Instagram is a high-return social channel, especially for the B2C focus. It is a great channel to tell visual stories, so missing out on Instagram is not an option.

Instagram profiles with around 1000 followers have the highest engagement rates which reduce as the number of followers increases. This means profiles with 10,000 to 100,000 followers have much lower engagement rates than profiles will 1000 to 2000 followers. This is good news because it’s easier and cheaper to use micro-influencers than macro-influencers. Here’s how you can leverage micro-influencers:

HOW TO:

Step 1: Make a list of micro-influencers. (Micro-Influencers are easily-approachable and Budget Alternatives to Advertising or Macro-Influencers).

Step 2: Outreach to micro-influencers in your domain through Instagram or Email (Many influencers will have their email ID in their bio or a link with their email ID on their Instagram profile) to promote your brand.

Step 3: Finalise a Cost Per Engagement (CPE) or Cost Per Action (CPA) price with them instead of a flat fee model.

Step 4: Track performance metrics through actions.

FURTHER INFORMATION

This is a simple OPN growth hacking workflow which focuses on the fact that many micro-influencers are more effective than a single macro-influencers since data shows that Instagram reach reduces with the number of followers of an account. We have found Influencers to have around 45% response rate to Instagram DMs and emails which makes this workflow even more effective.

80% of the views come from only 20% of your content. Why? Because only 20% of our content is useful for your target audience. This workflow helps you focus on that 20% and increase it to improve ROI.

HOW TO:

Step 1: Go to Quora.com and find popular questions around your topic.

Step 2: Schedule links on Twitter (or any other channel) to a bunch of Quora posts on Buffer with their questions as the body of your Tweets.

Step 3: If a tweet gains 3x above average interaction rates, write the post answering the question on your blog or website.

Step 4: Post the link of the answers (your blog links) to those questions on Quora.

FURTHER INFORMATION

This workflow helps you validate your content ideas but not only that, you don’t have to think about content ideas anymore. You already know what content would work!

An ‘Exit page’ is the last page accessed during a visit. That’s where the visitor ends the relationship with your website. Most marketers ignore Exit Pages. But what if you could turn those people who are about to leave into email subscribers? Customers? Lifelong fans? Here’s how:

HOW TO:

Step 1: Go to Google Analytics and find the most popular Exit Pages on your website.

Step 2: Go to your website and create a Popup (an “Exit Popup”) and set up the popup on all the exit pages.

Step 3: Offer a free calculator or worksheet or cheatsheet (or even your Side-Project if you have one) in exchange for the user’s email ID.

FURTHER INFORMATION

You can use one of these tools to create an exit popup:

● GetRooster ( http://www.getrooster.com/ )

● GetSiteControl ( https://getsitecontrol.com/ )

● ExitMist ( http://exitmist.com/ )

Exit popups can increase Visitor to Conversion Ratio by almost 100% or even up to 300% in some cases. A/B test from your exit pages to get the best results.

When it comes to scouting influencers, It’s either the money or the ego. For this hack, we’ll use the Ego.

HOW TO:

Step 1: Choose a blog topic for your niche which can include your CTA.

Step 2: Make the topic about Influencer Opinions. Example, “Top 25 Digital Marketing Influencers share their thoughts about Inbound Marketing”.

Step 3: Create a typeform or Google form asking Influencers for their opinion. Note: Your question has to be specific, so they can answer it in under 50 words (the less, the better).

Step 4: Tweet or email the link of the form to top influencers.

Step 5: Curate all the inputs from the influencers and for the ones who don’t fill the form, pick one of their public tweets on the related topic.

Step 6: Once published, don’t ask them to promote your content. Just thank them for helping you out and send them a link an hour or so after you publish it.

FURTHER INFORMATION

You will be surprised at the amount of engagement a single influencer share can get you. Try this out and if it works for you, jump into a more intense influencer marketing campaign. And next time, make sure you reward the influencers for their contribution!

SEO is the most important channel for your startup growth and it takes a lot of time and effort to RANK on the top search results for your target keywords. But we will doubt the default practice of SEO and show up inside the highest-ranking search results for your target keywords! And it’s not very difficult. Here are the steps:

HOW TO:

Step 1: Analyse the search rankings for the keywords in the first 3 search result pages.

Step 2: Filter the results for the keywords from the first 3 pages which are from publications, listings, review websites and blogs and make a list of these.
Step 3: Outreach to these websites to add your link to the list by contributing content to the same. (much faster than ranking your own blog or site).
Step 4: Additionally, place banner or link ads on these pages through direct advertising in these publications. (which is much cheaper than going through something like Google Adwords). This will get you the same visibility that you would get by ranking on the first few result positions, and maybe even more since you’re now “showing up” inside multiple search results.

FURTHER INFORMATION

We’re basically hacking into Other People’s Search Rankings (OPSR) in this case. They’ve already spent their time, money, resources and efforts to achieve the rankings and we need to LEVERAGE the same. You can also get SEO link juice by placing yourself on these results which will improve your own domain’s long-term rankings too! This works for all kinds of startups. And once you have a successful workflow, you can automate it using tech. Example: In Step 3, a JavaScript can open the contact forms of all these websites or track the Social Media profiles and then an auto-fill bot can send the query to all these publications on your behalf.

