A Growth Strategy Process for Any Business

In this guide, we use our skills as analysts and our experience working with entrepreneurs to share a process that can be used by any business to build a growth strategy.

To begin, we must cover entrepreneurial psychology. A growth mindset is crucial for an entrepreneur or founding team. And this means setting a clear goal upfront, working towards it, and assessing the success as time passes.

The reason this is so important is that entrepreneurs typically have to juggle multiple demands on their time. This makes it incredibly easy for them to lose sight of the bigger picture when pursuing day to day tasks.

To build a growth mindset, the entrepreneur must have certain characteristics including resilience, drive, and determination. These are particularly critical as they have to set the objectives themselves and work towards them without distraction. In addition, they have to keep calm, particularly in the early stages. The allure of quick success can easily lead people to place short term gains above longer term stability.

And this means the short, medium, and long term goals of a business can be as essential as its mission or the quality of its growth strategy.

The growth strategy of any business is dependent on the resources available, including the number of people and the marketing budgets. If the budgets are extremely tight, then the team will need expert skills. If the budgets are significant, then the team will need to have broader managerial skills to bring in additional support. Alternatively, if there is no investment or supporting team, a founder will need to focus on revenue generation at the expense of building a brand.

Marketing is simply the process of making a product or service appeal to a market, which makes a knowledge of the market one of the most important aspects of growth hacking. In fact, the answers to how to growth hack can be usually found by studying the market. This is because the people that you will want to appeal to are likely to have similar characteristics and by understanding them, you can quickly realise how and where to get in touch with them. We’ve shown previously how the tactics used by some of the most successful businesses were situation specific and difficult to replicate. No market is the same, and even in the same market, multiple companies may succeed by appealing to different behavioural characteristics.

And this makes behavioural science an essential feature, especially when considering the mindset of a target audience or their familiarity with similar products. In doing so, a growth hacker can separate a founder’s preferences from those of the market. This is essential as the startup’s success is controlled not by the founder but by the customers it serves.

If you know your audience, you’ll be able to work out what they like by profiling the types of brands they purchase or what they like to do in their spare time. If you follow this process carefully, then it’ll help to establish the creative aesthetic for your brand and specifically the types of images to select, the colours, the tone of voice and the messaging. This process is crucial as it will become an amplifier for all future marketing efforts. The time and effort spent on the marketing assets should also be proportionate to the short, medium, and long term goals of the business.

There are many growth areas available to businesses, which makes considering them all an important part of any growth strategy. The knowledge of the target market should then naturally make some more applicable than others. However, the budgets available will also dictate the routes to take, and the skills required.

There will always be more than can be done, which is why a growth mindset is essential to retain focus and realism. It is also essential to remember that expecting new visitors to convert the first time that they come to a website is just a dream for the vast majority of businesses. Instead, multiple engagements that deliver value each time are usually required, particularly if there is significant market competition.

Great businesses require great people, and they require great tools to allow them to perform at their best. This makes the selection of a marketing tech stack crucial, which is particularly dependent on the team size, the goals of the business and the budgets available. Furthermore, if the goal is to scale quickly, then investment may be required. The founding team can then hire agencies and freelancers with specialist skills.

The quality of business’ marketing activities plays a major role in its success. Amidst an over reliance on data gathering, it can be easy to forget that you are aiming to inspire people. The more you engage them in an authentic and creative way, the more likely they are to see your business as being of value to them.

Creativity can also take many forms, from copywriting to influencer selection or even progressing trends. This makes the knowledge of the target market especially useful, along with the brand aesthetic, as previously covered. It can be all too tempting to create amazing ideas without considering these things. After all, most marketers like the discipline because they get to work on creative projects.

The metrics or measures of success are essential for checking whether the business is achieving against its short, medium, and long term goals. Their selection will, in time, shape further marketing strategies. They will also depend on the nature of the business. For example e.g. downloads, churn or usage, but they will never be able to assess how the target audience think or feel. This is because they are measures of action. For this reason, a marketing team must always consider these in context with a clear understanding of the target audience.

We hope you’re inspired

In this guide, we’ve set out a comprehensive approach that any business can to use to growth hack, irrespective of its size or industry. Startups by their nature are more agile, making this approach more suitable for them. Often with time, the structures that a business creates can make it very difficult for them to innovate, which is one of the main reasons why startups can succeed.

If you’d like to learn more about the steps covered, then please check out our other insight pieces and research. Alternatively, if you’d like to, please click below to speak to us.