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Growth strategies are your plan for scaling. A business growth strategy is an action plan for increasing market share - whether through new products, new markets, deeper penetration, diversification, or partnerships.
The right strategy depends on where you are. Use the five guiding questions in this article to evaluate which type fits your stage, goals, and resources.
Small, targeted tactics drive outsized results. Companies like Zapier, LinkedIn, and Airbnb grew by finding one high-leverage tactic and doubling down.
Chestnut brushed it off, replying, "We don't need no stinkin' strategy - we've got this!" The employees of Mailchimp were not impressed with this cavalier approach. Chestnut reflected on this reaction after the meeting and realized the company actually needed a business growth strategy - some type of plan or goal. And the rest is history. Today, the company has an estimated annual revenue of more than $700 million.
It's a good story because it captures what a lot of fast-growing teams get wrong: they assume momentum is the same thing as direction. But growth without a strategy is just activity. And for B2B SaaS companies especially, growth isn't just about acquiring new users. It's about activating them, retaining them, and turning them into advocates.
If you're sitting over there like Chestnut back in 2014, tasked with designing an overall strategy for growth, the examples below should get the wheels turning. We'll cover the five core types of growth strategies, walk through real examples from companies like Zapier, LinkedIn, and Airbnb, and give you a framework for choosing the right approach.
A growth strategy is a plan of action that allows you to achieve a higher level of market share than you currently have. Contrary to popular belief, a growth strategy is not necessarily focused on short-term earnings; growth strategies can be long-term, too.
As an action plan, your growth strategy should include the following components:
Here's what that looks like in practice. Say a SaaS company notices that trial-to-paid conversion is sitting at 8%, well below their 15% target. Their growth strategy might set a goal of doubling activation rates within six months, align product and marketing around that goal, audit the onboarding flow for friction points, and define specific tactics like targeted in-app messaging to move the needle.
Your growth strategy needs to be communicated across your organization, so everyone is on the same page. If you're clear about the strategy and the path to achieve it, teams will feel they can contribute.
Growth without a strategy is just motion. And motion without direction gets expensive fast.
Companies that grow strategically outperform those that grow reactively. Research from McKinsey found that companies with a clear growth strategy and aligned execution deliver 2-3x the total shareholder returns of their peers over a ten-year period. The compounding effect is real: small, sustained improvements in activation, retention, or expansion revenue build on each other quarter after quarter.
Without a plan, here's what tends to happen:
The companies that win treat growth as a system - connecting acquisition to activation, activation to retention, and retention to expansion revenue - not a series of one-off campaigns. That's the core principle behind lifecycle marketing.
You know you need a growth strategy, so... what should it be? There are five core types of business growth strategies, and companies may use one or more of the following.
Growing your market share by developing new products to serve that market. These new products should either solve a new problem or add to the existing problem your product solves. Think of Slack adding Huddles to give teams a lightweight audio option without leaving the app - a new capability layered onto an existing product for the same audience.
Growing your market share by developing new customer segments, expanding your user base, or expanding your current users' usage of your product. This strategy is sales-focused. Notion is a good example here: the company started with individual productivity users and expanded into enterprise teams, bringing the same core product to a completely different buyer.
Growing your market share by bundling products, lowering prices, and advertising - basically everything you can do through marketing after your product is created. This strategy is often confused with market development strategy, but the approaches are distinct in emphasizing either sales or marketing. A market penetration strategy is more similar to a marketing growth strategy. Dropbox's referral program is the textbook case: same product, same market, but a clever incentive mechanism that drove massive adoption through word-of-mouth.
Growing your market share by entering entirely new markets. Rather than expanding within your existing market, you're launching into the unknown with new products or services in a new market. This strategy is often the riskiest but can have huge rewards if successful. Amazon's move from online retail into cloud computing with AWS is the classic example - a new product for a completely new customer base.
Growing your market share through co-marketing, integrations, or channel partnerships that extend your reach without building everything yourself. Partnership-driven growth works particularly well in SaaS, where ecosystems matter. HubSpot's app marketplace is a strong example: by building an ecosystem of integrated tools, HubSpot made its platform more valuable to customers while giving partners a distribution channel.
One approach we like to take is thinking of strategies in the context of the customer lifecycle stages: acquisition, activation, advocacy, and retention. This is the foundation of product-led growth. By looking at your growth strategy through the lens of a lifecycle stage, you can focus on specific tactics, such as "How can I apply a tactic to increase customer acquisition and achieve better market development?"
In journalism school, they teach you to write reports answering the basic questions: "who," "what," "when," "where," "why," and "how."
