Growth Hackers Guide to the Galaxy

Streamers who want to make streaming a full-time gig knows how important it is to build an audience. In fact, we’ve already written a couple of articles about how to grow your audience, so you can start monetizing your channel. 

However, even with the strategies and tactics we’ve presented, growing your stream is still a challenging endeavor, mainly because most streamers have the same mindset and approach to growing their streams. 

As a result, most strategies and tactics become overused and ineffective because audiences get tired of seeing the same promotions over and over again. When audience fatigue happens, potential stream viewers start to ignore your promotional activities. Ultimately, this makes it extra challenging to gain new audience. 

This isn’t something that’s exclusive to streamers. A lot of businesses, big or small experience audience fatigue as well. That’s why marketers created Growth Hacking to break this cycle to reach exponential growth for their brand. 

Usually, it’s startups who use Growth Hacking strategies because it’s cheaper than running a full marketing campaign. 

Since you’re new to the streaming game, we’re assuming that you’re looking for an affordable way to grow your audience. That’s why in this article, we’re teaching you how to growth hack your way into a massive audience. 

 

What is Growth Hacking?

In a nutshell, growth hacking is a strategy used by marketers to gain as many customers as possible while spending as little as possible. It’s commonly used by tech start-ups to generate buzz and gain new users for their apps. 

A good example of a highly successful Growth Hacking strategy was Apple’s strategy from 2004 to 2008. 

The tech giant made one simple change that made their iPod viral. Can you guess what it is? 

If you think it had something to do with the iPod itself, then you’re wrong. The simple change they did was to make their earphones white in a time when all the earphones were black. This made theirs stand out from everyone – making people wonder what those were and where can they get the device. With this strategy, existing iPod customers became walking billboards that caught the attention of everyone everywhere.

As a result, the iconic white earphones became a massive marketing campaign that they scaled to fully capture the market. 

 

How you can Growth Hack your Stream

Growing your stream using this method is not easy. We’re saying this as early as now because a lot of people have tried it and failed. But if you’re brave enough to take on the challenge of growth hacking your stream, then here’s a guide on how to do it. 

 

1. Start with your product

Everything starts and ends with your stream. Before you can even think about applying this new strategy to grow your audience, you should first evaluate whether or not your stream is worth growth hacking. 

Even with the best growth strategy, a boring stream will never grow. That’s because even if you can get 1,000,000 people to watch your stream if you’re boring and unwatchable, 999,999 of those people would stop watching you in the first 5 minutes. So you just wasted a whole lot of time and effort to get 1,000,000 viewers only to lose them immediately. 

So before you even start coming up with ideas, ask yourself if your stream is worth watching. Is there value for your audience? Is it entertaining enough? Would you watch it if it wasn’t yours or your friend’s stream? 

If you objectively believe that you have an awesome stream, then it’s time for you to hack your way into a wider audience. 

 

2. Have the right mindset

Growth hacking is less of a marketing strategy, but more of a mindset. It’s because, unlike traditional marketing and promotion, there are no hard and fast rules here. There’s no actual playbook on how to do it right. 

What you need to have is a mindset that’s focused on the following: 

• Growth – You need to have growth as your North Star. All your activities should be geared towards growing your stream. You can’t focus on anything other than this, because it will derail your progress. 
• Curiosity – As a growth hacker, it’s important that you stay curious. You can’t cling to your assumptions and ideas about how the world works or how your audience behaves. You need to be open-minded in researching and discovering new things. You need to take time to study your analytics and engage your existing audience. Being curious about the unknown will help you come up with better ideas to grow your audience. 
• Ingenuity – The biggest challenge for Growth Hackers is coming up with new and creative ideas to engage the market. And as a disruptor in your space, you need to always generate new ideas on how to bring more people to your stream. 
• Resilience – This is going to be a long endeavor that would make you face more failures than success. That’s because most of the things you’ll do are experimental in nature. You’ll be trying out new and untested concepts and 99 times out of 100, they’ll fail. But finding that 1 idea will ultimately change your life. 

 

3. Social Listening

The first technical skill that you’ll need to have as a growth hacker is social listening. Meaning, you’re going to research what your target audience is saying about the game, about other streamers, and about the world in general. 

Knowing what your target audience is saying and thinking would give you an insight on what’s lacking or what they’re looking for. This would help you come up with more effective ideas that aren’t out there yet. 

The most effective way to do social listening are as follows: 

• Watch your competitors’ streams and read the comments. Look at what people are saying about the stream and the streamer. 
• Go to gaming forums to know what players are saying about the game. What do they feel about the latest update? Is this something you can make content about? 
• Stalk topics on social media. Research hashtags and keywords to know what gamers are saying on social media. This is where most casual gamers hang out. So, there’s a lot of insight here on what you can do to get them to watch. 

You can do these manually if you’re just starting out. But you can also subscribe to a social listening software or hire virtual assistants to the jobs for you. 

 

4. A swipe file

A swipe file is a compilation of ideas that you love. Most creatives have a swipe file to use as a reference when they’re having a mental block. For instance, writers like us usually keep a couple of articles that have really caught our attention. We analyze these and use the ideas to improve our writing. 

As a growth hacker, having a swipe file of growth hack ideas that you encounter would be beneficial in the long run because it becomes your fuel for new ideas. Innovative ideas don’t come out of the blue. They are formed by combining different ideas to form a new one. And having a swipe file ensures that you’ll never run out of ideas for your experiment. 

 

5. An eye for analytics

Since growth hacking is a continuous experiment, you need to know the results that you’re getting. This would help you know what’s working and not working, so you’ll know how to improve your experiment. 

You can find your analytics in the dashboard of your social media accounts, streaming platform, and website. 

Check out our other articles for a deeper dive into analytics! 

 

Last words: 

There’s no one right way to growth hack your stream. As we mentioned above, it’s all about having the right mindset and the courage to innovate and experiment until you find the right idea. All you need to do is to listen, innovate, measure, and iterate consistently. 

 

So now that we’ve given you a guide on how to grow your stream with growth hacking, we wish you well, young padawan.