12 Free Growth Hacking Tools For Entrepreneurs And Startups To Achieve Growth

The goal of every entrepreneur is to attract the right target market, convert them into paying clients, and repeat the loop. However, most entrepreneurs struggle with figuring out ways to attract potential clients. Unlike traditional marketing, online marketing has evolved past ads and hard sell tactics. The way to win more customers is now through more subtle, less invasive sale tactics through growth hacking tools.

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The concept of growth hacking was coined by entrepreneur Sean Ellis in 2010. It refers to the various tactics used to drive traffic to a startup as quickly as possible – without spending too much money. It is also a process of identifying effective and efficient methods to grow your business across several channels.

Growth hacking is a combination of digital marketing, product design and management, and data analytics with the focus on scaling rapidly. This is particularly useful for entrepreneurs who want to grow their businesses with their limited resources.

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Free Growth Hacking Tools For Entrepreneurs

There are many growth hacking tools available that will enable you increase your reach to your target audience. We have prepared a list of free growth hacking tools that you can apply to your business.

1. Search Engine Optimization

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It is simply the practice of increasing the quality and quantity of traffic to your website through organic search engine results. To break down the terms, getting quality traffic means attracting visitors who are genuinely interested in the products that you offer.

Increasing the quantity of your web traffic can be done by having more people click your website from the search engine results pages (SERPs). Organic search engine results are traffic that you don’t have to pay for. SEO is the best way to be found without any hard sell. 

Start by ensuring that you create good and relevant content on your website. However, you need to ensure that there is no plagiarism, no auto-generated content, and no keyword stuffing. By doing this, you are adhering to Google’s policies and guidelines.

Next, build backlinks to your site by having other brands and websites talk about and link to your website. This also promotes trust from customers and helps you easily get found.

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2. Social Media Ads

Social media ads especially Facebook and Instagram are powerful marketing tools for growth hacking. The power of Facebook ads cannot be ignored. In fact, Facebook alone had a whopping 19.6% share of the digital ad market in 2018. Instagram, on the other hand, is also owned by Facebook. You should explore using Facebook and Instagram ads to market your brand. This is a powerful hack that can foster growth is remarketing. 

Remarketing works by following the people who have visited your website around the web with related offers. When a user visits your site, they are “cookied”. They then get to see your ads across the web as they go.

Your brand follows people around, making it easier for them to choose you when they need your product or service. So, when you see ads on other sites of a webpage that you had previously viewed, it isn’t coincidental, it is remarketing.

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3. Google My Business

Google My Business is particularly useful to businesses that have a physical location that clients can come to. It is free, fast, and the easiest way to drive traffic to your store. With a Google My Business account, you get more than a business listing. Your business profile enables you to easily connect with customers across Google Search and Maps.

Google My Business is a useful tool for dominating local searches. So when a visitor searches Google for something like “beauty shops near me”, the top results are relevant beauty shops in that area. It also includes important details like hours of operation, contact info, address, ratings, and website.

4. Email Marketing

By using email marketing, you can create active campaigns to communicate with your target audience. You also get valuable insights on your audience that has opened or read your email, which enables you to tweak your message in a more relatable manner.

Also, you can create a workflow for people who receive your email for the first time, people who have not read your ails in a while, and also your active audience. Email is also a way to see what language attracts customers. You also give personalised user experience by using their name and other relevant info.

Email marketing is important for building relationships with customers, especially in the early stages. It helps to convert leads to paying customers without spending on marketing. Hence, it is a vital growth hacking tool.

5. Content Marketing

You can save up lots of money by being creative in the kind of content that you put out. Many small brands have become big brands “overnight” by riding on the viral content that they have created.

Therefore, as an entrepreneur, content marketing is a vital tool that should not be overlooked. You can create eye-catching headlines, viral content, and interesting stories to draw in your audience. You should aim to create content across platforms that are relatable, emotional, motivating, and is lovable. Then encourage readers to share.

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6. Feedback

An important tool for growth hacking is implementing feedback mechanisms in your campaigns. It is important to track how your consumer interacts with your product/service. More importantly, you need to directly solicit feedback from your consumers on the entire customer experience.

Online surveys are efficient for generating this feedback. A protip to having your customers fill your survey is to make it short and fun to fill. Free apps that can be explored towards getting feedback are Typeform and Google form.

7. Collaboration

Collaboration tools are important growth hacking mechanisms that help teams with internal communication. This is more important in the face of a pandemic like this time, where most companies are working virtually.

Social media apps like Whatsapp, Facebook messenger, and Emails are not convenient for office communication. This is because it is not easy to create specific channel threads that can be referenced. A go-to app for collaboration among employees and teams is Slack.

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8. Outsourcing

As an entrepreneur, an efficient growth hacking tool that can be explored is outsourcing. Outsourcing is a process of having a freelancer handle some tasks in your company, to enable you focus on other aspects of your work. You may identify that some company tasks do not require that you hire full-time staff. These tasks could be marketing, web developer, content creator, virtual assistant, and animation.

You should give these tasks to freelancers who have a specialty in doing them. This saves you time and money. You can also outsource your content management, admin, and virtual assistant tasks to us here at ReDahlia. Other apps that you can find freelance staff are Upwork and Freelancer.

See Also: How To Develop Growth Strategies For Small Businesses

9. Branding

In the digital age, branding is one growth hacking tool that is a leveller. Small companies have been able to land big contracts just by leveraging on good branding. Branding cuts across every point of interaction that people have with your company. Your website, social media handles, pitch decks and presentations need to have a look and feel that is pleasing to the eye.

As an entrepreneur, you also need to create a brand guideline that documents your brand color palette, font styles, font sizes, logo variation, and the likes. An app that is very useful in helping you stand out as a brand is Canva. Canva is so invaluable because you don’t need to be a designer to use the app. There are templates across social media channels and other presentations that you can tailor to fit your brand.

10. Analytics

Analytics is a particularly useful tool for understanding user behavior on your platform. The most widely used platform for analytics is Google Analytics. The platform gives in-depth data on your site visitors, their behavior, and conversions to drive more growth. This gives you insights on what works for your existing users and what should be improved. If you are using a WordPress dashboard and looking for an easy way to access your analytics data, try MonsterInsights.

11. Videos

According to Hubspot, 72% of customers would rather learn about a product or service by way of video than by text. This makes videos a very powerful growth hacking tool for growing your business. You need to show your customers how to use your product.

YouTube is a powerful platform to put your videos. This is because YouTube is the second most powerful website after Google. The best part is that YouTube is free, so try including onboarding videos to educate your consumers and drive them to your site. You can use your videos on blog posts and also share snippets on social media. It is a no-brainer.

12. Webinars

Did you know that 2% to 5% of webinar participants will make a purchase? Hence, webinars are a useful growth hacking tool for both new and existing customers. Zoom is a very valuable app for this purpose. The exciting part is that you can record your webinars and share them on other social media platforms sharing the same knowledge.

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The Big Picture

The best part of the growth hacking tools that have been highlighted is that they are completely free to use and easy to learn. And, there is absolutely no downside to using them.

Which of these tools plus their related apps do you currently use, and how helpful has it been to your business?

Let’s create visibility for your brand and put your business on the world map. Contact us today to make your business the preferred brand for our audience of entrepreneurs and business leaders.

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