Defining the steps to a business growth strategy is kind of like answering these questions: you won't have a finished product without them.
While no two growth strategies are the same, here are five key questions that you can ask to plan out the steps to your business growth plan.
Businesses can grow in many different ways. That's why it's important to understand what you're actually trying to grow when crafting a plan.
Some examples of business growth include:
When looking to grow, there's usually some sort of underlying reason why. Very rarely are businesses just throwing darts at a wall and working on things randomly.
Usually, the why behind these initiatives comes from market or industry research. For example, product marketing managers do competitive research to surface potential areas for growth based on what others in your category are doing.
What are you trying to achieve? Once you know the area of the business you're growing, you can lay out SMART goals to make sure you're actually meeting the mark.
It's important to understand the timeline behind your growth. Rome wasn't built in one day, and your company probably won't magically triple ARR in a quarter. Set a realistic timeline to work toward and track against as you grow sustainably.
Every growth strategy needs a measurement framework. Without one, you won't know whether your efforts are working until it's too late to course correct.
Choose a north star metric that reflects your core growth goal - monthly active users, net revenue retention, or trial-to-paid conversion rate, for example. Then identify the leading indicators that predict movement in that metric. If your north star is net revenue retention, your leading indicators might be feature adoption rate, support ticket volume, or NPS score. Tie your metrics to lifecycle stages so you can see the full picture from acquisition through expansion.
Knowing the types of growth strategies is one thing. Executing them is another. Here are five practices that separate teams who plan from teams who actually grow.
Remember the Mailchimp all-hands story? That's what happens when teams don't share a strategy. The fix is shared OKRs, cross-functional growth squads, and regular check-ins where product, marketing, and customer success are looking at the same numbers.
Don't try to optimize acquisition, activation, and retention simultaneously. Pick the highest-leverage stage and go deep. If your trial-to-paid conversion is low, that's an activation problem. If customers love the product but leave after 12 months, that's retention. Diagnose first, then focus.
The AdRoll example later in this article is the perfect case study: a single modal window drove 60% adoption of a feature integration. They didn't redesign their entire onboarding. They tested one targeted message with one audience and scaled what worked.
Use in-product behavior signals to identify which growth lever to pull. Track which features drive retention, where users drop off, and what actions predict expansion. Use customer retention tools and behavioral analytics to improve user adoption based on real data, not assumptions.
Marketing hears what customers are asking for. Product sees how customers behave. When those two signals connect, you build better experiments, ship more relevant features, and grow in ways your competitors can't easily copy.
Growth strategies fail more often from execution mistakes than from choosing the wrong type. Here are four pitfalls that trip up even experienced teams.
Teams launch referral programs, ship new features, and run campaigns without tying them to a strategic goal. Activity feels like progress, but without a clear "why," you're just generating noise. Fix: start with the five questions framework above before picking any tactic.
Growth strategies require product, engineering, and support alignment. If only marketing owns the plan, adoption stalls because the product can't deliver on what marketing promises.
Acquiring users you can't retain is expensive. If your monthly churn outpaces your new signups, no amount of ad spend solves the problem. A sustainable business growth strategy balances new user acquisition with activation and retention at every stage.
What worked for Airbnb won't work for your B2B SaaS product. Extract the principle (go where your users already are), not the tactic.
When you first start thinking through your growth strategy, you might find it useful to apply a loose framework from the productivity app If This Then That (IFTTT).
IF you apply a tactic to THIS phase of the customer lifecycle, THEN you expect an impact on THAT type of growth strategy.
We've rounded up examples of companies that achieved growth through a seemingly small tactic that yielded enormous payoff. You can't copy and paste their success, but there's a lesson in each.
The Head of Growth at AdRoll wanted to experiment with in-app messaging in order to target the right AdRoll users more effectively. But growth experiments like this require rapid iteration. Engineers are better suited for longer development cycles, and adding in-app messaging would be a distraction.
So the team started using Appcues to create custom modal windows quickly and easily - and without input from their developers. With a low-code solution in place, AdRoll's growth team could design and implement however many windows they needed to drive adoption of the features they were working on.
One feature that needed an adoption boost was AdRoll's integration with Mailchimp, which lets users retarget ads to their email subscribers. Very few users were actually making use of it.
Here's how AdRoll drove adoption for the Mailchimp integration:
AdRoll set the modal to appear as users logged in to their dashboards - a place where users are already poised to take action on their ad campaigns.
This single experiment yielded thousands of conversions and ended up increasing the adoption rate of the integration to 60%. The experiment is so easy to replicate that the team now uses modal windows for all kinds of growth experiments.
