22 Tips to Supercharge Your Startup Growth in 2022

We believe 2022 is going to be the year of startup super-growth. We can already feel it. The past 16 months have seen a record-breaking number of new business launches. In the summer of 2021 alone, people started over 440,000 businesses in the US.

So, to help you supercharge the growth of your amazing startup, we’ve rounded up the top 22 detailed tips, tricks, resources, and strategies you should be using to max out your growth potential.

These killer insights fall into three categories: Mindset, Marketing, and Customer Experience.

Let’s get started.

MAX YOUR MINDSET

1. Never underestimate the power of focus.

Focus is at the heart of business growth and personal wellbeing. It’s not just for productivity. Focus brings your team clarity and purpose, making their roles more fulfilling. That’s a recipe for happy teams and strong employee retention.

2. Even as an entrepreneur, don’t get chained to your desk.

We live in a culture of workaholism. In a world where we’re obsessed with the hustle, being busy, and flaunting productivity, so many people have truly become addicted to their job. Don’t let yourself become so wrapped up in your business that you forget to notice the little things. Time with your loved ones, the wagging tail of your dog, the sweet smell of coffee consumed for enjoyment–not survival. Don’t overlook these things in the pursuit of hyper-growth.

3. Make sure your goals are valuable and tied to results.

Your goals have to be valuable and results based. If they’re not tied to a metric you can track, how will you know when you’ve reached them? Get measurable goals that are tied to your revenue and company growth.

4. Make sure your goals are aligned with what your team is doing.

Your company goals have to reflect what your team is actually working on. Otherwise, you’ll never get any closer to reaching them. If your goals and teams are misaligned, you’re either chasing the wrong goal or your team needs to be redirected.

5. Hire a dedicated project manager.

Nothing sinks a great project faster than disorganization. A dropped ball here, a missed communication there, and your million-dollar idea can stall out. When you hire a project manager, you free every member of your team to focus on what they do best. Small businesses can even get away with a part time PM on the team. A few hours of organization every week make a big difference.

6. Automate everything you can.

Hyper-growth companies have to focus their time on what really matters. Automatic emails, team notifications, workflows, and report generations let you do more in less time. They also reduce the risk of human error. Automations take time to set up and get used to, but the time savings adds up quickly.

MARKETING

7. Winning content strategies require a lot of quality content, consistently.

To get ahead of iOS 14, you need to be posting more than ever. You can land a high volume of sales when you create quality content consistently and frequently. When you find a winner, reproduce that winning post again and again. Share it across other platforms, tag new users, boost to new audiences, and repeat.

8. Modular content is effective and efficient.

Modular content refers to a social media video made of several short clips with sound, text across the screen, emojis, or other visuals. It’s a cost-effective social media marketing strategy because you can rearrange the clips, change the text, and swap the music dozens of times until you have a combination that works. While traditional videos are either boom or bust, modular content offers endless combination options.

9. Analyze your marketing winners and losers.

Chart the similarities between your marketing inventory items with similar performance results. Can you find areas of overlap? Is there a specific keyword, call-to-action, or photo style shared among your top performing pieces of content? It seems like a no-brainer, but many brands forget to take the time to stop and assess every once and a while.

MAX YOUR CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE

10. Outstanding customer experience is key to becoming a disruptive company.

If your buying process is complicated or confusing, people won’t purchase your product or service. It doesn’t matter if you have the best product in the world, they’ll turn to a competitor with a smoother buyer journey. You have to view your customer experience from 3,000ft up, looking for every point of friction along the way and meticulously cutting it out.

11. Ditch forms whenever possible.

The old buying experience is full of forms. Contact forms, request forms, download forms, and that’s just the start! But forms cause a lot of friction. When a user has to fill out a form there’s a chance you’ll have fallout. Reduce the friction by replacing static forms with a more personalized and user-friendly form, like a Typeform, which automatically and quickly scrolls the user through your questions.

