Top Growth Marketing Strategies to Follow in 2022

In our growth marketers interview series, we spoke with top marketers who have been voted among the best on LinkedIn.

We’ve gathered valuable insights from them, including top growth marketing strategies for 2022, what trends they’re excited about this year – and a few they’re not so excited about.

We saw trends across the board from authentic personal branding, understanding your audience and users, product-led communities, and the importance of high-quality content that speaks to your audience.

Here’s a roundup of those interviews.

Episode #1: Brooklin Nash – Nash Content Consulting

Brooklin Nash of Nash Content Consulting is a B2B freelance content marketer, strategist, and consultant. He’s worked with industry-leading companies like Sales Hacker, Trust Radius, Mixpanel, and Media Radar.

A growth marketing trend that Brooklin is excited about is the use of benchmark reports or surveys. While this strategy isn’t new, it’s growing in popularity – particularly how they relate to a niche and audience interest.

In the past, Brooklin put together a Sales Stack Report at Sales Hacker, which measured the effectiveness of revenue intelligence, conversational intelligence, and sales engagement software. These softwares were ranked by participants in terms of efficiency, impact on sales motion, and ROI.

The benefits of these benchmark reports, Nash says, is that they can be repurposed.

For instance, they can be distributed to the companies mentioned in the report as a form of partner marketing. Their graphics can also be extracted and used across social channels, since many benchmark reports have upwards of 30 individual charts and graphics.

This is an invaluable tool for growth marketers.

“Doing research as a SaaS company that’s related to your niche and what your audience is interested in isn’t new, but I think it’s getting more and more popular, which is what I’m really excited about.”

Read full interview here.

Episode #2: Nick Bennett – Alyce

Nick Bennett is the Director of Field, Community, and Partner Marketing at Alyce, an AI-powered B2B gifting platform.

Nick’s talent lies in building personal brands, forging relationships, and delivering valuable content.

Nick is really excited about both paid social and dark social. Dark social constitutes those “invisible” social shares that are tough to track – like shares via email, messenger and text messages.

Recently, Nick conducted a LinkedIn campaign using conversational ads to generate leads. Nick invited strategic accounts to a 30-minute video conversation with him. In return, he offered a gift for their time.

In three and a half weeks, Nick drove 30 meetings, resulting in their first deal, with another eight or nine in the pipeline.

Nick believes it was his personal touch and branding that he has previously done on LinkedIn that caused people to respond to his messages.

“I’m not even trying to sell anything in what I post. I posted about what your paid social strategy should look like or what does mine look like. I just kind of laid it out there, but people find value in that. And then they connect the dots and put two and two together.”

Read Nick’s full interview here.

Episode #3: Sandy Mangat – Pocus

Sandy Mangat is the Head of Marketing at Pocus, a Product-Led Sales platform that empowers sales teams to prioritize the best opportunities and take the right action

Sandy’s expertise in PLG has led her to have more nuanced conversations with consumers. She believes it all starts with understanding their needs.

In her previous work at a SaaS company, much of her focus revolved around improving onboard flow and user experience. Sandy was also trying to find correlations between feature adoption and user retention.

This led her to discover the value of user “a-ha” moments – moments that spark delight in the user.

To discover these moments, Sandy went on Zoom and watched users as they interacted with the product. She observed user behavior as they moved through the product and took note of when users had an “a-ha” moment.

This research led to a key onboarding strategy. Rather than trying to introduce the user to every aspect of the product, instead, focus on introducing those features that result in “a-ha” moments. After, you can introduce other features and layer on complexity.

“It’s just getting closer to customers and really understanding their needs. Then, of course, in true PLG fashion, we utilize all of that information to feed it back into making our product amazing.”

Read the full interview with Sandy here.

Episode #4: Moni Oloyede – Fidelis

Moni Oloyede is the Director of Marketing Infrastructure at Fidelis Cyber Security. She’s an expert in all things digital marketing, marketing automation, and inbound marketing.

Moni stresses the importance of empathy when getting to know your audience. For instance, uncovering details about your audience’s daily routine can help in moving them along their journey.

She also emphasizes that not all customers are ready to buy at all points in the journey. It’s a nurturing process. Once you know your audience, you can speak to what motivates and what pains them.

Getting back to marketing basics is what Moni is excited about in 2022. She believes putting the brakes on growth hacking is the way forward, and becoming intimately familiar with your customers’ lives and needs is most important.

“If you invest in your customers, serve them well and give them what they want, you won’t have a problem with revenue at all.”

Read our full chat with Moni here.

Episode #5: Chris Walker – Refine Labs

Chris Walker is the CEO at Refine Labs, a demand accelerator for B2B SaaS companies. Refine Labs helps businesses dominate categories and unlock major growth opportunities.

