Keeping your business moving on an upward trajectory can be vital if you want to remain competitive – but finding ways to grow revenues is a persistent challenge.

Here are six time- and cost-efficient growth hacks that could help boost revenue in your business.

Research shows that content marketing can cost 62% less than traditional marketing, and generate as much as three times the number of leads.¹ Getting started doesn’t have to be laborious or expensive, either. Simply using a call to action in all your social posts can help boost the number of clicks to your website.¹ And if you can create a bank of engaging content on your website, it could help improve your search rankings and bring more customers to you.²

Positive reviews from other customers are a powerful tool that can help grow your business. One survey found that nearly two thirds of online shoppers read between one and six reviews of a product before deciding to purchase.³ Featuring reviews prominently on your website could help boost consumer trust and encourage sales – a Harvard Business School study found that an increase of one star to a restaurant’s Yelp rating led to an increase in revenue of 5-9%.⁴ HubSpot has a thorough guide to the different types of customer reviews and how you could use them in your business.

Chatbots – artificial intelligence tools that communicate with customers or team members, typically by a messaging app – are becoming increasingly popular. Businesses can use them as part of their customer service, for answering customers’ queries around the clock, or even as another sales channel. Consumer retail spend via chatbots worldwide is predicted to reach $142bn in 2024, up from $2.8bn in 2019.⁵ Find out some more about using chatbots in your business here.

Marketing automation, for example, has been shown to improve overall business productivity by as much as 20%.² Some 69% of employees believe that automating business processes would reduce time wasted each week.⁶ Investing in tools to automate some of those repetitive tasks could help improve efficiency and free-up staff to work on other things – which could in turn help your business to grow.

Consumers typically visit a website several times before committing to a purchase. Grocery and beauty consumers average around 2.5 site visits before reaching checkout, while shoppers of luxury products visit a website just over four times, on average, before they buy.⁷ You could consider using retargeting adverts, which are shown to previous visitors to your website on other websites that they visit. These tools can help your business to stay top-of-mind and can ultimately lead to more sales.

Cart abandonment is a challenge for e-commerce businesses; one estimate puts the rate at more than 80%.⁸ The good news is that those potential customers can often be persuaded to complete the purchase – up to half will do so when prompted, according to Hubspot.⁹ An email prompt reminding customers of the item they were looking at with a simple call-to-action – such as an instruction to click on a link to visit your website – could help you capture some of those sales.

1. Set goals and measure progress

Identifying what you want to achieve with your growth hacks can help you implement the most effective tactics. Then consider breaking the overall target down into smaller, more achievable goals, as this can help keep you on track for success.¹⁰

2. Test and learn

Whatever growth hacking tactics you decide, consider taking a test and learn approach. By trying different content, tools or techniques, and reviewing your output at regular intervals, you can make incremental improvements that improve effectiveness.¹⁰

3. Take a multi-strategy approach

Implementing several tactics – instead of just one – could maximise your chances of growth. McKinsey recommends identifying several revenue drivers and applying best practice to each.¹¹