Growth hacking is a great alternative to traditional marketing model. How to plan activities in the local market and increase sales?
A small advertising budget requires searching for alternative ways to achieve sales goals. This is how growth hacking was born. It assumes a creative and unconventional approach to acquiring customers using non-standard methods. It is perfect for small, local companies. How to use growth hacking in advertising activities?
Valuable data
Growth hacking requires proper handling of data regarding consumer behaviour. The collected information is the starting point for further tailoring the product to expectations and needs of a potential customer. Growth hacker should be guided by website traffic statistics or social media analytics. The concept can be very effective for small businesses with a modest advertising budget. However, a growth hacker must be aware of trends, new technologies, web analytics, and marketing to match the product to expectations of potential customers in the local market.
One of the tools that allows for sending offers to a specific target group is push messages. They ensure consistent communication regardless of a device that users are currently using (computer, tablet, or smartphone). When planning to use push messages in the local market, you should first narrow down the target group to potentially interested recipients, so as to provide them only with the content they need at a given moment.
Audience segmentation
Obviously, before we start analysing the collected data, the audience should be segmented. Push messages can be sent to users based on location, operating system, or specified tags. Pushes engage subscribers, remind them of local events or new products. Unlike email marketing or SMS campaigns, they do not collect personal data, which raises greater trust among recipients.
A good complement to an advertising campaign is remarketing, thanks to which we can create recipient lists in terms of preferences or behaviours. Remarketing covers only those people who have had contact with the company’s offer (e.g. viewed a product in an online store). The cost of the campaign depends primarily on the number of clicks on the ad – remarketing gives an opportunity to freely manage the budget, which is especially important for small companies that do not want to invest straight away in more advanced advertising activities.
You can also direct advertising messages to a strictly selected group of recipients as soon as a user is in the vicinity of a given store or service point. Geolocation enables to reach a potential customer here and now. However, the way geolocation is used in marketing activities depends on the channel used:
- In the case of text messages, it is the telecommunications operator that monitors the location of their users’ phones thanks to base stations (BTS) and can initiate the sending of advertising texts ordered by advertisers. It makes their delivery (and often their content) dependent on information about the current location of a device (e.g. on a specific street near a shopping centre) or history regarding presence in specific places and at a specific time.
- In the case of mobile applications the process of sending geolocated push notifications by applications installed on a user’s phone looks similar, however, this time the application itself, after having obtained permission to access the location of the device, can send push notifications to the user.
- For web push notifications, which do not depend either on the telecommunications operator or the specific phone application, this is a little more complicated. Notifications of this kind are sent to a user’s browser, either mobile or operating on a desktop computer. This means that we cannot track a current user’s location. However, if someone has agreed to have web push notifications sent from a given site, it is possible to check where they were at the time of interaction. In this case, it is recommended to collect data from multiple locations and make a decision to contact a user. It is worth sending a message to a recipient when the location of interest to us appears in their geohistory at least several times.
Geolocation has a great potential in the Polish market, but it should be remembered that recipients may be distrustful and will not want to share information about their location, because they do not know what their data can be used for.
Activating recipients
Place marketing can involve planning marketing activities exactly where potential customers are located, that is in a given city, region, or tourist attraction. What is important in this case is not only online promotion, but also creative offline activities. Place marketing uses many communication channels, including billboards or events. A good tool to support promotional activities on the web is OOH advertising which is intended primarily to reach mobile recipients.
Both large-format and poster advertising should be eye-catching and contain a small number of elements: a catchy slogan, clear and simple message, as well as minimalist graphics. When implementing place marketing, it is impossible to measure the effects, which is why this advertisement is classified as image-building. The strategy is a great complement to online advertising. For both online and offline campaigns, a good original concept with a viral potential is crucial. This is where success of growth hacking lies – recipients themselves promote a given product or service, while the brand does not invest large financial resources.
