7 Growth Hacking Tips From 7 Inspiring SlideShares

On a scale of one to pizza, how important is acquiring (and retaining) customers for your business?

I'd venture to guess that pizza is the general consesus, as sustainable growth for most businesses means finding a way to bring people in and keep them, right?

However, whether you're just starting out or you're feeling like an old dog struggling to learn new tricks, building a foundation of customers and fans is easier said than done. 

Enter growth hacking. 

(If you haven't heard of concept yet, hold on to your pants.)

Responsible for the success of Airbnb, Eventbrite, and a little video hosting platform called YouTube, growth hacking is a marketing technique that has proven its ability to quite simply, create growth. 

If you want to gain a considerable advantage over your competitors, you'll want to pay close attention to the following collection of SlideShares. While each one is packed with remarkable tips, we broke down our top 7 favorites to help get you started. 

Hack #1: Remix Everything

Six Growth Hacks to Get More Conversions from Your Content Marketing from Sean Ellis

Your content doesn't have to follow the "one and done" style approach. If you want to get ahead (and save yourself time and resources), consider the benefits of reworking your existing content to create a related resource that takes a different shape. 

Whether this means turning a series of blog articles into an ebook, or an exerpt from an ebook into a SlideShare, the possibilites are seemingly endless.

We've seen a ton of success with finding clever ways to remix our tweets for social media. All it takes is one blog post to spawn 10 unique tweets that can be posted to social to drive traffic back to your website. Simply change the scope of the message by framing it as a quesiton, pulling a stat, sharing a relevant quote, adding an image, etc. 

Hack #2: Invest in professional photography

Growth Hacking with Data: How to Find Big Growth with Deep Data Dives from Sean Ellis

When Airbnb discovered that listings with high quality photos received 2-3x more bookings than the average listings, they saw an opportunity for growth and went after it. 

After taking the plunge and investing in professional photography and verified photos, they saw bookings go through the roof. This chart aims to illustrate just how big of an impact the investment had on their growth:

Point being, if you're relying on low budget visuals to serve as a representation of your business, you could be stifling your own progress.

Just this year we took a similiar leap when we invested in Shutterstock's photography service. As a result, the imagery that accompanied our blog went through a major transformation (for the better.) Check it out:

Hack #3: Reinvent customer service

Growth Hacking Basics from Morgan Brown

Did you know that 86% of customers are willing to pay more for better customer service? (Source: ClickSoftware)

In other words, what's holding you back from delivering a level of customer service that is anything short of stellar?

Through their commitment to customer service, Zappos has built up a renowned reputation for themselves. As a result, they had to quickly learn to get used to all this love and attention:

Not a bad problem to have right? 

If you're looking to kick up your current customer service strategy, consider these 3 tips:

• Respond quickly - with the introduction of social media as an avenue for customer complaints, immediacy is of the utmost importance. 

• Exceed expectations - anyone can put forth the bare minimum, but it’s businesses who go the extra mile that are getting noticed and in turn, receive awesome word-of-mouth marketing. 

• Provide solutions - no matter what the case, figure out a way to put systems in place and provide them with a solution.

Hack #4: Create a free tool

15 Practical Startup Growth Hacks - Workshop from Jon Yongfook

After realizing the benefits of using a free tool to stir up interest and drive people back to their website, HubSpot created the free Marketing Grader. Essentially the tool allows you to plug in your website's URL and turn up an insta-report of how your digital marketing efforts measured up (0-100 score.)

This tool is brilliant for two reasons.

For one, users of the tool were able to generate a better understanding of how their current marketing efforts were stacking up at no cost at all. And as for HubSpot, they were beating the systems by creating something that essentially served as a free consultation (only they didn't have to pay the sales staff.)

To apply this hack to your business, consider what you can create that will drum up interest amongst your ideal customers. For us, we realized that a lot of our prospects were struggling with finding time to blog, or coming up with blog topics on a regular basis. As a result, we created BlogAbout, a free tool designed to cure writer's block by prompting interactive titles for users to customize and save to a notebook to inspire their next blog post. 

Hack #5: Create a referral program

Growth Hacking : Disrupt the Business with Mobile! from Antonin Cohen

Uber, Dollar Shave Club, and Dropbox are just a few of the big names taking advantage of a referral program to develop their business. 

According to their cofounder and CEO, Dropbox was able to increase signups by 60% through the implementation of a program that makes it incredibly easy for users to tell a friend about their software. 

Check out their approach here:

By incentivizing users with up to 16 GB of free space, they are effectively increasing the likelihood that they will spread the word to a friend (or two, or three...) 

Hack #6: Leverage Twitter lists

4 Growth Hacking Techniques for Twitter from Romain Simon

Have you ever been added to a Twitter list? You received a notification that alerted you, right?

You probably took it as a compliment, and in return, followed or engaged with the person who added you to the list. 

This hack suggest that you leverage this function to get people talking about (and following) your account. Simply identify a list of accounts you want to engage, add them to a list, and voilà. 

All the listees will receive a notification that they've been added to your list, which will likely spark some buzz. Not to mention, these are the followers you want. You hand selected these people.

It doesn't get much better than that. 

Hack #7: Identify the "AHA" moment

21 Actionable Growth Hacking Tactics from Jon Yongfook

Twitter found that when users follow 30+ people, their engagement increases. It isn't until this point that they reach their "aha" moment, and begin to understand and buy into the lay of the land. 

To apply this hack to your business, consider what essential information people are going to need before they can make a purchasing decision. An easy way to do this is to analyze the website behavior of your existing customers. What pages did they view in the discovery stage? Are there any common threads? Is there a page in particular that has proven its ability to assist conversions? 

Leverage these pages. 

Keep the content updated, make sure that you're giving them everything they need, and serve it up in a way that aligns with their preferences.