Growth hacking is about practical action steps you can take to immediately grow your business. For any startup, this is the secret sauce that allows you to grow quickly, cheaply, and effectively.
In case you missed it, Vincent Dignan‘s discussion of “growth hacking” was voted the best talk on the subject at this year’s South by Southwest V2V conference in Las Vegas. Now, on September 23, he’s raising the bar at the Secret Sauce Conference in London, alongside some top entrepreneurs, for a no BS approach to hacking your business to success.
I had the opportunity to interview Mr. Dignan and asked him about what insights he could share with you, his fellow entrepreneurs, to growth hack your businesses to the level of success we’re all looking to achieve. Here’s what he had to say:
- Ignore the Successful Millionaire Cliché Club. How many times have we heard successful millionaires pontificate about clichés that, while accurate, give you very little specific action to take? Growth hacking is about specific, actionable steps any entrepreneur can (and should) take to immediately drive your business forward.
- Find Any Email Address Online for Free. How? There are actually several ways that most people don’t know about. A popular site Vincent Dignan referenced was Email Hunter. Just enter the company domain you’re interested in connecting with and immediately see all the email addresses that have been scraped from the Web. Does it work? You bet. I typed in my own company’s name and found my email address along with others. Or, if you don’t find what you’re looking for, click over to SalesForce.com’s own Data.com. For the simple price of your own data, you can have access to just about any company you’re looking to reach.
- Automate Your Email Reminders. If you’re not hip to Rebump, this is a simple add-on feature to Google’s own Gmail that will allow you to automate your friendly email reminders to clients and prospects who tend not to respond to your first email inquiry. Rebump customers report an average 30 percent response rate! This not only saves you time, but ensures you follow up along a timeline you set (e.g., every four days).
- Get a One-Pager on Everyone You’re Going to Meet Before You See Them.Check out Charlie App for an incredible tool that combs through hundreds of sources and automatically sends you a one-pager on everyone you’re going to meet with, before you see them. This includes blog posts, breaking news on their company, common connections, competitive insights, common passion points, and whatever else is available. How’s that for having an effective meeting with someone you’ve never met?
- Establish a “Trending” Topic on Twitter. What if you could pay someone to push out a tweet that would be read by so many followers that you actually trend on Twitter? Yeah, there are people who do that, and they are hyper local, so that your trend occurs precisely in the city you are targeting. Who, exactly? Start withSteven Bartlett, who is the CEO of Social Chain, the U.K.’s largest influencer marketing agency and one of the most talked about marketing agencies of 2015. At just 22 years old, Steve Bartlett heads up a team of young creatives growing huge social trends, recognized as one of the most powerful influences on social media.
And this is just the tip of the iceberg. Anyone who has attended a session with Vincent Dignan knows that it’s a lean-in experience. This is about practical action steps that you (and any highly motivated entrepreneur) can take to growth hack your business. If you aren’t in a position to attend the Secret Sauce Conference in London, I recommend you follow the Twitter feeds of the keynote speakers. I have a feeling that some incredible growth hacks will be shared next week.
And if I’m able to speak to any more of the keynote speakers, I’ll certainly share what I learn. (And yes, I acknowledge that this is in direct opposition to the growth hacker’s code: You do not talk about growth hacking. “It’s like fight club,” says Vincent Dignan). Thankfully, he was willing to make an exception today.
