Is your marketing a bit stale? Feel like you’ve hit a plateau? You might have heard about growth hacking from the startup world, but actually any kind of business can do some marketing growth hacking of their own to see results without huge spend.
For your average B2B business, your best measure of growth on the marketing side is your sales pipeline. So our tips here are all about engaging new leads, re-engaging old ones and making sure they slide smoothly down your marketing and sales funnel.
Here are five marketing growth hacks you can start using straight away to unlock more leads and start having better conversations.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a great tool for finding perfect prospects and engaging with them.
Use the tool’s in-depth search functionality to find who you’re looking for. You can search by company size, content keywords, even what school they went to – check out the full list here.
Then you can create lead lists (which only you can see) for specific segments – perfect if you service a few different industries or business sizes.
Don’t just rush in with a sales message – follow what they post and engage with their content. Not only is it a more personable approach, but you might be able to answer a few of your initial sales questions just by what they’re posting. You can build out a clear picture of their personality and their challenges before you come in with a pitch.
Yes, there’s lots of noise distracting from the signal on Twitter, but lots of relevant conversations happen there, and certain industries (like tech) are very active. There’s also a certain kind of discourse that happens on Twitter that you won’t find on any other B2B social media community.
Use hashtags and location search to find people talking about the topics you’re interested in. You can use Twitter’s Lists functionality to keep track of prospects, but keep in mind that every Twitter user can see which lists they’re on.
Once you’ve found your target audience, start getting involved in conversations. If you have some crossover from your LinkedIn list, engage with them on Twitter too – just make sure to do it in a manner that’s appropriate for the platform. The same works vice versa – often you’ll want to bring Twitter leads over to LinkedIn for a more work-focussed conversation.
When you find a trending topic, the next step is to start capitalising on that buzz by setting up a Google Ads campaign to direct traffic to your website (use Google Keyword Planner to narrow in on the specific keywords – the below example is a keyword search for “marketing growth hack”).
You need to send that traffic to a page that’s relevant to the topic and provides some value – for example, sending leads from a specific industry to your industry-specific website page. If you don’t already have one, write and publish a blog on the topic. Otherwise, the traffic will bounce and you’ll just be wasting your money.
Here’s an example from our perspective: if a topic was trending about the rise in small B2B marketing agencies, we could write a blog about how we only focus on B2B (and why), and then set up a compelling Google Ads campaign to direct traffic to it.
If you already have a library of blogs that perform well, you don’t need to get distracted by the need to be pushing out heaps of new stuff. You can add value to your existing blogs by adding in ‘content upgrades’.
This is content that’s more in-depth than the blog but still the same topic – for example, a research report or an infographic.
Put a link to this upgraded content on the blog, but behind a form. This is a great technique to combine with your Google Ads from point four.
Right now you might re-engage with an old contact if you happen to remember them, or you have a new product or service to pitch. But as you grow, you should have a system in place for re-engaging with old prospects.
You can set up an email automation through your CRM software – but there’s nothing wrong with an old-fashioned phone call or email as well. Just make sure you have a trigger which will notify you when it’s time to get in touch.
These prospects could be proposals you didn’t win or leads that fell quiet… there’ll be a lot of them, and it might look like an intimidating list – but remember, they showed interest in your business for a reason. If you have a shiny new piece of content (or you’ve recently updated an older one 😉) you have a perfect reason to reach out.
Now you’re ready to start your own growth hacking campaign with our tried and tested marketing growth hacks. With these techniques you can break that plateau and get your message out to a whole new audience.
Just make sure you’ve refined that message and your proposition is crystal clear before you start – you wouldn’t want to waste the opportunities about to come your way!