Growth Hacking is the buzz word of the marketing world, with Facebook community groups, podcasts and blogs proposing exciting new hacks to grow your brand online. With so many new ideas it’s easy to lose focus about what actually works for your business and customers.

Albert Mai, Growth Hacker at Glam Corner and previously Air Tasker shares his Growth Hacking tips:

1.Put yourself in your customer’s shoes

Don’t just follow all the hype in the growing marketing communities and the tactics and campaigns used to acquire customers. Instead, talk to your targeted customers, think like them and even be one of them if you can. It will give you ideas for which channels or platforms your customers are currently using.

2. Identify the places your customers go to find a solution

It’s also important to go to where they conduct research before they make the final purchase decision. Then target these key channels with content or ads which add value.

3. Validate

This also applies to validating your business model and building the product, not just to acquire customers in the first place.

4. Track and measure everything possible

You can track traffic, users, conversion, spend through to product usage and team performance/productivity. Data is very crucial for any startup. It provides insights into your business performance, gives you a competitive advantage over competitors and proves traction for potential investors. You won’t be able to capture all of them on day one but you set up a tracking plan depending on the level of resources and stage of your startup. When you fail to plan, you plan to fail.

5. Growth hacking tactics come and go but strategies will stay

There will always be new tactics invented and they can give a huge traffic spike for your startup. However, they don’t last and don’t bring customers if you don’t have a product-market fit solution, or you don’t have plans to convert them and don’t have a sticky product. Growth is about adding layers, not spikes.