Witnessing business growth can be tedious and slow in today's world, where there are various startups and big companies. Fortunately, there's a strategy for your casino to gain attention in a short period, and this is through growth hacking. With this strategy, you can take matters into your own hands and get ahead of the competition with minimal costs.
Aside from lending our world-class SEO services, QWERTYlabs aims to teach different techniques that can help you grow your company. Know everything about growth hacking and how you can use it for your casino in this complete guide:
Growth hacking is the phrase used to describe a marketing strategy that requires minimal resources and little to no costs at all. It aims to help casinos experience significant growth in terms of their followers and sales within a short time by trying out unique tactics.
Also known as 'growth marketing', growth hacking is a strategy that focuses solely on a casino’s growth. The unique tactics in this strategy involve lots of trial and error, and it's a process purely based on data. For instance, a growth hacker will try several forms of cost-efficient marketing strategies simultaneously. The growth hacker can distinguish which ones to pursue and cut off based on the data and feedback from these strategies.
Since it's cost-efficient, this strategy is often used by startups trying to grow and maintain followers without having to stake a considerable lump sum of money. However, it can also be used by any business regardless of its size since the strategy can be scalable depending on the scope.
The term was coined over a decade ago, in 2010, by Sean Ellis when he was trying to come up with a job description for someone whose sole purpose is to provide driving growth for a company. The word 'hacking' in this phrase acts the same way as when it's used in the term 'life hacks', which are shortcuts and unorthodox ways that make your life easier. From there, the strategy quickly rose in popularity among startup companies, leading some big brands to have dedicated growth teams and a Head of Growth within the company.
Although both of them aim to draw more attention to your casino, marketing and growth hacking aren't 100% the same. For starters, growth hacking strategies don't require much money to execute since they focus more on low-cost and innovative tactics.
These tactics include establishing and optimising online presence, creating referral programs, using SEO backlinks for online casinos and more. Additionally, growth hacking is data-driven which helps a brand decide whether to continue a specific strategy or not. Meanwhile, marketing requires a set amount of budget, which is commonly used in established businesses. This type of budget allows these companies to put up advertisements on commercials, interstate billboards, LED signs and more.
However, you'll see more significant differences when you look at the key responsibilities of growth hackers and marketers. Here's an example: while marketers are busy coming up with different marketing strategies that require huge amounts of money, growth hackers focus on finding more ways to ensure growth for the brand. Growth hackers are required to be equipped with a set of technical skills such as programming and automation.
Knowing what growth hacking means begins your casino’s journey to exponential growth. To put this knowledge to use, you must build an effective framework that caters to your casino’s specific needs. Here's a step-by-step guide to help you achieve this:
Setting your objectives straight is the first step toward your casino’s exponential growth. During this, ensure the goals are backed by research and are attainable. Once you've established these objectives, knowing which tactics to use is easy since you're familiar with which areas of your casino need improvement.
Additionally, this is where setting your priorities will fall into place. Think about which areas of your business need improvement the most. With this, you can narrow down the tactics you can execute for your growth hacking strategy.
Nowadays, it's easy to scour the internet for new ideas you can take inspiration from. Once you've gathered enough information, you can make them your own by adding a few tweaks that will cater to your company. Additionally, you can research what strategies didn't work for a brand in the same industry as you to know which one to avoid. Whether the outcome is negative or positive, use as much information as possible to help you curate the best tactic for your casino.
Based on the strategies you've hypothesised through research, start implementing your tactics and consider this as the trial and error stage. Here, keep experimenting with new strategies until you gather enough feedback to analyse.
Your newly implemented strategies will either fail or accomplish your initial goals. Regardless of the result, consider this a win for all the feedback you'll gather from your consumers. After all, growth hacking is data-driven. With the responses, you gather, make changes to your next strategy using what you've learned through your trial and error phase. Continue this process until you see a significant change in your casino’s growth.
