3 ways to grow hack your content marketing strategy

By now you’ve likely heard the phrase “growth hacking” almost as often as you’ve read about the power of influencer marketing. Growth hacking, a term originally coined by Sean Ellis in 2010 and used by countless others since then, is built around the mindset of being a hybrid of marketer and coder. Growth hackers answer the question, “How do I get more customers for my product?” with Google Analytics and conversion rates, all the while looking at marketing growth tactics through the lens of data-driven decisions.

Growth hacking’s roots stem from the integration of product development and marketing. When your product is your content and you’re telling the story of your brand, applying growth hacking tactics is the only way you can drive sustained organic traffic and (try to) make your content go viral.

As the co-founder and president of a brand experience agency, I often think about ways to apply this same thinking to branded content marketing. Here are three growth hacks that any business can use to hone their content strategy:

Data-Driven Content Decisions

The basis of growth hacking is built around the concept of data-driven decision management. As content hackers, we want to use analytics backed by hard data to influence — and ultimately dictate — our content strategy and verticals.

Ø  Monitor Google Analytics: What areas of your website are receiving the most traffic? What pages are consumers staying on the longest? That will tell you what content is drawing and keeping people on your site and in turn, what content you need to be producing more of.

Ø  Enhance Social Media Engagement: Social media is the ultimate real-time consumer focus group for your content. Try different tactics and see what sticks. Once you find those “sticky” content areas, expand upon them and build out your social content cadence accordingly.

Ø  Boost Email Open Rates: Subject lines matter. A lot. Customize your subject lines and brand voice to help separate your emails from the competition. Try out different templates and see what delivers the highest open rate. Email marketing is a long-term reach strategy, but that doesn’t mean you can’t growth hack your user acquisition. While we’re at it, don’t be shy about collecting email addresses everywhere, including your social channels.

Analyze and mine your data. Let the data dictate your content “tent poles” and topics, and leave all emotion-based reasoning at the door.

2.  Encourage Your Consumer to Share Your Content

While growth hacking has come to the forefront with the rise of startup empires like Airbnb, Twitter and Warby Parker, its roots go farther back, even helping to build digital legacy brands like Hotmail.com. Arguably the “father” of growth hacking, Hotmail gained more than 12 million users in less than one year due to a simple line of text added to the bottom of every email, “P.S.: I love you” featuring a link back to their homepage.

That simple idea that Hotmail leveraged to fast-track their growth can be applied across your content strategy.

Ø  Share Your Own Content: You have to push your content out – don’t expect people to find it or come looking for it just because it’s associated with your brand. And don’t be afraid to share it more than once.

Ø  Ask the Consumer to Share Your Content (and Give Them the Tools to Share It): It might seem silly, but it’s OK to ask the community to share and comment on your content. That’s what the Social Web and is all about. Just don’t forget to give them the ability to share your content via social sharing tools.

Ø  Leverage the Power of Influencers: Work with brand-friendly influencers to increase the potential reach of your content. Whether it’s a celebrity, a “super” influencer or multiple social tastemakers and bloggers, work with them to increase your organic reach.

Ø  Recruit Word-of-Mouth Brand Advocates: Apply social listening tactics to your community management to identify and engage with your brand advocates to empower them to spread your content gospel.

3.                  Incorporate Visuals Into Your Content to Unleash Its Full Potential

Content is king. We all know that by now. But that’s not enough anymore.

In 2013, social media management tool Buffer released a study that showed that tweets with images received 18 percent more clicks and 150 percent more retweets than those without. That was when Twitter first added in-line images to tweet and before the addition of GIFs, videos and the evolution of branded emoticons to the social content sphere. I bet that if we were to run the same study today, that percentage would be much higher.

Visuals – both static and in motion – make users pause their timeline scrolling. If all your content is based around plain text messages only, content-hack your own feed with original images, animated images and videos as well as universally accepted emojis and pop culture references. Content marketing is ultimately an inbound channel. Growth hacking your brand story is about making your content easier to find, consumable across all platforms, and easily shareable. Any concept or opportunity to do so is a hack worth exploring.

Source: forbes.com