Business Growth Strategy Firm – Growing a business is hard. Whether you’re a small business owner, a marketing team or an agency, riding the roller coaster of ups and downs is no small challenge. What is even more difficult is setting ambitious but realistic expectations of what is achievable.
That is why a growth strategy is of utmost importance for companies. In this guide, I will cover what a growth strategy is, how it differs from a marketing strategy, and why it works, with lots of examples. I will also walk you through the five-step process of creating a growth strategy for your business. The five steps are:
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By the end of this guide, you will be able to identify what goals to set for yourself and what it will take for your team to achieve them. Ready to drive steady, predictable, maybe even explosive growth for your business? Read on.
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There is a lot of confusion in the marketing world about what a growth marketing strategy is and how it differs from a marketing strategy.
First, a growth strategy is not a marketing plan. It also doesn’t mean buying PPC ads, generating traffic via SEO, or running CRO testing on your website. These are marketing
Your growth strategy is the overall road map you have created to get your business from where it is now to where it wants to be in the future. This means:
In summary, a growth strategy is a high-level strategy that outlines everything a business needs to do to grow. It is a holistic, science-based approach to driving growth.
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A growth strategy is not a marketing plan. It is a high-level strategy that outlines everything a business needs to do to grow through a holistic and scientific approach.
Here is an example of a growth strategy for a hypothetical “Startup Masters” company, which we will use as an example during the five-step process:
It can be difficult to grasp the concept of creating an actual, actionable plan for something as broad as “growth” and then seeing concrete results, but not only is it possible; works! Growth strategies are the secret sauce behind the steady growth of some of the biggest companies in the world like DropBox, Dollar Shave Club, WhatsApp and more.
Growth strategies are the secret sauce behind the steady growth of some of the biggest companies in the world like DropBox, Dollar Shave Club, WhatsApp and more.
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Now that you know what a growth strategy is (and isn’t) and have seen concrete evidence of its ability to drive business growth, it’s time for the fun part: creating your growth strategy.
The process of creating a company-wide growth strategy can feel overwhelming. There is so much that goes into a business and defines its success, where do you start? Do not worry. I’ve broken down the process of creating your growth strategy into five well-defined phases.
If you could predict how much income your new business would make in the long term before you even started, wouldn’t that help you figure out the best growth strategy to get there?
The point is that it is more useful to start at the end and then work backwards (than the other way around).
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So let’s get to the end of your growth strategy. This is where you set ambitious but realistic high-level goals (it’s a delicate balance). Business guru Jim Collins calls them BHAGs, or “big, hairy, audacious goals.”
At Venngage, we call these “high-level goals” or “long-term goals”. Then, for step one, start outlining a long-term goal like your 10-year goal. To do this, ask yourself the following questions:
Let’s look at the growth strategy example I shared earlier. Here’s what a hypothetical 10-year goal would look like and the steps required to achieve that goal for StartUp Masters:
By working backwards, it becomes easier to set realistic goals and objectives for where the company needs to be in five years, three years and one year from now in order to reach the 10-year target. You can also start smaller, for example with a hypothetical five-year goal, which will help you draw four-, three-, two- and one-year goals.
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Working backwards makes it easier to set realistic one-, three- and five-year goals for your business to help you stay on track.
Now that you’ve defined your high-level goals, it’s time for the active part of your growth strategy: the steps you need to take to reach those goals.
Once you’ve set your high-level goals, the next step is to determine your key performance indicators (KPIs). For each goal you set, it is critical to identify key metrics and results that will help you measure whether you are on track to achieve your goals. Here’s how to do it:
One of the first metrics you should identify is your North Star metric. It is also known as “One Metric That Matters (OMTM)”. This metric is the number that best represents the value customers get from your product. Here’s a handy explainer video from Alex from Web Profits:
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For example, Airbnb’s North Star metric is the number of nights booked. Why? Because it is a clear indication of the value of their product. The more nights you book, the more likely customers will have a positive experience with Airbnb and the more likely they will return to book their next stay. Remember that the North Star metric you choose should have a direct correlation to your company’s revenue and retention goals.
Once you’ve chosen your metric, the next step is to figure out how you’re currently doing it. Let’s say you’ve started a new streaming service like Netflix. You selected “total viewing time” as the North Star metric. You chose this metric because, according to your analysis, higher watch time correlates with higher retention (which results in higher revenue).
Let’s say users spend about 30 minutes a day watching shows on your service. This is how you are currently performing for your North Star calculation. That’s your baseline. One of your high-level goals is to increase retention by 30% over the next 12 months. To achieve this, doesn’t it make sense to focus on improving the total viewing time per user?
Bottom line: Find out how you’re currently performing with your North Star metric and how much that number needs to change to impact your high-level goals. Set your OKRs
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OKR stands for objective key results. They refer to specific metrics that you want to monitor that will affect your high-level goals. In software startups, many founders follow the AARRR framework for setting OKRs. This stands for Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Revenue and Referral.
It can be overwhelming to influence each of these metrics. So using the example company we started with above (“StartUp Masters”), we’ll focus on acquisition and retention for now.
StartupMasters aims to influence acquisition primarily through their paid and organic traffic goals. The goal? Scale organic traffic by 130,000 and paid traffic by 70,000 visitors per month.
If you look at the entrances, there are many pages that drive traffic. They also outlined the traffic required to different parts of their website to impact their OKRs:
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By continuing to break down your goals into smaller, more specific inputs, you make it much easier to achieve the ambitious goals you set for yourself. And when you reach those goals, you can see your plan for growth
And when setting OKRs, identify metrics you can manipulate at a smaller scale that will have a higher impact. As you continue to understand what inputs affect your OKRs, you can start thinking about experiments you can run to affect your inputs.
By continuing to break down your goals into smaller, more specific inputs, you make it much easier for you to achieve the ambitious goals you set for yourself and see your growth strategy work. Step 3: Perform growth experiments
Finding valuable experiments to run is not as easy as it seems. A common trap companies fall into when implementing new product features or marketing ideas is
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. Waterfall occurs when a team continues to add requirements to a project, to the point where the time required to implement them continues to increase, similar to scope creep.
As a result, what was supposed to be implemented in weeks will now take months. To avoid this, I recommend that you trade with a one to two week sprint cadence. You can do this by breaking down large projects into minimum feasible tests, or MVTs. With MVT, you can quickly gain valuable insight and see if a large-scale project is worth pursuing.
With Minimum Viable Tests (MVT), you can gain valuable insights faster and see if a large-scale project is worth pursuing.
Start by determining the OKRs you are trying to influence. In our Growth Strategy example for Startup Masters, we want to increase retention by 10%:
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The recording? Push multiple users to complete a new project within three weeks. To influence this metric, an experiment they can run is to create a pop-up modal in the project dashboard that prompts users to start a new project after they reach the 80% completion mark.
They also assumed the results of this experiment and the effort required by each team to carry it out. Before running tests or experiments large or small, run them through this flowchart to see if you can further break them down into smaller MVTs:
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