You can't increase your casino’s growth significantly overnight without the help of growth hacking. Here are some reasons why you should consider trying this useful and cost-efficient marketing strategy:
If you're a startup company, putting all your money into advertising is not ideal since you won't have enough resources, and there's no guarantee that this will be effective. Fortunately, with growth hacking, you're not required to put your funds at risk on various strategies that may fall flat on your consumers. Instead, it involves low-cost tactics that make the most of your current resources. Some of these tactics include writing meaningful blogs and posting them on various social media outlets, ensuring high SEO scores for pages so they rank high in search engines.
A huge factor why growth hacking is considered low-cost is that you don't have to fund an entire team to do it. Companies often let one person do all the planning and implementation.
Since growth hacking is data-driven, casinos can immediately see which hacks have more provable Return on Investment (ROIs) compared to others by looking at their performance. With this information, you can discontinue those that provide little to no benefit to your casino and double down on the effective ones.
To successfully maximise growth opportunities for your casino, you have to download the essential tools specifically designed for this. Although entirely optional, they can increase the effectiveness of your strategy and make the overall process easier. These tools include:
HubSpot is the number one tool for all things Customer Relationship Management (CRM). This free software offers a complete set of everything you need concerning contact and customer management. Some of the tasks you can do with this tool include scheduling meetings, connecting with visitors worldwide, controlling your sales pipeline and more.
Growth hacking thrives on data as it helps predict your brand's growth trajectory. An excellent marketing solution for this is TrueNorth which does everything you need, such as doing experiments, collecting data and forecasting your growth.
Zapier makes the lives of programmers easier by automating web applications and workflows within your applications. According to their website, Zapier is what happens when all your apps can talk to each other. It's a coding-free process that allows you to trigger certain apps to do tasks automatically. For example, your trigger is when a user clicks on your blog. You can then program this to automatically send you an email so you can monitor whenever a user visits your webpage.
Monitoring is critical in growth hacking since it helps you determine your user activity and use that to hypothesise new strategies. For this need, you should use CrazyEgg, an online tool that helps you monitor the user activity on the pages of your website.
This tool provides a rundown of which part of the screen your web visitors clicked on the most, giving you an idea of what interests them the most. More importantly, it's easy to set up since you need to insert a line of code into your page's HTML.
Over the years, several brands have made innovations through growth hacking and eventually impacted the market. Today, they're some of the biggest companies in their respective industries. Here are some of them:
Before it became the travel booking service giant it is today, Airbnb started back in 2008 by using another website to draw people into its platform. This platform is Craigslist, a website where users post job openings, items for sale, housing for rent and more.
At that time, Airbnb didn't have an application, and Craigslist was the go-to website for people looking to rent a house. However, everything changed for Airbnb when they started including links that redirect to their platform on every property listing they post on Craigslist. The purpose of the link is for users to be redirected to Airbnb's platform if they want to know more about it. By doing this, more people started paying attention to Airbnb even though they were coming from Craigslist.
Hotmail was the first free email provider during the early days of the internet, specifically in 1996. The strategy they used involved placing a footer on every mail sent by their users that says 'P.S. I love you. Get your free email at Hotmail.' People who received emails through Hotmail switched to the provider because it was free. With this simple strategy, the company's active user base skyrocketed to 17 million in just 18 months.
DropBox is one of the most extensive cloud-storing services in the world today and how it rose to fame was through its refer-a-friend incentivisation program, which, in 2008, was unique. Cloud storage was also fairly new during this time, and when people started learning what DropBox was about, the waiting list quickly grew.
However, many find it a hassle to create an account in DropBox. Those who wanted to join in would have to receive an invitation from an existing user. Every successful referral from a current user is incentivised with more storage space. This strategy helped make DropBox viral which immediately saw exponential growth for the company.