Takeaway: A single, well-targeted in-app message can move adoption metrics more than a full product launch. The key is reaching the right users at the right moment with a clear action to take.
Zapier is all about integrations - it brings together tools across a user's tech stack, allowing events in one tool to trigger events in another, from Asana to HubSpot to Buffer. The beauty of Zapier is it sort of disappears behind these other tools. But that raises an interesting question: How do you market an invisible tool?
Zapier leveraged its multifaceted product personality through content marketing. Every new integration is an opportunity to build search authority and appeal to a new audience on its blog.
The company's blog reads like a collective guide to hundreds of tools, with specific titles like "How to Quickly Append Text to a Note in Evernote or OneNote from Your Browser" and "How to Automatically Generate Charts and Reports in Google Sheets and Docs." Zapier's strategy is to subtly make itself a content destination for the audiences of all these different tools.
This strategy helped their blog grow from zero to over 600,000 users in just three years. The blog continues to grow as new tools and integrations are added to Zapier.
Takeaway: If you have a product with multiple use cases and integrations, try curating your content marketing around each use case instead of aiming for a catch-all approach.
Remember handing out business cards? LinkedIn launched an online version of this process to maintain professional contacts while employing a "six degrees of separation" concept for people to grow their networks.
In the very beginning, the concept of contact importing was new. LinkedIn aggressively used this strategy back in 2004.
LinkedIn built an Outlook plugin that would sift through users' contacts. They then used email marketing to reach out to these contacts, inviting them to connect on the platform.
It became a cycle. This email would be sent out to the contacts of new users. Those contacts would sign up, and the email would go out to their contacts, and so on. LinkedIn found that a benchmark of four emails was needed before a user would sign up. Kind of a FOMO mentality among professionals. It worked: LinkedIn went from 500,000 users in 2004 to 2 million users in 2006.
Takeaway: Look for innovative ways to use your existing user base and draw new users into your product.
Airbnb's origin story is one of the infamous growth hacking tales. Founders Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia knew their audience was already on Craigslist, so they engineered an integration that allowed hosts to double post their ads to both platforms at once.
While this integration got Airbnb off its feet, it's not what allowed the brand to keep growing. The company's review system became the critical factor. For 50% of bookings, guests visit a host profile at least once before booking, and hosts with more than 10 reviews are 10X more likely to receive bookings.
Airbnb grew its network of users by making reviewing really easy:
By making reviews easier and more honest, Airbnb grew the number of reviews on the site, which in turn grew its authority.
Takeaway: Identify barriers to trust and smooth points of friction within your product.
GitHub began as a software development tool called Git. It was designed to solve a problem its coder founders were having by enabling multiple developers to work together on a single project. But it was the discussion around Git - what the founders nicknamed "the GitHub" - that became the tool's core value.
GitHub's founders realized the problem wasn't just practical - the whole developer community was missing a communal factor. So they focused on growing the community side, creating a freemium product with an open-source repository where coders could come together to discuss projects and solve problems collectively.
They created the ability to follow projects and track contributions, so there's both camaraderie and competitiveness. This community turned GitHub into a social network for coding. A little over a year after launch, GitHub had gained 100,000 users. By 2012, GitHub secured $100M in venture capital. By 2018, the network effect had grown so valuable that Microsoft acquired GitHub for $7.5 billion.
Takeaway: Find a community for your product and give them a place to come together.
BuzzFeed is a constantly churning content machine, publishing hundreds of pieces a day and getting over 3.2 billion content views per month. BuzzFeed's key growth strategy has been to define virality and pursue it in everything they do.
CEO Jonah Peretti shut off the noise and started listening to readers. He found that readers were more concerned about their communities than about the content - they were disappointed when they didn't find something to share. So BuzzFeed created the Golden Rules of Shareability, analyzing its viral content to build a formula for what makes something inherently shareable.
Takeaway: Define what "viral" means for your business, build criteria around it, and use data and feedback to refine what content draws people to your platform.
None of these growth spurts happened by changing a whole company all at once. Instead, these teams found something small - a way in, a loophole, a detail - and carved out that space so growth could follow.
Whether you find that a single feature in your product is the key to engaging users or you discover a north star metric that allows you to replicate success, pinpoint a target for your growth strategy and dig into it. Pay attention. Listen to your users. Notice what's happening in your product and what could be better. Learning is your first step in defining your next growth strategy.
Appcues helps growth teams run in-app experiments, drive feature adoption, and optimize the user lifecycle - without waiting on engineering. If you're ready to turn your growth strategy into action, book a demo and see how targeted, in-app experiences can move your most important metrics.
