In this section I’m going to show you how I work with growth hacking. There is a lot of articles out there explaining Growth Hacking and what a Growth Hacker is, and you have probably read twenty of them already so no need for double content. Instead I’m going to show you AARRR! as a metod of growth hacking. If you want to know how to work with growth hacking I have tons of articles explaining it, all of it.
I use 5 key stages in my workflow: Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral and Revenue. AARRR!
Be a pirate – AARRR!
<ecosystem>
(A)cquisition
This is the first step of the ecosystem. The customer have visited your website or read one of your blog posts. In this stage you have to analyze where the traffic to your site are coming from and which channels are the most popular ones. You can then use a segment metod to identify how your auidience behave. Maybe the most common part is from Twitter when you have published a new blog post and in that blog post you have a call to action to read more about other sections of your blog. This is a segment metod to identify one of your target audiences. Another target audience could be sources from organic search and the visitor land on one of your content rich pages.
(A)ctivation
The second step is to identify which of your audiences converts. E.g downloading a whitepaper or signs up for a newsletter. The customer is now activated and ready to learn more about your business. Eventually the customer will be willing to cash in and buy your product to continue experiencing that value.
(R)etention
When you got an audience which are engaged in your blog post, product or are playing your game, you need to make them return and coming back regularly. This is called retention and it is up to you to decide what a retained user is in your business.
(R)eferral
When a customer are visiting your website, subscribes to your blog posts and are using your product this is an ideal customer to maybe recommend your product for colleagues or friends. This can be done in several ways and if you can offer your customer something back when referring (e.g 30 days for free, free credits, free support) you are really doing a great job engaging the customers. You could also only add share buttons or use promo codes which are a lot easier and cheaper. It is all about testing what works for your business in this stage. And remember that it’s 5 times as expensive to get new customers as keeping existing ones so you should focus on this.
(R)evenue
When you got the right funnels of getting visitors to your website and these are buying your product you need to focus on revenue and how much each customer is worth and how much you can pay to get a new customer. Is this done by Digital Ads such AdWords or from social media? Or by offering your customers a free t-shirt if they invite a friend? If your customers are coming from organic searches it doesn’t cost you much to spend time on SEO and make your landing pages even better. How much are you spending on things that are not working? And how much are you not spending on the things that works?
</ecosystem>
By following these 5 key stages you have a good opportunity to optimize your business and make new customers and making them continue using your product. The first step is equally important that stage two, three, four or five.