If you're looking for a growth hacker to add to your team, make sure to look for the following traits in your potential candidates:
In growth hacking, creativity is key. Since you're working with a relatively small company that doesn't have the biggest budget, you have to make the most out of your resources economically. With the resources they're presented with, growth hackers can immediately start formulating ideas and tactics to garner and maintain followers.
A great growth hacker should be willing to try new tactics since trial and error is the backbone of this marketing strategy. By tinkering with their curiosity, they can tap into their imagination and create something innovative that will help the casino get noticed by its desired audience.
Growth hacking is all about consistency. Your desired growth results for your casino won't happen overnight, and it takes a lot of data gathering and tweaking to find your footing. That's why growth hackers need to be goal oriented when it comes to their work ethics.
Fortunately, growth hacking promotes creativity and innovation, so you're welcome to try almost every strategy you can think of. To help you get started, here are some ideas and tips you can draw inspiration from:
One of the best ways you can draw attention to your casino is by creating exclusivity, which can be done through invite-only referrals, limited access and more. If you successfully describe what your casino is about, then announce this kind of exclusivity to entice people to join in on the fun. With this, you'll give them a severe case of Fear of Missing Out (FOMO).
A great way to increase your user base significantly is by incentivising those who spread the word about your casino, which will benefit both parties involved. In the case of DropBox, it managed to go viral since it combined this strategy with our previous point which is giving the feeling of FOMO. It's an invitation-only platform, and users who make successful referrals are incentivised with more storage spaces.
Let's say you're running an eCommerce site. You'll often encounter customers who add items to their carts and won't continue with the purchase. These are called 'abandoned carts', and they happen for various reasons, whether it be a change of heart or simply waiting for a sale.
To create a sense of urgency for these users, you can consider setting up an automated email that reminds them of the items in their cart. Various eCommerce sites widely use this, and it's a great way to get your customers to continue shopping on your site.
Nowadays, bloggers are some of the most influential people. These individuals have huge followings and can affect people's purchasing decisions, making them a great source of free product or service reviews. To execute this strategy, you can include an option on your eCommerce site that says 'free for bloggers'. This is a win-win situation for both parties since they'll get your product/service for free and spread the good word about it to their followers.
Collaborating with bloggers is also a great way to gain backlinks that redirect to your website. For instance, if your brand is an online casino, they can include casino games backlinks within their blogs so their readers can discover your website. Gone are the days when having to work with celebrities who require hefty fees. Nowadays, it's all about collaborating with independent bloggers. Not only will you get to save money, but you'll also reach a wider audience with their help.
If you're trying to establish a presence online, don't limit yourself to Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Don't write off subreddits since these are the best narrow channels where you can share your products and services.
Find the subreddit you think relates to your company and start marketing your brand there. Reddit contains threads that are just about everything you can think of. Make sure it doesn't seem forced and that your product recommendation is relevant to the discussed topic. If the subreddit permits, you can also include links within your comments that redirect to your website to increase your web traffic and convert them into leads and sales.
Growth hacking is all about trying several marketing strategies and discarding those that don't provide growth for your company. If you're afraid of trying something new, you'll be at a disadvantage since you reject this strategy's essence.
Going viral is a surefire way to generate growth for your brand. A great and simple way you can do this is by setting up small contests among your followers that will require them to create and share content about how they love your product or service. These contests can be in the form of essay writing, photography, video content or anything that you prefer. Nonetheless, the important thing is that your brand is put at the forefront.
To add more engagement, you can even add something like 'the user with the most share wins'. This way, they'll be more inclined to share their content with your product on their social media pages, where more people can discover your casino.
In a nutshell, growth hacking involves testing various marketing strategies and discontinuing those unsuccessful in providing your casino with significant growth. It's a consistent process that requires lots of refining but when it pays out, your company will start garnering more followers, which gives you better sales, or more players for your casino.
When you're ready to take the giant leap, feel free to contact us here at QWERTYlabs so we can collaborate in bringing growth to your casino.
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