So, you’ve decided your team or your company needs some growth hacking services? Whether you’re after courses, tools, agencies or software, you’ve come to the right place.

Growth marketing v growth hacking services?

In recent years, the terms growth marketing and growth hacking have become increasingly common in the business world. But what do these terms actually mean, and how are they different from one another?

Growth marketing is generally regarded as a more holistic approach to business growth that takes into account all of the different channels and strategies that can be used to drive growth. It encompasses work that covers the full customer lifecycle, from acquisition and activation, all the way through to retention, revenue and referral.

Growth hacking, on the other hand, is a more narrow and specific approach to driving growth. Growth hackers typical focus on using more creative and often outside-the-box methods to rapidly grow a business. From a customer journey perspective, growth hacking tends to be almost entirely focused on new customer acquisition, growth hackers are less interested in the effectiveness of the customer journey beyond that.

	Growth Hacking	Growth Marketing
Goal	To find creative and innovative ways to grow	To find creative and innovative ways to grow
Time horizon	Short-term, quick-win activities	Medium-term activities with a more sustainable outlook
Focus	Almost solely new customer acquisition	Entire customer lifecycle (Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Revenue and Referral)
Approach	Out-of-the-box methods for rapid growth	More authentic takes on traditional marketing methods
Customers	Early-stage startups, particularly in the tech sector.	More traditional business and corporates.

Ultimately, the differences are nuanced, and both growth marketing and growth hacking can be powerful tools for startups and businesses looking to scale.

What to look for in growth hacking services?

Growth hacking services come in all shapes and sizes, though the majority of agencies tend to focus on one or more of the following areas. If haven’t identified your core traction channels yet, implementing a foundational growth strategy is always the best place to start.

Growth strategy & process

Many growth hacking agencies have services centred around setting up a repeatable, predictable, and scalable growth marketing process. This can include identifying and setting specific growth goals, growth training for your team, identifying tools and technology gaps, and implementing the required processes and culture for growth. This strategy and process work is often done in parallel with go-to-market planning.

Brand

Supporting more traditional brand agency services such as customer research, segmentation, messaging and positioning, as well as helping to define your value proposition, particularly with regard to how market differentiation can help your business to stand out online.

Data & analytics

A solid data foundation is needed to understand which campaigns and experiments are driving real results and ROI. This could be as simple as auditing a Google Analytics installation, through to the real-time loading of all your marketing and sales data into a marketing data warehouse for more in-depth analysis.

Paid media

Depending on your market, one of the most effective tools for growth may be paid advertising on platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Google. Typically this follows a simple MVP-style approach in which an agency would test what works to set some basic standards and benchmarks, and then rapidly experiment with new ideas in order to compound successful results.

Conversion rate optimisation

Ultimately ensuring effective ROI and revenue growth comes down to 2 marketing growth levers – traffic and conversion rate. Clearly, it is ineffective to spend time and resource on traffic generation if none of that traffic converts to leads or customers. CRO involves the continuous testing and optimisation of key assets through AB tests, heatmaps, traffic analytics and more.

Content marketing & SEO

Creating valueable, sharable content that converts should be the primary focus of any growth hacking service. This may include more traditional forms of content, such as blog articles, ebooks and webinar, as well as custom tools, internal documents and studies based on new and unique data. Consider techniques such as incorporating gamification components into your content marketing approach, and optimising for SEO through techniques such as topic clusters.

Social media

Social media growth strategies vary widely but typically revolve around optimised and shareable visual content – whether that’s images, GIFs, infographics or social video. Collaborating with influencers can be a great shortcut to accessing larger audiences whilst social tools can speed-up manual work such as sharing on different platforms, content recycling, AB testing headlines and gathering insights from social media analytics.

Email marketing

Email marketing strategies designed to increase user and customer engagement typically include welcome emails, promo offers and discounts, reactivation, retargeting, newsletters, behaviour automations (such as card abandonment issues) and referral incentives. Growth hackers typically look to optimise email marketing and to increase open rates and engagement through testing subject lines, as well as through segmentation, personalisation and referral incentives.

Looking for more information on growth hacking and growth marketing services? Check out some of our other articles on the Growth Method blog:

1. What is growth marketing?
2. The 6-Step Growth Marketing Process Explained
3. An in-depth guide to b2b growth hacking for businesses (with 4 real examples)

The best growth hacking services providers

Here are our top picks of the best agencies that provide growth hacking and growth marketing services worldwide. We have also provided specific services providers in the UK, Europe and US below. We do occasionally get asked for the full agency list and are happy to provide this on request.

Growth Hacking Services London

Our full agencies database includes over 25 growth hacking provides based in London.

For more information, see our recent article on growth hacking agencies in London for B2B marketers.

Growth Hacking Services UK

The top growth hacking services providers in the UK. The full database contains agencies across London, Gateshead, Surrey, Wallingford and Exeter, though the vast majority are London-based.

Growth Hacking Services Europe

Here are the top growth hacking services providers in Europe, our full database includes agencies across Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Finland, Spain, Belgium and Helsinki.

Growth Hacking Services US

Our fall database includes agencies across Palo Alto, New York, Austin Texas, San Francisco, Seattle, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Chicago and Kansas. Below are our top picks.

Other growth hacking services

Growth hacking services software

Looking for growth hacking services software and platforms, try the links below:

1. Marketing project management software review
2. In-depth GrowthHackers Experiments Review 2022
3. Using Airtable for Growth Marketing
4. Growth Experiment Templates for Pipefy, Trello, Airtable, Excel & more

Growth hacking services courses

Looking for growth hacking courses, the two links should cover everything you need to know:

1. The 12 Best Growth Marketing Courses in 2022
2. The 12 Best Growth Hacking Courses in 2022