Being a growth hacker is very different from being a traditional computer hacker. While a computer hacker focuses on breaking into computer systems for the benefit of themselves or their clients, a growth hacker is more of a marketing function. A growth hacker is someone that specializes in the growth of the company, looking for new and creative ways to generate traffic, sales leads, growing a company’s brand etc. If you’re a startup founder, work for a small business or interested in working for a small business knowing how to grow a business is an extremely valuable skillset and it can be a lot of fun to help build something from the ground up. Here, I’m going to go over some of the best ways for growth hacking a cybersecurity company:
1) Use feedback to tailor your product
Having a good product is one of the most important elements of business, having a product that people love and find useful will make it 10x easier to market that product. When designing a product or a service you want to make sure you have channels for people to give you feedback on how to improve the product so that you can ensure that it’s constantly getting better. Overall, the best validation is to have people pay for it, if people are willing to pay for your product then you can be sure that it has some market value.
2) Identify your target audience
Before you can start coming up with strategies for growing your business you need to have a clear picture of what your target customer looks like. This includes things like age, gender, geographic location, job title, interests, and any other detail you can think of. This way you can make strategies that target that demographic and you can more easily track whether or not you are being effective. You can use tools like ubersuggest for determining what keywords/phrases your target audience searches for.
3) Website Content
This means having content on your website that people find useful and that generates traffic without you having to pay for it. Some common examples of this are blog posts, whitepapers, infographics, and free software tools. All of this web content not only brings in traffic but establishes you as a thought leader within your niche, gives people value and starts establishing trust between you and your readers.
Source @ oberlo.ca
4) Free software
Within cybersecurity open source software is very popular, even for professional use. Think of tools like virustotal, Nmap, Metasploit, burpsuite etc that all have free versions of their product. These companies gain an incredible amount of popularity by offering their product for free/freemium model and then that traffic can be used to generate money by charging for their premium product that has extra features. You can use this same concept by hosting a free tool on your website that will drive traffic to your website.
5) Be first to comment on the news
There are always new hacks, data breaches, exploits, vulnerabilities, and other cybersecurity news happening almost every day and definitely every week. By being the first to speak on these topics you can generate a lot of traffic from people that may be searching online for more information about it. This can be a full blog post or as simple as tweeting about it. This can help you gain a following very quickly.
6) Get referrals
The best way to spread your business is through word of mouth so you should incentivize people to give your business referrals. The easiest way to do this is to offer some type of financial incentive but get creative in finding ways to generate referrals.
7) Attend local and international events
Cybersecurity has a lot of large conferences such as black hat, SecTor and Defcon. These are all good places to make connections with potential clients or companies that may want to partner with you and share client bases. At these big conferences you can get access to a lot of good leads since they are often attended by company executives that are looking to network or find new solutions to the problems that they have.
Source @ networkinvegas
8) A/B Testing
This is a user experience research methodology, essentially you show users different versions of your website or your product and see what version of the product gets the better results. Relatively small changes in a product like colors, removing a form or changing the location of a single button can have a big impact on things like user retention or conversion rate. It’s important to do this type of testing so that you can maximize your company’s effectiveness.
Source @ towardsdatascience
9) Partner with other companies
Rather than trying to sell your services yourself you can partner with cybersecurity influencers or companies that have complementary services and you can give each other business. This way not only do you get more business referrals from your partner but you can essentially sell a wider range of services in a bundle because you have a partner that provides certain services or products that you by yourself may not be able to offer.
10) Use social media
The last tip for growth hacking is to leverage social media, especially twitter. While all social media channels can be useful for gaining traffic, twitter is probably the biggest social media platform for cybersecurity and that makes it very useful for advertising blog posts, making announcements etc. Other platforms that are useful are LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram for general posts while forums like Reddit and Quora are good for engaging with customers directly.
