What is Growth Hacking?
Growth hacking. It refers to someone who uses creative, low-cost strategies to help businesses acquire and retain customers. In simple terms, growth hacking refers to someone who is able to bring customers in the door of a business whilst also retaining them as loyal customers. Over the years, there have been a number of different famous growth hacking campaigns such as the famous “sent from an iPhone” or the PayPal campaign which gave other users $10 if they signed up. One of the most famous growth hacking campaigns which began in 2017 and only took developers six hours to create and has seen exponential growth, this is the infamous billion-dollar story of Linktree.
Background
Back in 2016 Australian founders; Alex, Anthony, and Nick were trying to launch the agency to help musicians grow their audience and help share their latest releases. Out of necessity, the three founders developed the initial framework for Linktree which would allow artists to share all of their songs for their fans to be easily able to access through the link in their social media bio.
Everyone is familiar with the “click on the link in bio” with one singular link linking to your service but before 2020 many people hadn’t even thought of the opportunity to have a landing page that could lead to all of the potential platforms where you wanted to send your customers.
The growth hack
The brilliance of Linktree lies in its ability to effortlessly reach every user on social media. By seamlessly integrating with existing platforms, they were able to tap into a ready-made customer base without actively seeking clients.
This strategy also highlights the genius of the user experience. When a user clicks on someone's link in their bio, they are immediately directed to a Linktree site with a URL like "http://linktr.ee/X". This instantly promotes brand recognition. Additionally, if the link owner does not have Linktree Premium, the user will see Linktree branding, further increasing brand visibility.
This means that any user viewing another person's Linktree will encounter the brand multiple times, creating multiple touchpoints. Over time, this has led to more people signing up and creating their own Linktree accounts.
Consequently, more and more people are exposed to the company and its brand, resulting in rapid scaling and growth without the need for expensive marketing campaigns. This ingenious approach essentially provides free advertising for linktree which has contributed to Linktree's current valuation of close to $1.3 billion.
Where to next
Linktree got 3 million users in the first three years since its inception. As of writing Linktree now has over 35 million active users worldwide. Linktree are continuing to raise capital to aim to expand and grow their platform. They are continuing to see rapid growth and it doesn’t look like it is stopping anytime soon.
If you are looking to grow your business this rapidly contact us!
Our team at Ascendify has had experience helping and growing startups and SMEs through growth hacking tactics and we would love to offer you the opportunity to create mass growth within your business.
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