It's that time again - the fresh start of a new year, and this time it's a pretty major milestone. Business owners everywhere have big plans for 2020 and beyond, but the first step in reaching your marketing goals for the new year is to assess what you have now, and decide what needs to be updated.
In the sixth and last part of this series on growth hacking, we're finally going to talk about the magic word that every small business owner and startup founder likes to hear: revenue.
In the first four parts of this series, we've talked a lot about how to bring in new direct customers. These are people who heard about your business either through your marketing campaigns, or through some other kind of exposure, perhaps on your social media accounts or elsewhere on the internet. This method of acquiring customers can be quite labor-intensive, not to mention expensive, and when you factor in attrition, sometimes businesses find that they're lucky if they get any growth at all past a modest user base.
Now that we've covered the three As of the Pirate Funnel - awareness, acquisition, and activation - it's time to move forward to the R steps. This half of the funnel is where visitors turn to paying customers, and where that customer base grows to the point where your business can thrive. The first of these steps, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, is retention.
Parts 1 and 2 of this series on growth hacking were all about the process of bringing customers into your sphere of awareness, and acquiring them in the sense of getting them to engage with you on an informational level. Once those steps are complete, it's time to progress to the crucial turning point of activation.
Last time, in part 1 of this series on growth hacking, we talked about awareness, the initial step in the AAARRR funnel (also known as the Pirate Funnel). This time, we're moving on beyond the point of awareness to when you have your first transaction with a customer. This is referred to as acquisition.
