Building a growth strategy can sometimes feel like running around like a chicken with their head cut off. You’re busy doing a lot of things, but you’re not sure if the things you’re doing are actually working.
And while I’m sorry for the graphic imagery of a headless chicken, what we’re really here to say is: if you’re feeling exhausted, lost, overwhelmed—welcome to the club.
Not having a growth strategy is also the perfect recipe for falling into the shiny object syndrome trap. Rather than commit to the strategy you have in place, and actually seeing things through, you yo-yo from every new shiny idea that comes your way.
That’s why we’re breaking down Growclass Founder, Sarah Stockdale’s comprehensive workshop on designing an innovative growth strategy. In this workshop, she shares her simple framework to learn, prioritize, and execute a growth marketing strategy that resonates with both internal and external stakeholders. She also includes tactical questions you can ask your team and customers to make informed decisions.
Curious to watch the full workshop? 👇
Designing an innovative growth strategy 101
Figuring out a comprehensive growth strategy is a lot. There’s a sea of information, opinions, and tactics out there—all competing for your attention. It’s almost impossible not to feel like you’re running in twelve different directions. To bring focus to your strategy and prioritize what truly matters, let’s dive into a simple four-step framework:
- Get curious (times two)
- Build your strategy
- Prioritize
- Retain
Using this framework, you’ll be able to set the groundwork for a growth strategy that:
- Sets your team up for success
- Opens new growth opportunities in your existing business
- Brings focus to what’s important
Let’s get into it!
1. Get curious: Understand your team and customers
To quote the legendary Walt Disney himself:
“We keep moving forward, opening up new doors and doing new things, because we're curious … and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths."
Unsurprisingly, the power of curiosity translates into all aspects of life—growth marketing included.
To effectively set the foundation of your growth marketing strategy you need to get curious about two things:
Get curious about your team
Disconnection is a threat to your business. That’s why it’s important to understand how your team is truly feeling and assess if they’re feeling burnt out and unmotivated. The last thing you’ll want to do is host a Zoom pizza party when your team needs real support. Trust me; it’s not fun.
Your goal is to understand: What’s your team’s experience working for you? At this step, it’s critical to avoid making assumptions and focus on listening. Challenge yourself to have real conversations with your team, and remember the truth comes out after the polished answer.
To gather the insights to truly understand your team, here are some simple yet effective questions you might ask yourself:
- What’s your team’s experience working for you?
- How are you motivating your employees?
- How are you giving them creativity and inspiration?
- How are you helping them network and build skills?
- Are you enabling your team with growth opportunities (ie. courses, conferences, mentorship)?
“As a marketing leader, the best way to figure out how your team is doing is to simply ask. Give that pause after you ask your question and don’t assume you know what they need. Disconnection is a threat to your business.”
- Sarah Stockdale, Founder of Growclass
Get curious about your customers: Uncover their true needs
If you’re going to design a growth strategy, you need to know your customers like no other. Even to the point of awkward obsession. When it comes to winning in a competitive landscape, the closest to the customer wins. So aim for that and nothing less.
What does this look like in practice? Being able to answer questions like:
- What keeps my customers up at night? Why?
- What are their raging pain points? Why?
- What excites them most? Why?
But, uncovering the true needs of your customers is no easy feat. Although heartbreaking—the reality is that sometimes, your customers might be lying to you.
Here are some guidelines for good customer conversations, informed by Rob Fitzpatrick’s “The Mom Test”:
- Always ask about the user’s pain, not about your product or service
- Ask about specific behaviors and experiences (i.e. Tell me about a time…)
- Don’t assume anything about the user
- Don’t lead the customer to an answer
- Get them to walk you through situations to observe behavior
“Get really curious about our customers. One of the things I always ask is, what are they waking up at 3 a.m. thinking about? It's always good to ask about things in the past because people will tell you the rosiest ideas about the future... Ask about what happened in the past versus what they wish they did."
- Sarah Stockdale, Founder of Growclass
2. Build your growth strategy
Learn, validate, and share: A growth strategy framework
When you land on an exciting experiment it’s easy to dive head first. However, an effective growth strategy is more than just running experiments on the fly. It includes folding in customer learnings, validating experiments, and sharing results with your greater team.
- Learn: Take all the research you’ve collected from customer interviews, data, and team feedback and synthesize their core goals and pain points.
Rule of thumb: Have at least 30 customer conversations before you build your growth strategy. The key is identifying how your customer psychology might align with existing marketing and product efforts.
- Validate: Now that you understand the problem you’re trying to solve, it’s time to build them into experiments. Set up low-resource experiments to test assumptions and always make data-informed decisions.
- Share: You’ve wrapped up an experiment sprint. It’s time to document and report any wins, losses, and learnings to the internal team. Sharing both successes and failures can strengthen organizational knowledge and break down communication silos.
This framework is a great starting spot to help organize all the chaos of building a growth strategy. Now let’s get more tactical, shall we?
How to find growth experiment opportunities in your business
Once you understand your customer's pain points, the tricky next step is finding the right experiments for your business. Identifying the right growth opportunities is all about finding the right signals. To find these signals, you can start by asking three simple questions:
What doesn’t exist?