Probably the best hack if you want a mass email database of valid email IDs. This works best if you can segment your target audience by their web technologies. (Example: Magento, WordPress, Shopify, etc)

HOW TO:

Step 1: Target your prospects by the technology they use. Example: If you’re targeting e-commerce websites, the tech they might be using could be Magento, WooCommerce, or Shopify. You can find this by using a service called BuiltWith.com.

Step 2: On the same website builtwith.com use the link  https://trends.builtwith.com/websitelist/Shopify to get the lead information of all the websites using Shopify. This also gives you access to full meta-information about results, which includes people names, titles, emails, location, and telephone data.

Step 3: Repeat the same for other technologies, just use the same link but replace the name of the technology. Example – https://trends.builtwith.com/websitelist/WordPress.

FURTHER INFORMATION

As I mentioned earlier, this works really well if you know what web technologies your TA is using. Otherwise, go figure that out and then run this workflow.

Creating content needs a lot of investment in terms of both time and money. Curation is the preferred strategy in some cases and it can be automated easily. You can find APIs of channels who are already creating content in your niche and use them to curate content on your platform.

HOW TO:

Step 1: Find major social networks, forums, portals, blogs, and websites which produce content targeted to the same TA as yours. You might pick a general website and filter the content to match your categories.

Step 2: Integrate APIs or widgets of multiple channels like these on your blog.

Step 3: Now you have unlimited content on your blog which is being fed in through these APIs. Always mention the original link to avoid any duplicate content issues.

Step 4: Improve conversions further by having users sign up for a digest from your blog with the best content from all the channels to their inbox.

FURTHER INFORMATION

This workflow has helped a lot of our clients who’re focused on content. If you have a platform which focused on UGC (User Generated Content), find an API (not from your competitor) which feeds you UGC and just plug it into your website. This also helps solve a major chicken-egg problem which marketplaces often face.

Contests are the best way to drive engagement on social media and in this hack, we’ll take this a step further by using contests to gain a lot of email subscribers!

HOW TO:

Step 1: Create a contest incentivising people to participate and refer their friends to participate to increase virality. Announce the contest on your social media channels using creatives. (photos or video).

Step 2: Outreach to contest handles on Twitter (Find them using Advance Search) and contest pages and groups on Facebook. These contest pages will do the marketing for you and you’re leveraging their OPNs.

Step 3: You will start seeing engagement on your contest creatives on your channel from these handles. Start engaging with people who’re interested and ask them to invite their friends.

Step 4: Repeat weekly or monthly to boost engagement. Also, instead of giving out gifts, giveaway your product or discounts on your products.

Step 5: Announce the contest winners on your email newsletter instead of the social media channel.

FURTHER INFORMATION

The last step will make sure people sign up for your emailer. Just keep it relevant so they don’t unsubscribe later. If this workflow works well for you, repeat the contests once every 3-6 months to peak your email subscribers.

You probably understand your ‘likes’ are just vanity metric and probably have no real value by their mere collection. However, if you’ve got a TA match, fans mean much more than likes.

As they are potentially part of your sales funnel. In this hack, we will use the most engaged Facebook groups in your niche to invite people on Facebook messenger to like your business page.

This works because targeted groups mean a TA match and inviting them on messenger means extremely high view and open rates. Which essentially means better conversions. The best part about this hack is you can really do this in bulk. And what more: No javascript needed. Surprisingly, this is an inbuilt feature of Facebook. Untapped my most. So, here goes

HOW TO

Step 1: Join an engaged group in your niche.

Step 2: Start engaging with people in the group and add them as friends on Facebook.

Step 3: Go to your business page and in the right column click on the ‘invite friends’.

Step 4: In the not invited column, click on friends and you will see the names of groups which you are a member of. Click on any of the groups and it shows you the option to invite all the friends in that specific group.

Step 5: Click “Select All”, and tick on “Also send each invite in Messenger”.  Now just wait for your likes going up.

FURTHER INFORMATION

Always tick on the “Also send each invite in Messenger” every time as this is personalization. It goes directly in their messenger inbox and feels like a personal invite than just bulk invite all.

CASE Note: The features we’re leveraging in this blog perfectly at the time of writing the same. When you use these hacks, you may have to work your way around the changes made by the respective platforms, if any.

This one’s our current favourite and has already started getting me Unicorn-Like Results.

HOW TO:

Step 1: Define a list of keywords on any website based on your target audience. Example, It might be “Project Managers” on LinkedIn (B2B) or “Food Blogger” on Instagram (B2C). It could be any other website or forum as well and LinkedIn and Instagram are just examples.

Step 2: Go and get the SERPDigger tool. This is a chrome plugin we would need to use to Scrape all these email IDs. It’s a small but highly rewarding investment.

Step 3: Once you run the tool in Step 2, you will have a .CSV file with all the email IDs.

FURTHER INFORMATION

After trying many email scrapers, this is the best one I’ve found! The best part about this tool is that the results are validated on the basis of keywords you use.

This means you have highly targeted specific keyword-based results.