Chris prefers marketing strategies that are tried and true: get insights and understand customers. To do this, Chris has worked to build a multi-channel community, using a mix of live events, social networks, and direct messaging.

The community is specific to how people think and work, instead of a channel, and he believes that’s what helps drive value for customers.

For instance, LinkedIn has become a driver in Chris’s marketing strategy. Posting longer videos with valuable content, Chris says, is more important than creating posts simply for views and vanity metrics. This strategy provides more value to community members.

Refine Labs also engages their employees in innovative ways, empowering them to use LinkedIn in whatever way they feel is best.

“All of the people on our executive team are active on LinkedIn and post a lot. We show people what good looks like, we teach people how to do it and we give them the tools and enablement during onboarding to be successful.”

Read our full interview with Chris here.

Episode #6: Darryl Praill – VanillaSoft

Darryl Praill is the CRO of VanillaSoft, a sales engagement platform that provides sales teams with the tools they need to engage, qualify and land sales.

His expertise lies in SaaS branding, but more specifically, Darryl believes in the power of personal authenticity in branding. He’s most excited about the opportunity that a personal brand has in creating awareness and authority.

Personal branding is also what got Darryl to third place in a popular LinkedIn bracket of 200 marketers. Knowing how tough his competition was, Darryl thought he was never going to succeed.

This prompted his team to grab attention with an email campaign that was all about personality and relatability.

Creating an email campaign using Darryl’s personal brand – and also hitting on both funny and personal notes – increased open rates significantly. And it resulted in Darryl making third place and widening VanillaSoft’s brand authority and awareness.

This is the type of growth marketing strategy that Darryl is excited about in 2022. Using personal brands and striking relatability in your audience is what leads to strong relationships.

“... you’re spot on when you build a personal brand and you do that honestly by consistently adding value and educating or entertaining or informing or challenging in a way that connects and resonates with your target audience.”

Read full interview with Darryl here.

Episode #7: Breezy Beaumont - Correlated

Breezy Beaumont is the Head of Growth at Correlated, a leading platform for product-led revenue.

Breezy emphasizes that a company’s marketing team should understand their product as much as they do their end-user.

At Correlated, Breezy does this by creating a community where marketers can dive into the product-led space. Q&A events, bi-weekly chats, and a podcast – all led by various marketing leaders and experts – help the community learn and grow from each other.

For Breezy, aligning product and marketing is good for everyone. This is a large part of what she’s excited about in 2022.

“... Marketers are getting more product knowledge. They’re hanging out in the places where their customers and prospects are to not only talk with them, but just to listen to them and hear what they’re saying so that we can help to solve their problems in the best way possible.”

Read the full interview with Breezy here.

Episode #8: RajNATION - Startup Hypeman

RajNATION is a storytelling expert, and the founder and Chief Pitch Artist of Startup Hypeman. His company helps startups find and tell their story through visionary pitch decks and demo coaching.

RajNATION is an outside-the-box thinker, using authentic content and personal branding to create an experience that people connect with.

Recently, he overcame an issue that many marketers and content creators struggle with: lack of engagement. He did this by creating a humorous music video that was both entertaining and educational, and posted it on LinkedIn. This video drove 15,000 views and around $150,000 of sales down the pipeline.

It’s this sort of B2C content that RajNATION says is crossing into the B2B content space and that’s what he is excited about for 2022.

“I look at how people are gravitating towards things like [B2C content] and say, okay, how do we make that happen in the B2B world? Or how do we make the sentiment behind that happen in the B2B world?”

Read our full chat with RajNATION’s here.

Common themes for marketing in 2022

Across the board, marketers emphasize the importance of using personal branding in their marketing strategies. By building personal brands, it’s easier to forge relationships and get to know your audience.

• LinkedIn continues to be a popular go-to platform for marketers. Posting quality content that offers value rather than for vanity views helps build brand awareness and authority.
• Communities – Slack, email newsletters, etc. – are gaining momentum as a way of building relationships.
• Marketers are using user “a-ha” moments to tailor their marketing strategies to streamline the user experience. Once users are comfortable with the product, complexity can be layered in (here are a few product marketing examples to get you started).
• Creating authenticity, value and deeper connections continues to be an important goal throughout the entire sales funnel – not just when it comes to lead generation.

Trends marketers are ready to see end in 2022

On the flip side, there are several marketing strategies that our interviewees are hoping will fade away this year:

• Creating content for the sake of content. This low-value or no-value marketing strategy doesn’t have nearly enough weight to hold up against quality content.
• Vanity metrics. Instead, it’s all about posting valuable content that your audience will relate to.
• Gimmicky LinkedIn content is getting annoying. Tools such as polls and click-bait to game the algorithm doesn’t measure up to content that provides value.
• Relying on too many virtual events. People have Zoom fatigued and the number of webinar and events available are reaching a saturation point.