with an automated list of your company emails, and you are able to select who to invite. It’s flexible and makes booking a one-on-one, round-robin or group meeting at any team.
You can also send the link to your own schedule (with appropriate meeting times listed) to any email you like and invite them to book themselves in to meet. This is a dynamic way to schedule your time and optimize your business.
The ease of Calendly can actively support your lead generation and sales acceleration by adding it as a step in your B2B sales cycle. Once you’ve identified calendar gaps, you can embed your availability into your website, negating the need to pitch the meeting altogether. If, for example, you host e-commerce coaching with a pay per session fee, you can even programme the tool to take a payment when booking, which will save ample time on your finance process and avoid any missed payments.
4. Hotjar
5. Reply
Email is a consistent pillar in B2B engagement, sales and customer service, but many companies struggle with executing effective cold email services, and the sheer amount of time it takes.
Reply is a sales automation platform that can be used to streamline your day-to-day and strategise your email services for personable, quality email content to optimise your campaigns.
The multi-use nature of reply is enormously helpful to any B2B growth hacking strategy as they aim to support you in discovering prospects, nurturing leads, executing your campaigns and improving your results.
You can use their email finder and outreach extension to search Linkedin for prospects and fully automate your outreach. You can have scheduled follow-ups sent, trigger calls even run A/B tests and analyse sequence stats to optimise your sales.
The company prides itself on the personal touches that give credibility to your automated services and never look automated. You have full control over what is being sent out and can personalise and tweak your templates as much as you’d like. This makes it an excellent option for boosting your outreach across multi-channel networks, whilst ensuring the carefully crafted tone and image of your brand is never compromised.
6. Growth Hackers Experiments
B2B growth hacking really isn’t anything without competent, in-depth analysis and consistent testing to ensure your processes are serving you well.
Having a system in place to manage your growth tests is an important stage in growth hacking to connect your key performance indicators to your company strategy.
Enter Growth Hackers Experiments.
This tool from the company that coined the term ‘growth hackers’, allows you to run tests across the entire customer journey and has been made especially to serve growth hacking teams.
The software developers of the tool have really given thought to what needs to be analysed and developed to optimise your testing. They offer a variety of features including; defining your objectives, generating an idea backlog and even custom integrations if you have a particularly complex test in mind. The tool is especially well-suited for fintech app development, where the complexity of financial transactions and regulatory compliance requires robust and comprehensive testing. By offering features that enable users to clearly define objectives, generate ideas, and integrate custom testing scenarios, the developers ensure that fintech apps are thoroughly vetted and perform reliably under various conditions.
You can automate results through your behavioural data tool or even Google Sheets, to keep data to hand. There’s a feature to create in-app meetings so experiments can be run, shared and discussed in real-time. They’ll even automatically generate reports with focused testing results so you can focus your findings.
This is a brilliant toolset for anybody who wants to keep optimising and streamlining their growth hacking strategy to gain optimal benefits.
Growth hacking is an important stage in any B2B companies’ strategic journey, and these tools can make that journey far less rocky.
To your surprise, you can even take this further with automation tools like Integrately. It can help you connect all your apps and automate your workflows. That too without writing a single line of code. You just need to set up the triggers and actions, and it takes care of the rest. I know it’s hard to imagine how easy your life will be with automations , so better explore it for yourself.
If you still feel unprepared to tackle growth hacking alone, we can help!
Here at Pearl Lemon, we can offer a complete growth hacking strategy and implement the process for you, leaving you to spend more time doing what you do best, running your business.
Our experts will show you how to achieve the best possible market fit for your products and get the early customer traction you need.
Why wait? Book a call with us today and see how Pearl Lemon can help you attain rapid, but sustainable growth.
