Expanding a business is no easy feat. It’s a challenging journey filled with ups and downs, regardless of whether you’re a business owner, part of a marketing team, or working with an agency. One of the toughest aspects is establishing ambitious yet attainable expectations.

This is where a growth strategy becomes absolutely essential. In this comprehensive guide, we’ll explore what constitutes a growth strategy, how it differs from a marketing strategy, and why it’s effective, using various examples for clarity. Additionally, I’ll guide you through a five-step process for crafting a growth strategy tailored to your business:

1. Define your overarching goals
2. Pinpoint your inputs and outputs
3. Conduct growth experiments
4. Validate your growth experiments
5. Cultivate a culture of strong accountability

By the end of this guide, you’ll be equipped to identify the goals you should be setting and what your team needs to achieve them. Ready to unlock consistent, predictable, and potentially even explosive growth for your business? Let’s dive in.

What exactly is a growth strategy?

In the realm of marketing, there’s often confusion surrounding the concept of a growth marketing strategy and its distinction from a general marketing strategy.

Let’s clarify: a growth strategy is not synonymous with a marketing plan. It doesn’t simply involve purchasing PPC ads, generating traffic through SEO, or conducting CRO tests on your website. These are marketing tactics that fall under the umbrella of your marketing plan.

Think of your growth strategy as the overarching roadmap guiding your business from its current state to its desired future state. This implies that it:

• Encompasses all departments within the company (not just marketing).
• Aims to grow the company from various angles (revenue, workforce, etc.).
• Encompasses your marketing strategy (not the other way around).

In essence, a growth strategy provides a high-level plan outlining every step a business needs to take to foster growth. It adopts a holistic and analytical approach to driving expansion.

A growth strategy is not a marketing plan. It’s a high-level strategy that outlines everything a business needs to do to grow through a holistic and scientific approach.

Let’s illustrate this with a hypothetical company called “Startup Masters,” which we’ll use as an example throughout the five-step process:

Do growth strategies actually work?

It might be challenging to grasp the idea of formulating a tangible, actionable plan for something as broad as “growth” and witnessing tangible outcomes—but it’s not only feasible; it’s incredibly effective! Growth strategies are the secret ingredient behind the consistent growth of renowned companies like DropBox, Dollar Shave Club, WhatsApp, and many others.

Growth strategies are the secret sauce behind the consistent growth of some of the world’s biggest companies like DropBox, Dollar Shave Club, WhatsApp, and more.

In fact, implementing a well-defined growth strategy for my own company, Venngage, has yielded impressive results:

• A threefold increase in blog traffic within a year.
• Over 40,000 new registrations per week (compared to 400 back in 2016).
• A remarkable 150% year-over-year growth over the past five years.

Now that you have a clearer understanding of what a growth strategy entails (and what it doesn’t) and have seen tangible proof of its potential to drive business expansion—let’s move on to the exciting part: crafting your own growth strategy.

The 5-step process to creating your own growth strategy

The task of devising a growth strategy for your entire business can feel daunting. With so many factors contributing to a business’s success, where do you even begin? Don’t fret! I’ve deconstructed the growth strategy creation process into five clear-cut steps.

Step #1: Define your overarching goals

Growing a business is a lot like planning a journey—it’s much smoother when you have a clear destination in mind.

Imagine being able to predict your new business’s long-term revenue before even launching it—wouldn’t that significantly simplify the process of identifying the most effective growth strategy?

The key takeaway here is that it’s more advantageous to start with the end in mind and work backward, rather than the other way around.

It’s more helpful to start at the end and then work backwards.

So, let’s fast-forward to the endpoint of your growth strategy. This is where you establish ambitious yet attainable goals—a delicate balance to strike. Business expert Jim Collins refers to them as BHAGs, representing “bold, ambitious goals.”

Former HubSpot VP of Growth, Brian Balfour, calls this the Top-Down Approach:

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At Venngage, we call these “high-level” or “long-term goals.” For this first step, begin by outlining a long-term goal, such as your 10-year goal. To do this, ponder these questions:

• Where do you envision yourself and your company in 10 years?
• How much growth do you anticipate for your business?
• What revenue target do you aim to achieve?
• What size workforce do you foresee?

