10 Effective Growth Hacking Strategies for Agencies in 2022

In 2022, growth hacking strategies are the lifeline of digital agencies that want to offer the best results to clients. Especially for early-stage businesses, marketing should target rapid results and help clients survive in competitive landscapes. 

Growth hacking is low-cost, creative, and actually effective—a dream trio of marketing services.

Growth hacking can change the fate of small businesses and early-stage startups. It helps companies acquire a customer base without spending huge amounts and resources on traditional marketing methods, in short periods of time. 

A large number of new businesses rely on marketing to grow and secure their place among the competitors, and trust agencies for the most effective growth plan. In 2022 global digital marketing spend is expected to rise by 13.3% to a whopping 441.2 billion dollars, which means the role of digital agencies in growth will continue its rise, and offering the best growth strategies is becoming more and more important to stand out in the industry.

10 Effective Growth Hacking Strategies for Agencies

In this section, we will go over the top 10 growth hacking strategies in 2022, for agencies that like to keep up with the latest trends and innovative marketing methods.

• Optimizing online presence
• Community building
• Offering freebies
• Viral contests and giveaways
• Influencer marketing
• Staying on top of trends
• Automation
• Content repurposing
• Daring to take risks 
• Video marketing

Optimizing online presence

Do you have any friends who are not on social media? How often do you talk to them, think of them, in comparison to friends you see on social media?

Especially in the post-pandemic world, online presence is vital to an overall social presence! And a brand needs a strong overall presence if they want to grow. There are digital marketing tactics for strengthening and increasing the visibility of a brand for a certain customer base. Some of such basic strategies in growth hacking are:

• SEO (search engine optimization)
• Building a website with accessible and friendly UI/UX
• Optimizing interface for mobile devices
• Captivating landing pages

Community building 

86% of Fortune 500 companies report that online communities provide richer insight into the needs of their customers. The best way to show customers that they matter is by actively engaging them. And you can do that by building communities. 

Building online communities around a brand have many merits. It adds a personal touch to the brand’s engagement with its customers. That personal touch is the key to building brand loyalty. It shows a human side to businesses, a positive image that attracts potential leads and spreads brand awareness to larger audiences.

Online communities also enable direct dialogue around the product. When the company wants to do user research and get feedback from its customer base, it can easily do so by addressing the community.

Offering freebies 

They say the best things in life are free. This is up to debate, but free things are always very popular, and most welcome. In fact, sometimes offering free products or services can snowball up to a 2000% increase in sales.

Offering free tools and resources is one way of doing so. Depending on the company’s product, you could install calculators, tests, reports, PDF guides on the website. This also opens up the possibility of lead generation by getting detailed contact information from the visitors before they can access the free content. 

You could also ask for personal information and input that could help with segmentation and user research. Collecting emails in this way can help build up a list of potential leads, to which you can then send marketing content and newsletters in the future.

Viral contests and giveaways

There are so many ways to go viral on social media, and running contests & giveaways is a classic among growth hacking strategies. The product gets promoted for free, the brand’s social media gains exposure, and perhaps even achieves rapid growth through likes and new followers in bulk. 

This creates a psychological phenomenon called “social proof”, which is when people adjust their behaviors in order to fit what the majority is doing. Think of viral trends in social media. Remember how many people poured ice-cold water over their heads to join the ice bucket challenge? You can add a fun twist to the contest campaign to create such a rippling effect on social media.

Influencer marketing

In-your-face marketing is not as effective anymore, people prefer organic content that doesn’t directly feel market-y. Between 2009 and 2021 alone, influencer marketing has grown more than double the size, leaping from 6.5 billion to 13.8 billion US dollars. Their opinions are trusted, and true to the term they have the power to “influence” a large audience of followers. 

Collaborating with influencers can really boost the visibility of a brand, and generate promising leads. Some factors to consider are the number and demographics of their followers and the relevance of their content to the business you are trying to promote.

What are some growth hacking strategies with influencer marketing? The most popular ones are giving out promo codes or launching a giveaway campaign. Promo codes can give a quick and effective boost for conversion and sales numbers. Giveaways generate likes and followers in a cost-efficient way and can help the brand’s social media account grow pretty quickly.

Staying on top of trends

For brands to stay relevant, they need relevant marketing tactics. Though some growth hacking strategies have proven very successful in the past, you should be careful about which ones to adopt according to the business, the product, and the social context.

It is important to follow competition and trends in the digital landscape. An outdated approach might end up creating a negative image. The key is to keep it fresh and innovative. Analyze the trends well and adapt it to the brand’s identity. And not just marketing trends, but also organic trends in digital media among actual users.

Automation

We have listed the merits of growth hacking strategies above as cost efficiency and effectiveness. In our day and age, there is nothing more efficient than automation. Okay, but how does it work for marketing, and how does it help with business growth?

In digital marketing consistency is key, and you don’t always have time to be manually consistent. You should get software support for repetitive tasks, such as emails at different stages of the customer journey, directed at different parts of the funnel, as much as possible. There are plenty of tools for social media automation as well, helping marketers pace and schedule posts so that it’s punctual and regular.

And it’s reflected pretty impressively in numbers. After adopting automation, 44% of companies see a return on their investment in six months, and 76% see it in one year.

Content repurposing

Even the most creative agencies can run out of creative juices sometimes. Or simply run out of time. But no worries, there’s another growth hack strategy to the rescue: repurposing. It not only saves time but gives an SEO boost and allows experimenting with different formats, testing out which one works better.

The same message can be translated innovatively to different mediums, so don’t be afraid to recycle content that has already worked with some tweaks and changes. For example, you can take written content and transform it into a compact visual infographic or a short kinetic typography video.

Daring to take risks 

Growth hacking is all about experimenting and testing out different strategies to see which one works out. As the saying goes, “the proof is in the pudding” in growth hacking strategies. You need to create multiple versions and models of campaigns and dare to try something different each time.

The term for this kind of experimentalist approach in growth hacking is A/B testing (or split testing). There are always alternative groups, receiving alternative versions of a campaign (whether it’s an email, a targeted ad, or a landing page). Make sure to keep track of how each model is received by the audience, so you can continue with the better ones, or make use of your insights in the future.

Video marketing

If we are talking about the top growth hack strategy for 2022, it is undoubtedly video content marketing. Between 2019 and 2020 alone, the global watch time of ad-supported and purchased movies has increased by 800%. This is just one number demonstrating how rapidly video is growing in our lives, compared to other media formats.

Here are essential points to consider if you’re aiming for a successful video marketing strategy:

• Choose your platform according to the target audience
• Ensure that the format fits the platform
• Collaborate with influencers and trending accounts on video platforms
• Keep up with trending formats and topics
• Offer substance in your content to get shared
• Try paid promotions and targeted ads
• Keep it short and clear

Closing Thoughts on Growth Hacking Strategies for Agencies

In this article, we have offered 10 growth hacking strategies for agencies that have proven successful in many cases in 2022. There is no universal formula for success that fits every business, but we hope this gives you some ideas to explore.