SME Growth Hack Build. Promote. Sell. Inspire - The Outcome

With a week between us and last week’s SME Growth Hack, now is a good time to reflect on what was learned, covered and uncovered. To do this, let’s have a quick look at the four pillars of the event.

Build

Creating and growing a small business takes time, commitment, and funding. Although time and commitment are not always easy to find, it is often funding which stops many small businesses from reaching their potential. However, according to Ari Last from Market Invoice and Sophie Chappelow from Funding Circle, finding investors is becoming easier to do through new funding platforms. Banks have become more and more stringent with loans, which has lead to a wealth of new organisations offering crowdsourced funding.

Promote

The question of how to spread the word about your newly developed product or service is often asked. Constant Contact joined us to demystify the process, and share a range of methods for reaching new customers and markets. As Tamsin Fox-Davies and Karen Haller explained in their session, in order to increase your social visibility, you should focus on increasing engagement. Engagement, to put it simply, is the process of building relationships with customers and clients.

Sell

Sales are the pinnacle of business, and being able to sell your product or service to customers is essential to growing. Jacqui Ma, founder of Goodordering, shared the story of her Goodordering bags - from the initial concept art to selling her products in the UK. A compelling story, with many insights into the level of commitment and dedication needed to get an unknown product to market.

Inspire

Raj Kotecha, Managing Director at the Creative Content Agency, spoke passionately about the role of inspiration in business and how he has been inspired to reach where he is today. Furthermore, he discussed how he finds Eventbrite to be an inspiring business. By bringing people together, and by creating a platform which allows individuals to meet through events, Eventbrite has both inspired people and facilitated engagement in customers.

The day featured a vast amount of advice, and exposed many methods for reaching customers. So what is the essence of growth hacking? As Mr. Lumley-Savile from Locatable so eloquently put it - “Starting to think #growthhack is just the #shoreditch word for something called 'marketing.'” However, we believe Louis Sayers hit the nail on the head stating “Growth hacking is thinking about how to scale your business and how to leverage different platforms.”

Thank You to everyone who attended, and thank you to our sponsors and media partners for making the event possible!

For the presentation slides on the day, go here! 

Check out the pictures from the day here.