Let’s revisit the “Startup Masters” example we introduced earlier. Here’s a hypothetical 10-year goal and the steps required to achieve it:

By working backward, setting realistic goals and objectives for where the company needs to be in five years, three years, and one year to reach that 10-year milestone becomes more manageable. You can even start smaller, like with a hypothetical five-year goal, to help map out four, three, two, and one-year targets.

By working backward, it becomes easier to set realistic one-year, three-year, and five-year targets for your business to help you stay on track.

Now that you’ve defined your high-level goals, let’s move on to the actionable part of your growth strategy—the steps needed to achieve those goals.

Step #2: Identify your inputs and outputs

With your high-level goals in place, the next step is to define your key performance indicators (KPIs). For every goal you’ve set, it’s essential to pinpoint the key metrics and results that will help you gauge your progress toward achieving them. Here’s a breakdown:

Determine your North Star Metric

One of the first metrics you should identify is your North Star Metric, also known as your “One Metric That Matters” (One Metric That Matters). This metric represents the value customers derive from your product. Here’s a helpful video explanation by Alex from Web Profits:

For instance, Airbnb’s North Star metric is the number of nights booked. Why? Because it directly reflects their product’s value.. A higher number of nights booked suggests a positive customer experience and increases the likelihood of repeat bookings. Remember, your chosen North Star metric should directly correlate with your company’s revenue and retention goals.

Your chosen North Star metric should have a direct correlation to your company’s revenue and retention goals.

Let’s look at some more examples of North Star metrics:

• Customer lifetime value (for e-commerce businesses)
• Monthly recurring revenue (for B2B SaaS businesses)
• Total watch time (for media businesses)

Once you’ve chosen your metric, the next step is to assess your current performance for that metric. Let’s say you’ve launched a new streaming service like Netflix and selected “total watch time” as your North Star metric. You chose this metric because your analysis revealed a strong correlation between higher watch time and increased retention, leading to higher revenue.

Let’s assume your users currently spend an average of 30 minutes per day watching shows on your platform. This is your baseline performance for your North Star metric. One of your high-level goals is to boost retention by 30% in the next 12 months. To achieve this goal, focusing on improving total watch time per user makes sense.

Bottom line: figure out how you’re currently performing for your North Star metric and how much that number will need to change to impact your high-level goals.

Set up your OKRs

OKRs stand for Objectives and Key Results. These are the specific metrics you’ll track to influence your high-level goals. Many startup founders adhere to the AARRR framework framework when setting OKRs, which stands for Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Revenue, and Referral.

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Trying to influence all these metrics simultaneously can feel overwhelming. So, using “Startup Masters” as our example, we’ll prioritize acquisition and retention for now.

Here are the acquisition OKRs defined during our Startup Masters growth planning example:

Startup Masters aims to drive acquisition primarily through their organic and paid traffic goals, aiming to increase organic traffic by 130,000 and paid traffic by 70,000 visitors monthly.

Looking at the inputs, numerous pages contribute to traffic generation. They’ve also outlined the required traffic to different sections of their site to impact their OKRs:

By breaking down your your goals into smaller, specific inputs, you significantly increase your chances of achieving those ambitious goals. As you hit these smaller targets, you’ll witness your growth plan in action.

When defining your OKRs, prioritize metrics that you can influence on a smaller scale but have a larger impact. As you identify the inputs that affect your OKRs, start brainstorming experiments to influence these inputs.

By continuing to break down your goals into smaller and specific inputs, you’re making it that much easier for you to hit the ambitious goals you’ve set for yourself—and see your growth strategy working.

Step #3: Run growth experiments

Developing effective experiments isn’t as straightforward as it might appear. A frequent pitfall companies encounter when implementing new product features or marketing ideas is waterfalling. Waterfalling happens when a team keeps adding requirements to a project, causing the implementation timeline to extend indefinitely, resembling a scope creep.

Consequently, projects initially planned for a few weeks end up spanning months. To prevent this, I recommend adopting a one- or two-week sprint approach by breaking down large projects into minimum viable tests (MVTs). MVTs allow you to gain valuable insights quickly and determine whether a larger-scale project is worthwhile.

