Being in the ever busy world of content marketing, you must always be thinking about how to drive more traffic to your blog and how to engage more readers into active conversion. But are you always ending up clueless? Still can’t figure out how you can drive more people to your blog? The current world of brand marketing does not solely depend on content and its quality. Rather, brand business is more concerned about growth and result.
When you are assigned for the job of a brand’s content marketing, your goal should be to drive more traffic. But what is the way to make it work? Growth hacking influences a campaign and produces immediate results. Content marketing also needs to fetch such immediate results that will suggest business growth.
What if we fuse both together? What if growth hacking becomes a part of the content marketing world? The result won’t be as disappointing as you are thinking.
What is Growth Hacking?
Yes, you have heard it right. I am talking about hacking. It is used here to directly influence the growth significantly. This marketing strategy of ‘hacking’ primarily focuses on driving traffic to increase the conversion rate automatically. Where traditional marketing focuses on brand building and attention grabbing for business expansion, growth hacking mostly remains busy with the numbers.
Growth hacking, as introduced by startup marketer Sean Ellis, is not only for startups. As Ellis puts it, growth hacking can be quite effective to redefine brand marketing. What Sean Ellis suggests to focus on is methodology and simple tactics that result in increasing growth.
When you are applying growth hacking techniques into content marketing, you need to think of a new approach. You need to probe into the psychology of your potential customer and engineer a plan that will work like an explosion in the content marketing world. It should immediately drive more traffic to your blog or website.
Some Examples of Growth Hacking
HotMail
One of the earliest examples of growth hacking is the strategy used by HotMail. Launched in 1996, HotMail accomplished the mission of driving more traffic by an intriguing strategy. They added a small six word sentence “P. S. I love you”, at the bottom of every mail they sent. This sentence was linked back to their home page. The result was beyond expectation. Just after a few weeks, 80% of new sign ups found out about the service from just one friend.
And due to this success, HotMail was purchased by Microsoft for an estimated amount of $400 million.
Guest Blogging
When social networking was not in the vogue, guest blogging was one of the ways to create instant growth. The bloggers used to link back their articles to their content. It increased traffic at a notable rate. In fact, according to many content marketers, guest blogging is extreme friendly with SEO and it helps blogger’s ranking.
Characteristics of a Growth Hacker
- Growth hackers always talk about products that fit the market. If the product and the audience are in alignment, then they can actually jump into action. Without such alignment, scaling the growth is useless.
- Growth hacking is essentially inexpensive. So, it is a perfect technique for the startups.
- Growth hacking revolves around numbers. The true ROI for growth hackers is something that they can scale.
- For the real growth hackers, out-of-the-box ideas are the things that work. There are often some rules that a traditional content marketer loves to follow. But for growth hackers, there is no pre-determined rules. The techniques that work and give the best result, are rules for them.
Characteristics for Content Marketer
- Content marketers think of whether the content is aligned with the taste of the targeted audience. Whatever the brand they are marketing for, they mainly focus on what the audience is asking for.
- Content marketers love to market even the simple words of a content. The backlinks give them the opportunity to market other contents too. And they focus on doing it more than anything. They look beyond the list in their editorial calendar and search for opportunities to market the content.
- If the growth hackers concentrate on the scale, the content marketers think about the sustainability of a content. It is true that a content lasts more than the Facebook or Twitter post that markets it. A content also works for the content developer for making the plan of further content marketing strategies.
- As growth hacking is all about numbers, content marketing is about SEO. The ranking decides the fate of a content.
How to Fuse Growth Hacking with Content Marketing
In short, how to become a content hacker who will not only generate higher rate of traffic to the website or blog, but will make sure higher rate of conversion, is a question of million dollar now. Let’s find out.
#1. Catchy Headlines
The most important and prominent feature of an article is its headline. When we scroll through the search result, the new and catchy headlines grab our attention more than the generic cliché ones. The headline plays a vital role. Within its small package, it needs to convey what’s expressed throughout the content. Besides, it has to be attractive to grab the attention of the readers immediately and influence them to read the whole content.
Be more creative while writing the headlines. Use numbers. Be bold and outrageous while making your point. Confidence is the key that works behind every successful headline.
#2. Sharable Content
Your content won’t work if it is not share-friendly. A content becomes successful when it goes viral. Place multiple share buttons at different places of the content. When you are writing a content, make sure you choose a relevant topic that people find worth sharing in the first place.
Social media is the apt platform for sharing your content in various forms – as a write up, an infographic, or a video.
Must Read: Content Marketing Strategy through Social Media
#3. A Prominent Call to Action
Sometimes, to make people do something, you need to spell that out clearly. Call for action is meant to make people do what you want them to. It is often seen that if there is a button that calls for action in the content, then more people engage in direct conversion than that of brand marketing. If you want to sell your product, direct your audience to buy it. Want to share what you have written? Ask your readers to click on the share button. But make sure the call to action is relevant to what you are conveying through your content.
#4. Think like a Hacker
The funniest similarity between the VP of content marketing and a hacker is, they both need to learn the rules by heart. But the only difference is that the VP learns the rules to go by it, and the hacker, to break them. If you want your content to work like a magic, then question the pre-set rules. Going by tradition often gives a positive result for sure. But when they become cliché, they stop working anymore. But taking risks and breaking the rules result in setting new laws that work like wonder.
Gradual growth is outdated now. It’s time for quick and immediate result. And to get that desired outcome, fusing growth hacking in content marketing is a must.