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The key to business strategy is GROWTH.

Scaling a business is essential to create a presence in an increasingly competitive marketplace. It is difficult to attract new customers if a company is lost in the shuffle. 

Ultimately, growth is the goal of any business because it fulfills other goals, such as increasing revenue, marketing success, and fostering brand loyalty.

What Is Growth Hacking?

Growth hacking is a general term to describe strategies that promote growth. Growth hacks create growth with minimal expenditure. 

For example, cost-effective market research methods may involve using an SEO proxy service or finding ways to scrape Amazon product pages without writing code. The right tools make market research affordable and efficient.

There are many instructive growth hacking success stories, such as Dropbox, Airbnb, and Paypal Dropbox started with a tiny marketing budget, and it grew into the ultimate referral program. Dropbox provided 25MB of additional storage for every referral. 

Airbnb began with some broke students in SanFrancisco and grew to the world’s favourite accommodation alternative by word of mouth, PR, providing rooms to attendees at tech conventions, improving their photos, and cross-post listings on Craigslist. 

Paypal also compensated for a limited marketing budget by rewarding referrals and partnering with eBay. These companies demonstrate that the key to growth hacking is finding easier, cheaper, common-sense solutions. 

Also read: Genesys Named a Leader in the Gartner 2020 Magic Quadrant for Contact Center as a Service

One way is through automating tasks. Automated tools cut production costs and achieve faster, more accurate results. Finding ways to make work cheaper and easier, from market research to product development and customer service, allows companies to focus time and resources on growth strategies. 

Automate Your Market Research with Web Scraping

Web scraping is one of the most effective tools for market research. A web scraper, along with a web proxy, automatically lifts HTML code from websites and retrieves valuable data about customers and competitors. Making a web scraper isn’t difficult for those who know coding, but web scraping tools are ready to use. 

Automated web scraping yields valuable information and allows marketers to analyse texts on competitors’ websites for keyword placement, linking, and other content strategies. 

The key to gaining new customers is to attract them through matching search terms with corresponding keywords in texts. Analysing the content of rival companies with successful SEO strategies is easy with scraping and data analytics tools. 

Monitor Competitor Product Reviews

Reviews are important resources for market research because they provide significant information about customers and competitors. Retrieving and interpreting review texts yields detailed insights on how consumers feel about certain brands and products and what features they would like to see. 

Reviews also provide honest feedback about your own and competitors’ strengths and weaknesses. Finding numerous statements identifying a flaw or a missing feature in a competitor’s product provides clues to refining an item in a way that will give customers something a competing product lacks. Discovering these clues and implementing solutions drives growth and attracts customers. 

Use Integration Tools to Connect Marketing Efforts

Having an assortment of effective tools is only part of the solution to driving growth. The time that would otherwise be saved with automated tools and apps may be partially wasted figuring out how to connect the dots. Integration tools like Zapier and Integromat connect apps and facilitate information sharing. 

For example, when a new email arrives, the attachment can automatically go to Dropbox, and Dropbox communicates with Slack, which sends a notification. 

Essential tasks are performed every step of the way without requiring user input. Customising triggers for workflows maintains control over tasks. Using integration software improves efficiency, cuts costs, and frees time and resources for the implementation of growth strategies. 

Keep an Eye on Competitors’ Email Campaigns

The majority of revenues come from repeat customers. Nurturing leads and present customers with a successful email campaign are one of the best ways to coax contacts into buying products. Gaining insight into a successful email campaign is a valuable research process. 

It is easy to subscribe to a competitor’s email list, but it is a good idea to keep them from discovering the IP address by using a web proxy. 

This will allow interaction with a competitor for research purposes without their realising it. Connecting a web proxy with a scraper allows anonymous subscription and automatic retrieval of email texts. 

Data analytics tools automatically interpret the data to inform future email campaigns. Paying attention to the tone and the structure of successful emails and keyword placement and linking give guidance on creating effective emails. 

Looking at how competitors personalise and segment emails to attract different subscribers is a useful approach to competitor email research. 

Successful Growth Hacking Starts With the Right Focus

Growth hacking strategies aren’t so challenging to generate and understand. If there are too many extraneous tasks sapping valuable resources and worktime, implementation is the issue. 

Automated tools perform these tasks at a fraction of the time for less money than traditional methods. They also create more time and energy to focus on growth. One of the main obstacles to growth is letting the details garner more attention than they deserve. Setting up tools and integration solutions to encourage automatic workflows sharpens the focus on the ultimate goal–growth.