Offline Growth Hacks – The Anomaly In The Online Growth Notion

The word ‘Growth-Hack’ really has the X factor. This word is slowly but surely redefining marketing permanently. Techies taking over the marketing department has now become a common affair. Be it Silicon Valley or Bangalore, it stands true for all. The startup circle is well acquainted with who growth hackers are. Hence let’s not delve into rhetoric any more. Well this article is not about Growth hacking. I will just try to push its boundaries a little further.

The term growth hacking simply put is proliferation of your user base at a rapid pace. Hence perception dictates that growth hacks should be online. Where else will you find so many users? Well this holds fort for the most of the cases, niche businesses and vertical networks with traditional user bases challenges the notion to the core.

Internet businesses have always been an attempt to translate offline behaviour online. More so with niche businesses with orthodox user bases it is very important to have a more coordinated effort. Offline growths hacks call for perfecting and customising practices that are deemed to be the best practices in the industry.

Objectively Define Your End User Behaviour

Do you know your Customer? Well I know what most of you will think. Its easier said than done. We want to replace offline behaviour hence we must know every tit bit of that behaviour. And then tell your designer to design materials in sync with that behaviour. For example if you want your users to read news on your app, it’s the newspaper you want to replace. Hence design your newsletter as a newspaper. It will certainly catch his attention.

Add Value. Create Impact Oriented Content

Self-boasting never helps. And your customers will always see through it however subtle it might be. Make sure the offline materials are more than just a run of the mill everyday promotional material. It has to add value similar to what you would want your product to do. It needs to carry the same virtue as your product. Financial motivation and career oriented content always helps and are easy to draw relevance to.

Emotional Marketing

We are the country of the Bollywood. We often consider a certain game as religion. Basically, we all are emotional. How can we leverage that in our marketing is the real hack? I might sound a little philosophical here but I will still go ahead and say it. There is no emotion strong enough other than the fear of lagging behind that can drive actions in a customer. This is where you need to stand out. Defining your best user will be critical as he will be the yardstick in devising any campaign. Different users have different behaviour. Like a doctor will use your product if his peer is using it or shop keeper might use it if his competitors are using it. Tracking customer behaviour at an emotional level is very important.

The Science Of Conference Marketing

To proliferate your user base you need users. A lot of them at the same place. And events are the place get a lot of potential users at the same time. We at Curofy initially went to conferences and got only 40 downloads a day. In a ROI driven industry we needed to delve deeper.  We thought of values that could increase our users drastically. Free wifi and pen drives containing session abstracts were two such values that drove downloads. Think of the very basic needs of the customers in huge event. Information. Conversions rose overnight to 300 a day. Guerrilla marketing is another avenue in event that have paid huge dividends in events. However as the name suggests lets not reveal them here.

Decoding Lead Generation Offline

Why would one do this is the first question? If one can procure the database of potential users who invested their time similar products, they immediately become your best leads. How you will do it? Well you need to have a growth hacker. And you will obviously have your competitors. Anyways, nurturing these leads through offline medium has been the best foot forward for us. We sent them freebies to address of the users we procured and got their phone numbers via our courier partners. We have seen conversions as high as 30% on certain databases. The bottom-line is, you have the right database, go offline, think, and the next million-dollar offline lead generation might come from you. 

Obviously there will be a lot of flop shows before one sticks. Hence the biggest growth hack is persistence and perseverance. These are overview and one will do great to follow them. But then again growth hacking has always been defying the traditions.

Note: We at Inc42 take our ethics very seriously. More information about it can be found here.