6 Essential Components of a Solid Growth Strategy

Let's get this right from the beginning. Obviously, in today's competitive market, it's vital to grow your business as fast as possible. If you have a great business idea or a cool product, but you don't know how to quickly market it, it's going to be very difficult to grow your brand, increase profit and become a successful entrepreneur.

One of the most important challenges that entrepreneurs face is creating a scalable business that generate substantial profit for stakeholders.

Here's the truth: If you don't follow the right framework, you will find yourself paying lots of money to marketing agencies or spending a massive amount of resources trying different marketing strategies that may, or may not, work for your business. As a matter of fact, as soon as you break through one strategy, you will find that it's incomplete, and you have to start again.

The biggest difference between a growth-driven business and a sinking company is in how good their founders and its marketers have embraced the growth hacker mindset.

In fact, entrepreneurs and marketers, who prefer to use paid marketing strategies, always expect quick results. When it comes to growth hacking, it's all about achieving consistent results, and that requires smart planning and a lot of hard work.

Read This: Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing, and Advertising by Ryan Holiday | Amazon | eBooks.com | Barnes & Noble

You set up your business to become a successful entrepreneur and make more money, but unless you have all the time in the world, plenty of money and a lot of energy to waste while learning from your mistakes, mastering growth hacking strategies will be costly and difficult - if not impossible.

That's why I've listed six essential steps to help you to layout a solid growth strategy, and easily scale your business.

Bear in mind that the first thing you need to do is to take guesswork out of the equation. Your ultimate goal should be to create your own growth hacking system. Here's how to grow your business faster than ever.

Step 1: Review your business model.

One of the most important yet undermined components of a powerful growth hacking system is a lean business model. Review your business model using the business model canvas, and make sure that you have done the following.

1. You have defined your customer segments precisely.
2. Each customer segment is correlated with a unique value proposition (UVP).
3. You have tested your offer with the market and incorporated customer feedback.
4. You have put in place a solid product/market fit strategy.
5. You have implemented a customer journey optimization strategy.

Step 2: Connect the dots.

Always remember that it's your job to transform your business into something powerful to create long-term sales, increase your growth rate and create an affinity for your brand; everything else will be your latter priorities.

Here are five essential steps to take.

1. Create your customer personas.
2. Understand your potential buyer's pain, gain and jobs.
3. Ensure that your product is addressing both functional jobs and emotional needs.
4. Monitor your competitor's marketing strategy.
5. Find new markets, which are easier to penetrate, and expand your business.

It's important not to duplicate the same marketing strategy as your rivals. Instead, focus on optimizing your growth hacking strategy based on your findings. This way you can spend more time on what's most important - growing your business and taking care of your customers.

Related: 6 Growth Hack Techniques You Can Try Today

Step 3: Use the right business pattern.

You must supercharge your business model with the right business model pattern. Depending on your niche, offering and pricing model you can implement any of these business model patterns.

1. Freemium model
2. Multi-sided pattern
3. Bait and hook strategy
4. Ad-centric pattern
5. Collaborative pattern
6. Unbundling business model
7. Exclusive pattern
8. Long-tail pattern
9. Low-cost pattern
10. Hybrid pattern

Step 4: Don't implement every strategy under the sun.

The truth is that it will cost you more than it benefits you to implement every single strategy that you read on the Internet. In order to grow your business, you must follow a three-step proven growth hacking framework, like the one I've outlined below.

1. Attract.

At this stage, you must focus on proving your value to your customers and implementing the strategies that attract customers to your website. You may use paid advertisements or organic growth hacking tactics, such as linkbuilding and content marketing.

2. Engage and acquire.

Once you attract your customers to your website, you have to engage them, using your lead magnet, and then walk them through an educational path to help them understand the value they're getting from your product.

Once you engage with your leads, convert your leads into customers. Bear in mind that automating your sales funnel, and implementing retargeting strategies can increase your conversion rate and revenue significantly.

Related: Growth-Hacking 101

3. Maintain.

According to Ipsos, attracting new customers costs 500 percent more that retaining an existing one. That's why at this stage, you must focus on offering great customer service and invest in creating engaging email marketing and social media campaigns to hold your customers' attention.

Step 5: Test. Adjust. Repeat.

In order to achieve a higher growth rate, consistently test your content, and adjust your landing pages based on customer feedback. Here are nine landing page optimization factors to pay attention to.

1. Ad copy
2. Title and sub-head
3. Message tone
4. Call-to-action (CTAs)
5. Button color
6. Microcopy, e.g. button text
7. Button position
8. Landing page length
9. Visuals

Related: The Definitive Guide for Growth Hacking (Infographic)

Step 6: Build your growth hacking system.

The most important step is to put everything together, and create your own growth hacking system. A growth hacking system is a customized growth marketing strategy that can be adopted and repeated.

Creating your own growth hacking system helps you plug in the right market intelligence strategies to your business model, then adapt the most efficient business pattern, and finally connect all of them to the relevant growth hacking strategies that lead to higher conversion rates and increased ROI.