What is Growth Hacking? (Definition)
This term was coined by Sean Ellis, the brains behind the whole concept, in 2010. It simply means using the least resources possible to expand your business in less time.
This technique is especially beneficial for startups, that need to maximize their growth output and gain a footprint in the market using minimal resources.
One thing that should be noted about growth hacking is that there is no pre-constructed formula that you can follow to fulfill your growth aspirations.
It requires constant experimentation, paired with creative acumen to gauge and implement what strategy works best for you. Growth hacking techniques could range from video marketing to influencer marketing, social media marketing and much more.
At its core, growth hacking means coming up with ‘hacks’ that will make it easier for you to drive growth, whether it’s customer acquisition you’re looking at or customer retention.
Why choose growth hacking over traditional marketing strategies to grow your business?
Growth Hacking uses many hacks to help businesses or start-ups to grow into something even bigger.
Digitization and new technologies like AR and VR have opened a completely new era of unexplored opportunities for marketing which eventually adds more and more NOISE to the ecosystem.
Search and social media are two major tactics anyone knows can drive the most business for them. But using growth hacking tools to make the most of search and social ups your chances of capturing the right audience.
But only a small percentage of marketers can effectively execute campaigns because they don’t know how .
The Growth hacking mindset believes there is always another better, optimized, and more efficient way to do things. It always pushes you to the limits to find new avenues of business growth.
92% of ideas fail. The remaining 8% experiment, learn and iterate to scale. Growth hacking is a 4 stage funnel – Attract, Acquire, Retain, Reap!
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This blog is an open-source initiative to offer you the best Growth Hacking tools and resources . We also accept clients here , if you need assistance with growth hacking.
So, here is a list of the best growth hacking tools , which also covers free growth hacking tools and growth hacking tools for startups that you can use to expand your business and your digital footprint.
Customers define your business. Finding hacks with available growth hacking tools or developing new tools to get your business discovered by your target audience will drive rapid growth.
Continuous testing with organic search optimization, paid campaigns, social media campaigns, influencer marketing, and customer acquisition hooks and hacks using a few of the below customer acquisition tools can help drive heavy traffic to your business.
Viral Marketing Tools
Gleam is a tool that works very well across multiple platforms. It enables us to run contests and rewards-based campaigns. It is one of the easiest growth hacking tools for contests. It also has other lead generation tools for timed opt-in forms.
KingSumo is created by the massively successful company AppSumo / Sumo. It is a viral contest/giveaway marketing tool. It can be used to win raffles, and participants win top prizes by sharing the contest. It’s very easy to use and it integrates with WordPress. They charge one flat fee for a lifetime of use – it’s one of the most economic growth hacking tools. It integrates sharing on social media platforms and you can decide how many entries a person gets per share per platform.
Viral Loops is one of the best growth hacking tools and viral marketing tools out there. It is also one of the most expensive tools to generate leads via viral promotions. You can run milestone referral campaigns, e-commerce referral campaigns, refer-a-friend, startup pre-launch, altruistic referral campaigns, and leaderboard giveaways.
Vyper can help you do viral sweepstakes and includes interactive popups that help customers earn coupons. You also get leaderboard giveaways and content upgrades with Vyper. In addition, you can try any plan for free and pay only when you’re ready to start the campaign – one of the more convenient growth hacking tools.
MobileMonkey’s Facebook Comment Guards is one of the most amazing growth hacking tools that makes your content go viral. The tool is very easy to use, and it is fully automated. You can use it on all your Facebook posts. Promote a blog post and get a chance to make it viral. This tool automatically catches a lead as well as the user’s data every time you get a response to your private message.
ViralSweep has 8 different types of lead generation campaigns, making it one of the top growth hacking tools . They have basic sweepstakes, contests with user-generated content, instant win contests, email forms, commenting giveaways, hashtag entry campaigns, promoted campaigns via influencers on their platform, and partner promotion campaigns via their networking platform.
Contest Domination is a software that helps brands reach their target audience effectively and generate new leads, improving sales. In other words, it is a contest software that helps companies create online contests that gather actual leads that spread virally – one of the most effective growth hacking tools . Contest Domination is the proven and most powerful viral contest software for generating qualified sales and deals.
UpViral helps in growing your e-commerce business with proven marketing campaigns. You can have a highly customizable reward system and a fully customizable referral link system. It allows you to A/B split test your lead magnet, which most of the other platforms do not, making it one of the smartest growth hacking tools. UpViral has a simple integration with all major autoresponders, easy setup and admin controls, and a great metrics and analytics tool with security protocols to eliminate user abuse and cheating.
This is the best giveaway plugin and a well-known acquisition tool for users of WordPress. It builds contests and giveaways online that can go viral. That’s because it awards contestants “entry points” for completing certain actions.
