Startups are unique in many ways. Talking purely in terms of growth, most of them target upwards of 20% month-over-month growth with lean marketing budgets. It might seem insane, but many startups have shown that it’s possible with a great growth marketing plan.
Driving massive traffic to your website is key to growing your startup. You can drive it using inorganic methods such as Google Ads, Affiliate Marketing, etc. These methods are expensive and work great for immediate results. Many don’t have huge marketing budgets and instead invest in long-term growth.
Having been a marketer for over two decades, I’ve been a part of marketing plans that have witnessed huge successes and spectacular failures. In this blog post, I will lay down five proven growth marketing methods that are bound to boost your website traffic. But before we get into it, I’d like to share a few things regarding ‘organic growth.’
Organic Growth: A Different Game in 2022
A decade ago, getting website traffic was a simple game. You only needed to produce quality content in your niche and implement SEO strategies. This strategy yielded insane traffic from Google and other search engines. Plus, there wasn’t so much of a rush on social media platforms, and you could catch some eyeballs. Unfortunately or fortunately, things have changed.
Social media has become a much more important part of our lives than it was. The customers have access to a mountain of information, new marketing methods have emerged, the competition has fired up, and many such factors have changed the face of ‘organic growth.’ We’re telling you all this to widen your horizons as far as ‘organic growth’ is concerned. It’s time to take your old glasses off!
Know What You’re In For
In case anybody tells you that producing a ton of content will give you result, they’re probably lying or don’t know what they’re talking about. Here’s why:
- Around 7 million blog posts are published every day across all platforms
- More than 2 million posts, articles, and videos are published on LinkedIn every day
- Over 30,000 hours of video content is uploaded to YouTube every hour, which means around 7,20,000 hours of content every day
We don’t want to discourage you, but this is A LOT of competition, and it will need much more than blog posts and social media posts.
Now that you have a fair idea of what you’re in for, it’s time to dive into how you can leverage the power of organic growth marketing methods to drive traffic to your site.
Tip 1: Create & Promote Your Content in Style
Whether you’re creating a blog post, social media post, podcast or any other form of content, you’re going up against millions of content pieces that will be communicating pretty much the same thing. The chances of success are even slim if you consider reducing the attention span of an average user.
The only way to succeed with your content is to grab the eyeballs in 0.5 seconds is to do it in such a way that they cannot scroll past it. No, we’re not talking about click baits but creating something that they cannot refuse to go past without checking even once.
Here are some tips for creating content that stands out:
- Producing content that solves the problems of your targeted customer
- Giving eye-opening research or study from the industry that would be of their interest
- Creating conversational content that people can relate to
- Creating your content with a particular style and tone. For instance, your blog posts can be humorous and solve customers’ problems simultaneously.
- Collaborating with industry influencers to promote your content
Tip 2: No “Gut” Based Decisions
Another big differentiator, especially in today’s age, is how you take your marketing decisions. Most startup founders depend on two things when it comes to making calls: their “gut” or the “most experienced” Joe in their team. It’s time to move past both and rely on one thing that generally doesn’t go wrong, and that is ‘data.’
I come across many startups, and it baffles me to see many startup founders having so little idea about their targeted customers. You might be a geek and might not be involved in marketing at all, but there’s no way you can even create a great product if you don’t know your audience.
For starters, here’s what I would suggest you do:
- Create a data-based customer persona and find out the kind of content they consume the most.
- Perform an in-depth analysis of marketing efforts of at least three competitors who’re doing great and find gaps.
- Check the ROI of your current marketing efforts and find holes in it.
- Arrange a workshop for all your company employees and understand your targeted customers.
- Find out which forms of content are working the most (for example, blog posts of more than 3,000 words deliver better results)
The bottom line is to do things backed by reliable data and not because “everyone is doing it.” Unfortunately, only 39% of marketers have a well-defined content marketing strategy. Don’t be one of them and start by putting things on paper.
