Excellent growth hacking advices by Nathan Barnwell: Growth hacking is an interesting trend that gives us glimpses into the future of internet based companies. There has often been a barrier between the product team, and those responsible for acquiring users for the product. The coders build. The marketers push. It seemed to work for a while that way. Now, those in charge of growth are having to learn what an API is, and those in charge of programming are having to think about the customer experience within the product. Worlds are colliding.

Finishing the second decade of the 20th century, not to start a business, but its growth and continuity have become a priority issue. In this context, growth strategies have become more important than ever and survival in the business world without growth is not sustainable in the long term. We see numerous brilliant growth strategy examples from major companies’ start-up days. Growth is an issue that is needed to be discussed with different approaches. Considering it just as a variety of products is a big mistake. It refers to expanding the product line, services, customer base, company size and more. But the essential need to acquire growth comes from increasing the number of your customers, the rest comes packed with it.

Nathan Barnwell growth hacking strategies: Some growth strategies are tailored to be completely self-sustainable. They require an initial push, but ultimately, they rely primarily (if not solely) on users’ enthusiasm to keep them going. One strategy that fits that bill is the viral loop. The basic premise of a viral loop is straightforward: Someone tries your product. They’re offered a valuable incentive to share it with others. They accept and share with their network. New users sign up, see the incentive for themselves, and share with their networks. Repeat. For instance, a cloud storage company trying to get off the ground might offer users an additional 500 MB for each referral. Ideally, your incentive will be compelling enough for users to actively and enthusiastically encourage their friends and family to get on board.At its best, a viral loop is a self-perpetuating acquisition machine that operates 24/7/365. That said, viral loops are not guaranteed to go viral, and they’ve become less effective as they’ve become more commonplace. But the potential is still there.

A good growth marketer thinks big and tests small. They can envision anything — even Craigslist! — as a marketing channel, but they also run constant cheap, iterative tests to make sure their ideas can work. When DTC growth guru and investor Nik Sharma worked at Hint Water, for example, every major marketing push started with small, cheap tests — a growth marketing staple. If a small test got splashy results, the company invested more in the strategy. This helped Hint Water avoid expensive missteps, and innovate effectively; the company helped pioneer influencer marketing as we know it today. “Now everybody does it,” Sharma told Nathan Barnwell. “But three years ago, nobody else was doing it and people thought it was kind of sketchy.” That’s the power of growth marketing — it’s an approach that allows you to confidently invest in a new channel. You just test first.

Getting permission to run this high impact testing often requires setting up an offsite meeting with the growth team, functional leaders and the CEO. Once you’ve been given permission to test, it’s important to set up specific improvement objectives and track progress against them. This will help your team generate relevant ideas and keep everyone informed about progress. As you run higher impact testing, you should start to see some big wins. These big wins will be critical for driving broader team participation. Keeping a full team in sync around growth is not an easy task. Building the habit in the first place is even harder. But the effort is well worth it. No individual growth hacker or even a growth team can outperform a company where everyone is mobilised to accelerate growth. Read a lot more details at Nathan Barnwell.

Don’t hit the ground running without planning out and documenting the steps for your growth strategy. We recommend downloading this free Growth Strategy Template and working off the included section prompts to outline your intended process for growth in your organization. It’s great that you want to grow your business, but what exactly do you want to grow? Your business growth plan should hone in on specific areas of growth. Common focuses of strategic growth initiatives might include: Growth in employee headcount, Expansion of current office, retail, and/or warehouse space, Addition of new locations or branches of your business, Expansion into new regions, locations, cities, or countries, Addition of new products and/or services, Expanding purchase locations (i.e. selling in new stores or launching an online store), Growth in revenue and/or profit, Growth of customer base and/or customer acquisition rate.