12. Remove the silos between your departments.

People fall into the cracks between our marketing and sales departments. Before you launch a single new marketing strategy, make sure there’s no gap between your ads, posts, popups, forms, and emails, and your sales team. If there’s lag time between when a potential customer fills out a form or requests a meeting and when the sales team reaches out, that’s a problem.

13. Refresh your buyer persona.

You can use a buyer persona chart like Hubspot’s Make My Persona to detail the characteristics, pain points, challenges, and more about your ideal customer. Use online surveys, your existing analytical data, and focus groups to further refine and define your customer. You can even look through your chat bot, Yelp reviews, and customer emails to pull insights.

14. Map out your buyer’s journey on a wall or whiteboard.

Having the whole journey charted out across the wall gives your team the chance to highlight moments of friction and moments of personalization. Where can you eliminate an unnecessary step or lag time? Maybe it’s a landing page that could be replaced by a Typeform, or a chat bot that can be added to reduce email response times.

15. Personalize everything you can.

The world has become so technical and generic that just a little personalization can go a long way in helping you stand out. Consider adding something to your website that displays the time or weather at your user’s location, with a friendly message about bundling up or wearing sunscreen. A message declaring today’s obscure holiday could even do the trick to reduce your bounce rate and improve user experience.

16. Plan for mobile first.

One way to make your site more user-friendly and improve customer experience is to replace downloadable PDF links with flipbooks. They’re easy to swipe on a phone and reduce the friction of a download link or email. Each page of the flipbook can be linked to your website, videos, and interactive elements. This encourages more clicks and site exploration.

17. Customers love quizzes

Where can you use assessments on your website or throughout the buying journey? How about on your homepage, to direct the visitor to the right place on your site? Or in your first nurture email, to qualify your reader and inform the rest of your email sequence? Quizzes give you valuable real-time data about the potential customers engaging with your brand. A few well-timed, user-friendly assessments can go a long way in helping segment your marketing efforts.

18. Replace “Contact us” with a calendar link, when possible.

Forget going back and forth over email, chasing a schedule time. Calendaring systems like Calendly or Acuity reduce the friction of scheduling. This gets more customers on your books, faster. Plus, automated email reminders help more of your appointments hold, without extra work on your part.

19. Streamline your conversations.

Use a chatbot to start the customer journey on your website. By addressing common questions through the bot, you improve customer retention and save your team valuable time. The real time responses engage more potential buyers and move them along the journey quicker.

20. Lead scoring makes your marketing dollars more effective.

Set up trigger points across your website that, when activated, assign positive or negative points to your leads. Hubspot is one lead tracker that monitors your lead scores. For example, a user who has visited your site three times in the past seven days, viewed your pricing page, and downloaded a PDF would have a high lead score. A user who has visited only twice and spent most of their time browsing blog posts would have a low, or negative score.

Only leads with above your pre-determined score would receive your nurture sequence, retargeting ads, or sales calls. This ensures your marketing dollars (and your sales team’s time) is being spent on the most valuable leads.

21. Consider using intent data in your B2B marketing strategy

Intent data utilizes user browsing behavior to tell you which buyers are the most likely to buy your product or service soon. Gather this valuable data using a platform like Bombora or G2. Thousands of businesses use these two websites to research and vet corporate operations solutions. By tapping into these platforms’ browser data, B2B companies can determine which other businesses are most likely to purchase their product or service.

22. Be proactively helpful for your customers.

Consider setting up a conversational support funnel. This is an email or notifications sequence that walks your new customers through the most common questions and friction points they might experience after purchase. By addressing these questions before they come up, you improve customer retention and loyalty while saving your support staff valuable time.

So entrepreneurs, hustlers, and trendsetters, there you have it. Our 22 detailed tips, strategies, and resources for supercharging your startup growth in 2022. Give a few of these tips a try, and let us know how it goes. We can’t wait to celebrate your wins with you.

ZeBrand is not sponsored by any of the companies, resources, or software mentioned in this article. We just want to help you hack your startup growth using the best tools possible. Here’s to your 10x revenue growth in 2022!