Growth hacking (also known sometimes as ´growth marketing´ or  ´agile growth marketing´ ) consists of resource-light and cost-effective tactics to help grow and retain an active user base, sell products and gain exposure. Growth hacking is most commonly associated with start-ups and small businesses, i.e. those organizations that don’t have a huge amount of cash to spare but need results quickly. However, it’s a scalable concept applicable to any online business keen to maintain the growth and retention of an active user base, and it can be successfully applied to the mental health industry.

First, we start with metrics to measure the growth of our mental health care business. The key metrics should always be the ones that will best deliver growth for your company, such as new strategic partnerships, new clients, client satisfaction, repetition or decrease of churn. 

Once you know which metrics are most important, it´s time to set goals. Goals should be SMART, which means specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and timely. Finding new customers, expanding niches, raising the Lead-to-Customer Conversion Rate, improving referrals could be valid objectives but in order to be SMART they should be set like this example:

Finding and attracting 30 new customers in three months.

Think of objectives as a desired increase, or decrease in a specific period of time in your metrics.

The next step is to design and test growth drivers. Growth drivers are ways of achieving our objectives, and we test them through small campaigns, called experiments.

Possible growth drivers for the mental health care sector might be remarketing to users that have already visited the site or incrementing conversion through increasing user trust. 

Which one suits us best, and which one should we focus on? This is what we are going to discover through this methodology. 

Customer trust in an industry like this is vital, we work with people who put their health in our hands.

 Being the reference for our clients in their recommendations to family and friends could help us to develop the potential of our business and generate the feeling of trust we are looking for.

It has been proven that when a family member, friend or trusted person recommends a place, it is up to five times more likely that the client will go there and discard other similar options.

To do this our clients must be fully satisfied with the service we have offered them and as we know there are different methodologies for us to gain their support, from discounts, to other types of attention or simply asking them for a recommendation. 

 Free trial sessions, giving people a taste of the service we can offer them can be the key to getting them to take the step towards therapy, leaving them with the candy in their mouth to get them to come back. We can study the possible responses of profiles to the prospect of a free trial and through a small test, admit or disprove the hypothesis.

With the help of social media advertising and Google Ads, we can take care of covering short-term sales. But when will we stop our campaign and what will happen then?

We have to work in parallel with the SEO strategy to receive customers organically and for free. Still, this is a fundamental aspect of any website, because what we do will be rewarded in one or more ways in the future.

But bear in mind that it is not about making the website work to receive traffic just for the sake of it, but to obtain qualified traffic, which means, visits that are interested in the products or services we sell. How can we attract this type of traffic? What kind of strategies do we have to follow?

To do this, a detailed analysis of the Web and the industry must be carried out, and once implemented, SEO strategies, contents and links must be planned on our website.

• What recommendations must be taken into account when placing a website?
• How can we carry out an analysis of the competition?
• What are the key words of transactions in your industry?
• How can I optimise my website?

All these questions and more are the ones we have to answer to find the right marketing strategy, answering them from small tests that allow us to have a global vision of the most important thing: What can make us GROW.

Finally, the lessons learned. Lessons learned are essential to document in order to know what has worked in the past and what should not be repeated. You need to have a regular feedback loop and keep track of the learnings on an ongoing basis.

Want to learn more about how to apply growth hacking to your Mental Health Care business? Sign up for Hypertry and request a one-on-one session.