Influencer Marketing Tools
Influencify is an influencer marketing platform that delivers performance-based solutions. Using filters, you can sign in as an influencer or brand finding your perfect match. It is easy for the company to manage multiple brands or products, set up campaigns and track results that drive growth. Search through the broad database of 34 million + influencers across different channels like Instagram, Youtube, and TikTok. Influencify developed influencer, marketing automation, and affiliate marketing solutions in one tool.
Followerwonk is a tool which helps us to find out Twitter influencers. It is an amazing tool which lets us to see demographic insights about our audience, and also the audience of other brands. To use Followerwonk just search the type of influencer you want to connect with and this tool with come with multiple highly-connected people from that space. Overall this tool is funtastic for audience research, content creation and on overall digital strategy.
Social Blade is a tool that track social media analytics and statistics for instagram, youtube, twitter etc. It has a detailed analytics in literally anyone. It is like getting a deep look inside your competitor’s youtube studio account. Social Blade helps you with the real-time subscriber count. With this tool we can get the exact number of subscribers and views someone gets every month. On other words this tool is a transparent and detailed platform for social media analysis.
Colibri.io
Colibri is a growth hacking tool and one of the best ones out there if you want to make the most out of your SEO strategies . It integrates with Google Analytics and allows you to monitor the keywords around which your business is focused on.
Using this growth hacking tool you can also track the backlinks that your business receives, and check conversions for each SEO action taken.
One great thing about Colibri is that it allows you to track social mentions and conversations so that you can find prospects online and insert yourself into relevant conversations to talk about your brand.
One of the most crucial metrics to measure how your content is performing online is to gauge how website visitors are spending their time on your website. Crazyegg is a growth hacking tool that allows you to do just that.
You can see:
- How far users are scrolling down your page
- How much time they spend on the page
- What do they click on, when they’re on the page. (images, inbound links, etc)
- How different segments of traffic are behaving on different pages.
- Heatmaps depict where visitors are spending most of their time.
Click to Tweet is the easiest way to promote your brand online through Twitter, and it’s absolutely free. All you have to do is create a message that you want to share (in the box provided) and convert it into a custom link. Then, you can ask your audience to promote that link in exchange for some free gift or service.
This growth hacking tool then tells you how many times your Click to Tweet has been clicked on, and also how many times the link on your original tweet has been clicked on.
Consumer Barometer is a free tool that can come in handy when you’re performing market research to understand customer behavior online.
The fact that Qualaroo was created by Sean Ellis. It’s a website conversion improvement tool that provides sentiment analysis , a visual representation of how consumers feel visiting your website or using your product.
It gives you an insight into not just the how and what of customer behavior, but also the why of it. It’s mobile responsive and uses targeted questioning to better understand the needs of your customers.
Startups often have to indulge in cold email marketing to spread the word about their product or service. Hunter.io is an email finder that we’ve tried and tested, and it works splendidly for the most part.
You just have to type in the person’s name and domain, and Hunter.io will fetch your emails using its aggregator, and along with the confidence score that it gives to each suggested email.
Recommendation: Emails that were verified or had a confidence score of above 90% did not bounce, so avoid the ones that have a confidence score of below 90%.
Similarweb is a free web analytics tool that will aid you in assessing your competitor’s website traffic metrics.
You simply have to add in your competitor’s website URL, and Similarweb will show you which social media website they’re getting their traffic from, which country opens their website, the average time people spend on their website, bounce rate, etc.
You can use this growth hacking tool to evaluate which social media platform you should drive traffic from, which geographical region you target, etc
One of the most important mantras in growth hacking , especially for startups, is to gather and analyze customer feedback, Crowdsignals is a growth hacking tool that helps you do that by creating polls and surveys that you can integrate on your website.
You can edit your surveys according to your choice and brand image, and get real-time results from the same. You can then share these surveys through Excel, PDF, Google docs, CSV, etc using this growth hacking tool.
This a growth hacking tool created by Neil Patel, that assists you with Keyword research. It tells you the number of searches per month for your chosen keyword, the cost-per-click, as well as the websites that are ranking for that particular keyword.
It also suggests other popular keywords surrounding the one you’ve chosen. You can use this growth hacking tool to perform thorough keyword research and analyze what keyword or topic your next blog post will revolve around.
This is a growth hacking tool that will aid you if you want to go for influencer marketing. A lot of the top brands like Buzzfeed, Ted, etc have been using this tool to fulfill their content marketing needs. You can use Buzzsumo to find content topics and also influencers that engage in that particular topic.
You simply have to put your topic in the search bar and BuzzSumo will show you the online engagement of that topic on different platforms. It will also show you the most shared content around that topic so that you can get an idea of what’s trending online making it a great growth hacking tool.
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