3 Marketing Growth Hacks That Are Ridiculously Simple & Obvious

After years of flying by the seat of your pants, your business has finally gained some stability, which means one thing: It’s time to focus on growth.

The last thing you want to do is spend another few years trying to figure out this whole marketing thing. You want to grow fast. Lucky for you, some of the simplest marketing actions will do wonders for your company’s growth.

Let’s go through three of our favorite growth hacks that are so simple and so obvious that you’ll be shaking your head and saying “duh!”

Blog. Blog. Blog.

Want to draw more traffic to your website? Blog. A lot.

Blogging is one of the best ways to increase traffic to your website. According to HubSpot, companies that published more than 16 blog posts per month got almost 3.5 times more traffic than companies that published zero to four monthly posts.

If you do it right, blogging brings in relevant traffic, full of users searching for your company’s solution. The more qualified traffic that lands on your website, the more you’ll have to convert them into customers. More leads mean more customers, and more customers mean growth!

Many will read this and think, I don’t have the time. That’s where you have the advantage. Be the company that makes the time, and you’ll be in much better shape than your competition. Create an internal system for generating blogs from you and your employees. Put out a blog a day, and you’ll successfully hack your growth.

Blogging doesn’t mean writing about just anything. It requires an understanding of your audience’s needs, as well as some quality keyword research.

Here are a few SmartBug™ posts about blogging to help you get started:

1. 9 Different Blog Post Types and How to Use Them
2. How to Write SEO-Friendly Blog Posts
3. How to Empower Your Employees to Become Bloggers and Content Creators

One last helpful blogging tip: You know the most about your company's solution. Use that unique insight to write your blogs. Give your readers helpful insider information that only your company knows.

Simplify Your Website’s User Experience and Navigation

What’s the good in pumping out blog posts if nobody can find them? Your website’s user experience is critical to growth and needs to be audited before you try any other growth hacks.

Here are a few simple questions to consider when giving your website a second look:

1. Do people immediately understand my business when they enter the website?

Whether your company has multiple offerings or a complex solution, your company’s purpose needs to be clear. If someone lands on the website and spends more than a few seconds trying to figure out what the product or service is, they’ll leave.

HubSpot states that 55 percent of your visitors spend less than 15 seconds on your website. You have a short window of time to gain their interest, so make the most of it with a clear solution/benefit and a reason to explore the website.

How do you know if your homepage is explaining your company well? Measure it using heat mapping tools and data found in Google Analytics. Heat mapping shows you where users are spending most of their time looking at the page. If you see most users focus on the page header and the page has a high bounce rate, the header could be confusing your audience. Knowing that the header is where most people look before they leave gives you the insight to run a test with another header to see if that impacts bounces. Tools like Clicky and Lucky Orange can help you with your website’s heat mapping.

2. Can visitors find the solution they need?

Your website’s navigation needs to be efficient. If your top line navigation has 10 choices, each with a drop-down list of more options, people can get frustrated. Choice is overwhelming. The best sites guide users toward a goal. Limit navigation to a few choices and continue to provide users with a small number of options as they move from page to page.

You’ll want to guide visitors through your solution by providing relevant choices based on the pages they are on, and ultimately guide them to a page with an option to reach out to your business.

3. Is your website easy on the eyes?

People like good aesthetics and your website isn’t exempt. If your website looks like it’s from the early 2000s, people aren’t going to stick around. Your business might be the best option on the market, but if a competitor’s site looks better and is easier to understand at the jump, you’ll likely lose business opportunities. Check out the “Keys to Proper Web Design for Inbound” to help guide your site design efforts.

Show Off with Social Proof

Now that you have a nicely designed website that supports an excellent user experience and you’re cranking out blogs daily, you can boost your conversion rates by building trust with social proof. Just 3 percent of consumers consider salespeople and marketers to be trustworthy, which makes social proof important.

Social proof is when other companies that appreciate your products or services share their experience through content. Social proof comes in many forms, such as case studies, testimonials, reviews, and even well-placed company logos on your website.

Case studies aren’t simple. You’ll need to find time to interview a client for the piece of content. Generating other social proof is easy if you, again, put in the time.

Here are a few tips for generating social proof:

1. Ask your clients for permission to place their logo on your website in an “Our Clients” section.

Do this if you have name brand clients that visitors will immediately recognize. The thought here is that if the name brand clients work with your company, you’re a legitimate solution to their problem. It creates a sense of ease for visitors that they are in the right place.

2. Ask clients to review your business after an engagement.

If a client is happy with your product or service, ask them for a review. Asking them in person will increase the likelihood that they’ll write one, but you can also ask via email with a link to your preferred review site. Sites like Google are great for local SEO and help build trust with users in search results. Other options could be industry-specific review sites such as Clutch.

Reviews provide proof that your company is an excellent option and they give users the final push to fill out a contact form on your website. HubSpot says that because reviews are posted on third-party sites and from real users of your products, consumers see them as reliable sources of information. Customers find online reviews to be so helpful that 85 percent of consumers trust them as much as personal recommendations.

3. Pull quotes from your reviews to use as testimonials.

Once you have a nice library of reviews, you can pull the best quotes and place them strategically on your website. If you want to take testimonials one step further, you can engage reviewers and ask if they’d be willing to restate their review on camera. According to Vidyard, 89 percent of marketers say video testimonials are the most effective content marketing tactic.

To the potential customer who hasn’t heard of your company, you’ll appear legitimate right from the jump.

These growth hacks are simple and obvious, but are you doing them? Every business leader is busy—it’s the leaders who take the time that end up succeeding, rather than those who don’t.