How to build a Growth Strategy

Probably the biggest problem I saw during the years was founders thinking that growth is about social posts, content, or paid ads.

Let’s make it clear: these are tactics, which may work or not depending on the business. And tactics alone won’t grow your business.

You may see some spikes in charts, a kind of growth, but in the long run, that growth will slow down or even stop.

And that’s exactly why I decided to publish this article – to help you solve (or avoid, better) these problems.

The solution from my point of view is a Growth Strategy. A mix of market understanding, strategies, and the right execution.

Foundation

First, you have to make sure your foundation is good enough to build on it.

1. Business Context

All the strategies and tactics in the world are useless if they are not aligned with your business and the way you see it.

Write down things like goals (both short-term and long-term), customer lifetime value, average deal size, etc, and use them as solid input and guidance.

2. Client Research

If you don’t know exactly who your customers are, you’ll never be able to pick the right tactics to reach them.

So start by thinking what are their problems, needs, desired outcomes, etc, and make your growth activities about that.

3. Segmentation

Segmentation is a tricky and crucial step because with the same effort, you can achieve different types of growth.

Write down the value you provide to a specific type of customer, the impact they have on your business, and then define the priority.

4. Competitive Analysis

Understanding the way your competitors are operating and being able to notice what’s working and what’s not… is crucial too.

Make sure you’re looking at things like positioning, offer, demand gen programs, customers, and pricing to know everything about them.

5. Service Offering

Most service offerings are bad because they are only about the service a company provides and not about the outcome.

Define your primary and secondary offer(s) and try to highlight the outcomes of your solution.

6. Positioning

The worst thing you can do with your business is to be “just another company” and not have a clear value proposition (and promise).

This can be solved if you define your messages, the value proposition, and the keywords that are the most relevant to your business.

Strategy

Second, you need to define the right growth strategy for your business.

1. Strategic Narrative

I saw several companies having a pretty good foundation, but they screwed everything because their communication was poor.

A simple, but very effective step is to build a Strategic Narrative with things like the founder story, company story, service story, etc – think about this like a collection of messages.

2. Growth Strategy

Remember the Business Context? This is where you should go back at it and make sure the Growth Strategy is built considering those answers.

Define the buyer journey for each of your ICPs, then build your strategy both short-term (6 months), and long-term (12 months).

3. Demand Gen Programs

Now that you have a clear overview of the Growth Strategy and the path you want to follow, you can select the Demand Gen Programs.

A tip here would be to work backward from your customer journey and focus more on people more willing to buy – mostly if you need faster results.

Infrastructure

Third, you need to make sure you have the infrastructure to execute the plan.

1. People & Resources

Without a proper execution, nothing will happen – even if you did everything perfectly until this step.

So make sure you have the right people to help you with execution so you can move faster and avoid bottlenecks.

2. Assets & Tech Stack

Everything seems to be ready, but you have to invest some time and maybe money in assets and tech stack too.

Probably the most important asset is your website, so make sure at least it communicates the positioning you built, but you’re also using tools to make your life easier (eg: a CRM).

And kind of… this is it.

I covered the basics only because there’s much more to each point, but now you have the roadmap to build your Growth Strategy.

If you manage to do this, I find it hard to believe you won’t see the results you expect.

That’s because this isn’t about a certain tactic, a certain strategy, or whatever, it’s about the way your business aligns with a clear growth strategy to actually help you… grow.