Growth Loop: Thumbtack.com
How a home improvement website grew to 7 million visits per month
Thumbtack, a home improvement website that connects customers with local service professionals, has used a variety of strategies to create growth loops. Their current website traffic stands at around 7 million unique visitors a month (Source: similarweb).
Here are some of the key ways Thumbtack has grown its website traffic:
Search engine optimization (SEO): Thumbtack has focused on optimizing its website for search engines, which has helped it to rank higher in search results and attract more organic traffic. This has involved optimizing website content, building backlinks, and ensuring website speed and mobile responsiveness.
Content marketing: Thumbtack has invested in creating high-quality content, such as blog posts and guides, which provides value to its target audience and helps to attract more traffic to the site.
Social media marketing: Thumbtack has a strong presence on social media, where it shares content and engages with its audience. This helps to drive traffic to the site and increase engagement with users.
Paid advertising: Thumbtack has used paid advertising on platforms like Google and Facebook to drive traffic to the site. This has involved targeted ads based on user search queries and demographic data.
Referral marketing: Thumbtack has a referral program that incentivizes users to refer their friends to the site. This has helped to drive more traffic to the site and increase user engagement.
Thumbtack has been successful in growing its website traffic through a combination of SEO, content marketing, social media marketing, paid advertising, and referral marketing.
But why is that different to anyone else? Thumback was able to amplify the above by adding growth loops into their strategy. Let’s look at how Thumbtack actually created a growth loop to leverage on top of this.
The growth loop involves the following four steps. Thumbtack:
Provided value to users: Thumbtack provides a valuable service by connecting customers with local service professionals who can help them with their needs. This creates a positive experience for users and encourages them to use the platform again in the future.
Encouraged repeat usage: By providing a high-quality service and making it easy for users to book and communicate with service professionals, Thumbtack encourages users to come back to the platform when they need additional services.
Leveraged network effects: As more users use Thumbtack, the platform becomes more valuable to both customers and service professionals. This leads to more word-of-mouth referrals and increases the likelihood that new users will join the platform.
Optimized their marketplace: Thumbtack continuously works to improve the marketplace by optimizing its algorithms, improving the user experience, and attracting more service professionals to the platform. This helps to ensure that the platform continues to provide value to users and encourages them to keep using it.