If you have a lawn mowing business and are interested in bringing in more customers (and money) to your business, you might be interested in the term growth hacking.

What is growth hacking?

In a nutshell, growth hacking is the process of rapid experimentation to learn what messaging, pricing and product offerings work best for your business across different marketing (and other) channels.

The key words in the definition are rapid and experimentation:

• experimentation: you need to test different ideas, not just rely on one idea to get more customers and money into your lawn mowing business; and
• rapid: it means testing things quickly and not spending six months in between experiments.

What you’re testing for is not just new customers, it’s also how much each new customer spends. This is because customers sourced from different marketing channels may spend different amounts of money, depending how they found out about you. So, test for this too.

What are some examples for a lawn mowing business?

Let’s say you want to test the best way to get new customers to your mowing business. The old way might have been to sign up to some (or all) of the following, then kiss your money goodbye and wait for people to come to you:

• Google AdWords for 3-6 months (DIY or with an SEO agency) on a generic “lawn mowing” campaign;
• An online, local, business directory for 12 months;
• A weekly local newspaper advertising campaign for one to three months;
• Printing 10,000 flyers and letter dropping them every day that you don’t have enough lawns to mow;
• Visit as many local businesses as you can, to see if they want to partner with you and refer business your way

The problem with the old method is that your (admirable) patience in waiting for each of those campaigns to end before you can reassign your marketing budget elsewhere, is costing you money, because you’ve locked yourself into spending money on long term campaigns that may not be bringing you new business at all.

The new way, the growth hacking way, would be to spend small amounts of money on lots of different marketing campaigns in a short period of time, then decide which ones work best to then redirect more of your budget in those successful channels. For example:

• Only set up Google AdWords for one week, then assess if the money spent was less than the new business you earned from it during that week;
  • You’d probably split that one week’s campaign into 3-6 ads, which may look something like this:
    • lawn mowing [your suburb]
    • lawn mowing [your region]
    • lawn mowing service [your suburb]
    • cheap mowing [your region]
    • experienced mower [your suburb]
    • gardener [your suburb]
• Only agree to a one month listing in your online, local, business directory, then assess the results;
• Agree to two advertisements in the local newspaper
  • Again, you might experiment within this, by creating two different ads, so that the week one ad is worded differently from the week two ad, to see if they bring in different results;
• Print 1,000 flyers and letter drop during one week only
  • Perhaps print 500 flyers with one message and 500 flyers with a different message, to see if the different messaging brings in different results
  • Perhaps deliver 250 flyers with message one in your first choice suburb, then deliver 250 flyers with your second message in your second choice suburb
• Visit local businesses in a strategic fashion
  • Visit 10 real estate agencies;
  • Visit 10 tenants at an industrial site;
  • Visit 10 samples from another type of business, then see which one has the best results (if any at all)

Quick Summary

So, before you open your wallet for any one, long-term, marketing campaign, you may like to brainstorm how you could better allocate your marketing money into smaller experiments, learn from those rapid results, test new marketing channels, learn again from the results, and so forth, until you are confident that you’ve found the best way to spend marketing money for your lawn mowing business.

If you start loving the growth hacking topic and want more information, and to learn from others, in all types of (mostly online) businesses, one authoritative source to check is GrowthHackers.

Good luck – and feel free to share any growth hacking tips of your own!

Thanks Daniel Smith from GrowthHackingTips for your inspiration today at a growth hacking workshop for Startup Weekend Youth students at Spark Bureau in Maroochydore, on the Sunshine Coast in Queensland.