It’s time to tap into those exponential opportunities. Take a hard look at your existing strategy and ask yourself what could be performing that doesn’t exist yet.
Take stock of your current efforts. Do you have:
- Email funnels that are automated to nurture your customers in their purchase journey?
- A retention strategy that keeps your customers using your product after 30 days?
- An SEO strategy that grows your content engine and domain authority?
- A referral program that incentivizes your existing customers to refer new ones?
- An ad strategy that grows your top-of-funnel brand presence
These are just five of the 101 possible experiments you could try. Just remember: always go back to understanding your customers and what they care about.
“Building something new is usually the most impactful thing for your business... It’s like adding a new layer to your growth layer cake.
Go back to your customer interviews, what could actually work? Where are these people getting their information? How are they influenced? These are the questions you need to answer to find where the opportunity is to build something new in your business.”
- Sarah Stockdale, Founder of Growclass
What’s not working at all?
It’s time to hit pause and reflect on what’s not working. Some questions you can ask yourself at this stage:
- Is something fundamentally broken about our funnel?
- Should it be deprioritized?
- Could it be performing for us if we put some time and resources behind it?
- Are we investing in a channel that our customers don’t hang out in?
This could look like:
- Customers aren’t making it through your onboarding sequences
- Your bounce rate on your pricing page is 85%+
- Users are churning after their free trial ends
- Your clients or partners don’t re-sign after their first engagement
Where do I see untapped opportunities?
In Shopify's early days, they discovered that building integrations with companies targeting a similar audience led to significant growth. Shopify then built an entire strategy around integrations, which formed their existing marketplace. Take a pause and reflect:
- Do you get really good engagement on your content?
- Are your referral channels performing well?
- Are your events driving leads to your product?
The takeaway? Look for opportunities where you’re seeing signals that you could be doubling down on.
The final step
To tie a bow on this exercise, compile an exhaustive list of everything you could do from these questions. Don’t fret, we aren’t going to do all of them. Having this list positions us perfectly for the next step: Prioritizing.
3. Prioritize ruthlessly: narrowing down opportunities
So you’re probably staring at your long list of ideas thinking: what now? You guessed it—it’s time to pull out the scary red pen and ruthlessly prioritize.
Maximum impact with minimal effort
When prioritizing which experiments to run, a good rule of thumb is to evaluate opportunities against your company growth marketing KPIs and available resources you have on hand. The sweet spot is finding maximum impact opportunities for the lowest cost or effort. Ask yourself:
- What is the north star metric you’re trying to move?
- What is your team being measured on?
- What are the specific things on your list that will move your KPIs?
- What are the short term vs. long term investments you’re making?
Prioritization is also a great way to prevent you from diving straight into shiny object syndrome and instead focus on what drives growth. When you bring focus, it’s easier to see how your team’s work tracks to the company’s main goals.
"Focus on maximum impact for the lowest cost or effort. I always like to take that exhaustive list, match it against your organization’s KPIs, then look for where the best bang for your buck is.”
- Sarah Stockdale, Founder of Growclass
4. Retain your customers and employees
Whether you’re a marketer or just a fellow human, taking care of your people always pays off. When it comes to building a growth strategy, this means looking out for both your customers and your team. After all, retention is the most important metric for growth.
Customer retention
Happy customers, happy business.
Retaining satisfied customers can multiply your growth more than anything else. That’s why it’s important to ask yourself how you’re taking care of your existing customers and ensuring they stick around over time. This might look like implementing a solid onboarding process or launching an email nurture campaign—tactics that make your customers sticky.
“Look at what's not working at all... are customers churning after their free trial and just leaving? Are they evaporating without paying for the product? Identify what’s fundamentally broken in your funnel, and that’s where you’ll find major growth opportunities.”
- Sarah Stockdale, Founder of Growclass
Employee Retention
A recent Gallup study proved that highly engaged teams increase business profitability by 21%. The report finds that the most successful organizations make employee engagement central to their business strategy. If you want your team to deliver, you’ll need to create a structure and support system that enables growth and reduces burnout. Give your team clear expectations and provide them with the tools and support to do their best work.
“In times of uncertainty, structure is such a big part of taking care of your people. How are you building a strategy and then giving them the resources they need to do their jobs really well?
You need to make sure your team is getting the support, learning, energy, and inspiration they need to do their jobs. When your whole team has a common foundation of growth marketing skills, everything’s going to get easier for you.”
- Sarah Stockdale, Founder of Growclass
Build an inspired, creative, and strategic team
So you want a team that feels inspired and valued—a team that not only brings viable, creative ideas to the table but also thinks strategically and maximizes your existing resources. We understand first hand that upskilling and supporting a team is hard work.
This is why we’ve launched Growclass for teams. Tell us about your goals, and we’ll get your team the training you need to make them happen. We believe that when your whole team has a common foundation of growth marketing skills it’s so much easier to collaborate on projects and reach your business goals.
Say goodbye to running around like a headless chicken.