With minimum viable tests (MVTs), you can get valuable insights faster and validate whether a large-scale project is worth pursuing.

Start by identifying the OKR you want to impact. In our Startup Masters example, the objective is to enhance retention by 10%:

Their chosen input is to encourage more users to complete an additional project within three weeks. One experiment they could conduct is creating a pop-up modal within the project dashboard, prompting users to start a new project upon reaching 80% completion on their current one.

They’ve also hypothesized the results of this experiment and outlined the effort required from each team to execute it. Before pursuing any experiment, regardless of size, run it through this flowchart to see if it can be further broken down into smaller MVTs:

When planning your MVTs, aim for experiments that demand low effort but yield high output. These are your “slam dunks” because they deliver substantial wins quickly.

Your goal when planning out MVTs is to run experiments that require low effort but have a high output.

Realistically, not every experiment will be a “slam dunk.” However, if you can steer clear of the “turtles” (high-effort, low-output experiments), you’re already halfway there:

Chart created by Venngage

Here’s an example of a well-documented growth experiment from Clearbit.

Step #4: Validate your growth experiments

Even breaking down an experiment into an MVT might not be enough to determine its inclusion in your growth strategy.

The next crucial step is assessing whether the experiment will positively impact your customers. As a marketer, your responsibility also includes delivering an exceptional customer experience.

Use this visual experiment validation checklist to rigorously evaluate your experiments:

Alternatively, you can achieve the same outcome by documenting your experiments (and areas of consideration) on a Google Doc or Trello card.

Our StartupMasters growth strategy aligns with the “Jobs to Be Done” framework, which prioritizes a potential customer’s goals over their demographic profile.

The checklist outlines the various “Jobs to Be Done.” Startup Masters also acknowledges the significance of personas in shaping their experiments.

As previously mentioned, other vital considerations include the probability of success, the effort required from each team, and the OKR impacted by the experiment.

Implementing this process consistently yields two key benefits:

1. It enables your team to consider all critical aspects more easily.
2. It ensures that your team prioritizes the most promising experiments.

Google Docs and Airtable are popular choices for HubSpot’s growth experimentation process.. At Venngage, we utilize Trello for planning our weekly sprints and Google Docs for validating our growth experiments—tools that are accessible and effective for companies of any size.

As you become more comfortable with the process, don’t hesitate to explore other tools to discover what works best for your team.

Step #5: Fostering extreme accountability

Last but certainly not least, perhaps the most critical element in driving growth is cultivating a culture of fostering extreme accountability within your teams. Every team member should clearly understand their tasks and how their contributions tie back to the company’s high-level goals. This aspect alone could warrant a separate in-depth discussion. For a more comprehensive understanding, I highly recommend Brian Balfour’s guide on building effective growth teams.

Every team member should be aware of the work they’re doing and how that work ties back to a company’s high-level goals.

Here’s a visual summary of Brian’s key points:

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We’ve adopted a similar approach to foster ownership and accountability across our entire team, extending beyond just the marketing department. In our monthly team meetings, each member leading a project presents their launches, outcomes, and next steps to the entire company.

We follow the same practice for our marketing meetings. Every week, each team member shares their launched experiments, promoting a sense of accountability for their work.

This process helps achieve two main objectives:

• By encouraging your team to share their launches and insights, you’re fostering a results-oriented culture.
• Team members who might not be performing optimally, working at a slower pace or generating less valuable insights, will feel compelled to improve their output.

Moreover, this approach allows you to identify your top performers and those who might be lagging, often serving as a much-needed wake-up call for the latter.

Get ready for consistent, predictable growth

To wrap up, remember that there’s no magic formula or shortcut to unlocking explosive growth overnight.

It’s about driving consistent, sustainable growth through a deep understanding of data, a relentless focus on influencing the right metrics, and a willingness to experiment with different marketing tactics to reach your goals.

As my favorite entrepreneur, Biz Stone, aptly put it, “Timing, perseverance, and ten years of trying will make you look like an overnight success.”