Tip 3: Build Relationships & Collaborate
The world runs on incentives, and everyone needs something. There are many people and platforms that are hungry for content from outside sources. You should find such platforms, reach out to them and see if you can create a win-win situation.
The same goes for influencers as well. Rather than reaching out to them at the time of need, you should understand their work and build a rapport with them. This way, you can approach them and ask them to help you by sharing or promoting your content.
You should have a list of people and platforms that you could collaborate with in future and build relationships through genuine feedback and helping them out in any way you can. The key is to take a personal interest to help them rather than just writing “well done” comment on LinkedIn. Personal relationships are way too underrated, and you should leverage them as much as possible.
Tip 4: Build Your Personal Brand
Most startup founders are geeks who take little interest in marketing and communications. As a result, their marketing campaigns lack the human touch and leave a trust gap between them and their target audience.
Building a personal brand can go a long way in establishing a brand’s presence and expertise. More importantly, it helps customers know where they’re buying their products and builds trust. So much is the power of the personal brand that Tesla doesn’t spend a single dollar on marketing or advertising. It’s all down to Elon Musk’s personal brand.
You can formulate a personal branding strategy based on your company’s core values, preferences of your customers and the impression you want to leave in people’s minds. And you don’t need to be the most social media savvy person to do it. You need to share your knowledge and expertise with your audience. You can do it in the below formats:
- Creating blog posts on your website or platforms such as Medium
- Penning down your thoughts and opinions on social media platforms
- Sharing videos to communicate with your audience
- Attending trade shows and giving keynotes.
- Doing webinars with your audience and industry stakeholders
- Doing podcasts with industry influencers to share knowledge and views
Tip 5: Build Your Own Audience
Many companies struggle for steady traffic even after years in their business. That’s because they rely too much on Google and social media platforms to drive their traffic. They might be doing great at the moment, but all it takes is one change in algorithm, and your website traffic could fall off a cliff.
The key to having long-term sustainable traffic is to create your own audience. In simple words, if a new user sees your social media posts or a blog post, you should have a clear plan to turn them into your subscriber or follower so that they can see your future content and eventually turn into your customers. Such a strategy is regarded as a ‘content marketing funnel’ or ‘sales funnel.’
Building such a funnel is not an easy task as it requires patience and consistent efforts. Here are a few tips you could implement to build your audience:
- Inviting users to follow and subscribe to your page on various social media platforms
- Directing social media traffic to your website
- Giving free e-books and converting them into email subscribers
- Publishing your newsletter on a consistent basis
- Interacting with users in the comments section of your blog and social media platforms
- Publish ‘how-to’ guides and infographics to drive traffic
Additional Tip: Share and It will Return
Marketing has changed. It’s no longer a game in which the biggest and badest win. It has become a game of kindness, education and sharing. The best marketers are no longer interested in driving insane sales temporarily; they want to offer their targeted customers the best solutions and knowledge.
That’s why every company has to be a content production company, no matter which niche they’re in. So if you’re one of the founders, you will have to be prepared to wear many hats.
Concluding Thoughts
A lot of what I’ve just mentioned might seem like a lot of work, and it is. The days of ‘set it and forget it’ marketing methods are gone. If your startup founders don’t have a background in modern-day marketing, it will be difficult to keep pace with the competition and hit your targets.
That’s why I always insist startup founders hire the right marketing team or marketing agency once they achieve reasonable stability of their products and services. The former is a more expensive option for startups since you need to hire many people such as marketing head, copywriter, graphic designer, SEO, social media marketer, etc. That’s why most startups tend to hire growth marketing or digital marketing agencies to do the marketing for their products or services.
After spending over two decades in the marketing divisions of many companies, I decided to start LeanSummits to collaborate with business leaders to help them address their most pressing business needs and seize the most promising business solutions. Our business model is based on your success rather than your budget. LSS’s objective is to grow your business by providing you with the right tools. We do not want to sell you anything that will not generate a return as all of our initiatives are ROI based.
Schedule a free consultation to take the first step towards achieving massive organic growth!
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