Further to my original growth hacking article, I’ve been asked to put together several growth hacking and digital marketing proposals and realised they looks very similar. This is a very quick post with a generalised version of those proposals. You’ll need to decide what’s easiest for you to do, and what will have the most impact. Happy hacking.
UX/Heuristic:
Click through pages, find issues that might cause friction, confusion, and drop off.
Unpack your conversion process:
- What is the current process? Usual process would be to go through this and map it out.
- Is there any lack of clarity?
- Can you make it shorter?
- Review any customer feedback, heatmaps and user journey recordings.
- Look at glaring issues and try improve these.
Analytics:
Health check and improvements – you’ll be surprised how easy it is for your analytics to be set up incorrectly.
Look at Mobile vs Desktop reports. Is mobile an opener and desktop a closer?
Page performance:
- How long does your home page take to load? Enter your website into GTMetrix and get your score.
- Look at your Exit Pages/Bounce Rates reports per page. Look at your main pages, and your best/worst pages and how you can improve them.
- Look at what’s generating website goals: is it people coming from Facebook Ads on mobile, or is it Direct. See which ones you can scale easily.
- Dig into your sources, referrals, media etc to see what you can scale.
- Find your biggest traffic source/medium/keyword and see if you can scale what’s working.
- Have some fun looking into Google Search Console (if you have this setup) and do keyword research and well as Click Through Rates (CTR) from search results to your pages. You can customise the text that shows up in the search results in the meta title and meta description tags.
Paid Media:
- Gather insights from Paid Media (messaging, creative, placements). Focus on Facebook Ads and Google Search ads.
- Top and tail (increase hard working campaigns, remove under performing campaigns).
- Get a landing page analysis tool, do some A/B testing (fairly difficult to get right).
External Technical Analytics:
These are items you can control on your site that show up around the web.
- Schema (OG Tags and images). Do an audit, try and improve. A great Open Graph image when you share your link on Facebook can greatly improve clicks.
- Find structured data per page → Add to Google Sheet → Make better
- Add keyword queries (you got this from your Google Search Console work earlier) to Title and Descriptions. Optimize length. Did you know you can add emoji’s? 😎
- Branded search authority – Google your brand name, do you dominate the search results?
- Inbound Links – use a tool like Ahrefs to find out who links to you, try get more.
Mobile:
Mobile is very important to get right, it’s normally worth cruising through your site on an average smartphone and trying to gauge where it’s too painful.
- Current status of indexing (Google Search Console again).
- Create a list of improvements.
- Run some tests on a platform like Website Responsive Test.
Content:
Arguably the easiest for most people to fix as it’s non technical, and has a large impact.
Intent
- Figure out what kind of media your audience prefers. e.g. text? Images? Video? Audio?
- What are the biggest questions customers face before signing up? Are you answering these questions clearly enough?
- For good rankings we need people to spend 3 minutes and 10 seconds on pages! This is called Dwell Time. Do you have enough content for the customer to hang around this long?
Create Exceptional Content
What content will people DEFINITELY want to share?
Create content that solves a problem – content that moves, motivates, and connects with people.
Collect and tell customer and destination stories. The hero’s journey – I want to learn about {insert your product}, I can see how {insert your product} can change my life.
Five questions for best results.
- What was the problem you were having before you discovered our product?
- What did the frustration feel like as you tried to solve the problem?
- What was different about your product?
- Take us to the moment when you realized our product was actually solving your problem?
- Tell us what life looks like now that your problems are solved or starting to become solved
- Share your content everywhere.
- Growing expertise, authority, and trustworthiness with your content.
- Ask how can you (the brand’s people) be the go-to source for journalists around your core topic expertise? Sign up to HARO (or local equivalent) and answer questions journalists have.
- Can you get more of your employees to blog, write, and speak? Then do it.
- Hire experts to author, leverage data from known entities, and ensure credentials and credit is given to both, with appropriate affinity to the promoted brand.
- Make a video – just 1 to start, it’s less daunting. e.g. Explainer video.
Happy hacking.
