Instead of pouring your entire budget into advertising campaigns to acquire new customers, think about what your existing customers can do to improve your marketing?
Dropbox and Airbnb have seen significant growth in recent years thanks to referral marketing. But PayPal did it even earlier. By offering $20 to new users and $20 to their referred friends (later reduced to $10, then $5), PayPal gained more than 100,000 users in its first month.
The bold referral program was spearheaded by PayPal co-founder Elon Musk, who described the campaign’s viral principle as “growing bacteria in a petri dish.” While you’re unlikely to be able to invest tens of millions of dollars in such projects, a good referral program (for both the referrer and their friends) can encourage rapid growth.
If you're not ready to launch a full-fledged referral program, consider sending your customers a discount code via email. Because they have a positive impression of your brand (reinforced by repeat purchases), they'll be more likely to refer their friends to you, especially if you incentivize them to do so.
Guest posting
A few years ago, guest posting was used for dubious reasons. For example, in order to get indexed in search engines and get external links, marketers posted SEO content on external sites without thinking about its value to the audience.
Luckily, Google has caught on to this dubious practice, and it is slowly becoming a thing of the past. However, Google still encourages guest posts that “inform users, educate audiences at other sites, or raise nigeria phone number data awareness of your causes and companies.”
In other words, guest posting is no longer a game for building links. It is now about building a long-term brand image and providing value to your audience. As a tactic for free growth, guest posting is extremely effective. If you don’t consider yourself strong in the craft of writing, you can hire a quality copywriter for this job. Also, make sure to find authoritative “guest” bloggers who are experts in their niches. They should be published on specialized sites, not on general-purpose resources.
If you're growing a startup, save your best content for guest posts. It sounds counterintuitive, but guest articles will be read more often than your blog posts — so it makes sense to offer more value to a larger audience.
Gamification
If you ever played the old MMORPG, Everquest, one of the most appealing features of the game's interface was the experience bar that showed how close you were to the next level.