How small businesses can create an effective marketing campaign

marketing campaign
Customer attraction strategy isometric illustration. Targeting advertising settings, sales growth, traffic conversions increasing, promo campaign. Business analytics, metrics tools 3d concept

You’ve probably heard of growth hacking. But what in the world is it?

Remember when Airbnb went from zero to hero in like one year? Or how about when Uber exploded into a billion-dollar company seemingly overnight? That’s growth hacking.

It involves using innovating, creative, and disruptive strategies to boost the growth of a business and focuses on the following three principles:

  • Innovation (how can I grow on a shoestring budget?)
  • Experimentation (how can I create a campaign that’s interesting enough to catch someone’s eye in a crowded market?)
  • Analytics (how can I make this campaign better, leaner, and more creative?)

Let’s look at four marketing growth hacks that will stuff your pipeline in 2021.

1. Get 10x reach with videos

Videos are marketing gold. They engage, convince, and convert customers faster than any other medium. Need more convincing? Check out these statistics:

  • Adding a video to your landing page can boost conversions by 80 per cent.
  • 65 per cent of execs have visited a website after watching a video (that’s B2B gold!)
  • 64 per cent of users will make a purchase after watching social media videos.
  • Websites with video are over 50x more likely to reach the front page of Google.

Adding videos to your social platforms, website, and landing pages is the single most effective way to boost conversions in 2021. Seriously.

Want to hear a success story on this? Let’s talk about the Dollar Shave Club

Yes! Videos can get 10x reach. But, sometimes they get 1,000x reach. That’s what happened to Dollar Shave Club. Their video “Our Blades Are F***ing Great!” has 26 million views on YouTube. That’s pop video level views.

Dollar Shave Club went from nothing to being acquired by Unilever for $1 billion from a single video.

2. Retarget your audience

One of the core tenants of growth hacking is finding ways to grow on a budget. There’s nothing more budget-friendly than tapping into your existing pool of prospects. Especially when you consider the following stats:

  • Website visitors who are retargeted with ads are 70 per cent more likely to convert.
  • 25 per cent of people literally enjoy seeing retargeted ads.
  • Retargeting lifts branded searches by +1000 per cent!
  • 91 per cent of marketers think retargeted ads work.
3. Flip your funnel

Finding people for your funnel is easy. Converting them is tough. Why is that?

The traditional funnel pretty much sums it up. After all, the funnel starts wide and gets small, right? Well, what if you flipped it upside down?

Instead of grabbing as many people as possible and slowly vetting them, try granularly targeting users first. This is a seriously good way to cut costs. If you can target the most valuable users, you can spend less time and money on ads. This strategy is known as Account-based Marketing.

4. Leverage automation

I can’t put the importance of automation into words. It transcends time-and-space. Automation is the single most powerful business driver.

Marketing automation results in a 14.5 per cent increase in conversions on average. Need to boost sales? Slap a chatbot on Messenger and watch the money roll in.

Tired of repeating the same workflows day in and day out? Automate them and free up employee time for more critical tasks. In other words, automate everything you can. It saves you money, time, and helps you grow fast.

Don’t fear the robot army, John Conner!

Joana Inch, Co-founder, Hat Media and author of “Go To Market”