Enterprise Organic Growth Strategy Guide (2023 edition)
Developing an organic growth strategy is important for nearly any business, and particularly important for large enterprises. Without a clear, compelling, and well-evangelized strategy, you’ll likely face these kinds of issues:
- Lack of understanding and buy-in from key decision-makers
- Under-allocation of resources and deprioritization of your initiatives
- Limited cross-team access and collaboration
- Reduced organizational impact and personal career growth
Regardless of the details of your specific situation (company, business model, available resources, etc.) there are a few key elements that any great strategy should have.
In this starter guide to enterprise organic growth, I’ll detail what I’ve found to be the core elements of a great strategy, a baseline approach you can take to developing your own strategy, examples of successful strategies, and lessons I’ve learned from my career that can help.
This guide is primarily made for brand-side organic growth marketers, such as SEO & Content managers looking to build an enterprise SEO or Content strategy. However, anyone responsible for organic growth on either the brand or agency-side should find value from this guide as well.
Defining What An Organic Growth Strategy Is
I define strategy as a specific deployment of actions, guided by a core insight, in pursuit of a clear goal.
Therefore, an organic growth strategy is a strategy where the goal is organic growth of key business metrics (i.e. revenue, customers, subscribers, leads, traffic, etc.) and the specific deployment of actions doesn’t include paid advertising, but instead activities like SEO and Content Marketing.
To be clear; organic growth isn’t “free” – producing content isn’t cheap, someone needs to be paid to put together the company newsletter, etc.
Before getting into what makes a great organic growth strategy, let’s break down the definition of strategy to ensure it’s clear.
A specific deployment of actions
Any strategy is comprised of actions, or tactics, that when executed upon help bring you closer to realizing your goal. These actions are determined by following a core insight or belief.
Guided by a core insight
A strategy isn’t just a set of everything you could possibly be doing. The actions that make up the strategy should be determined by filtering them through your own expert insights, beliefs, and judgements. This core insight is informed by your experience, research, and creativity and is the crucial element tying all of your actions together with the goal you’re striving to achieve.
In pursuit of a clear goal
Ultimately, a strategy is a tool you use to achieve a specific outcome. This should be the starting point of your strategic development. You need to be able to clearly define what you’re hoping to accomplish, and then figure out the best strategy that will get you there
For an organic growth strategy, that goal is, of course, going to be related to growing key business metrics through organic (i.e. non-paid) means. I’ll discuss this in greater detail in the section on how to develop a great strategy.
4 Key Elements of a Great Strategy
Definitions are helpful in keeping us grounded, but there’s clearly a lot that goes into the crafting of a great strategy that isn’t made clear by the definition I just provided. This next section will detail 4 factors that largely define the strength of your strategy.
Aligned with the broader business and marketing strategy
The single most important question you should ask about your organic growth strategy is, does it align with my company’s overall business and marketing strategy? If you cannot answer that question with a definitive yes, there’s likely two issues at play:
- Your strategy is too insular, and was made in a vacuum
- You don’t have a good understanding of what your company’s broader strategy actually is, either because you personally haven’t been exposed to it or because it’s been ill-defined by leadership.
As we’ve discussed, your organic growth strategy needs to have a clear goal, but without knowing the broader business strategy and goals, your strategy is unlikely to be compelling and resonate with the key stakeholders at the company.
Before you go any further in developing your strategy, figure this piece out. Here are a few tips to get started:
- Ask your peers or supervisor
- Review previous quarterly and annual business reports or investor decks
- Review the website, particularly ‘Mission’ and ‘About’ pages
- Read through recent press releases or news articles about your company
Compelling to key decision-makers
A great organic growth strategy must be compelling to the key decision-makers at your company. Otherwise, you won’t get the buy-in and resources you need to actually execute upon your strategy, no matter how impactful it could actually be.
What can make this difficult is that what makes a strategy compelling to one person might not be persuasive at all to someone else. Knowing your audience is key here. The first step is to find out who the key decision-makers are at your company that are relevant to the strategy you’re pitching, and then determine what resonates with them.
For example, if your strategy is going to require significant engineering resources to bring it to life, you need to identify who decides where engineering resources are allocated and then what is most convincing to them.
There are a few ways I’ve found that can get you this information:
- Review your company’s org chart to determine hierarchy
- Ask your peers or supervisor who determines roadmaps and what resonates with them
- Read through presentations by the stakeholders you’re looking to convince and see how they position their strategies and business cases
Generally speaking, people respond well to one or more of the following types of persuasion:
- Competition
- Social proof
- Excitement
- Logical
Depending on the scope of your organic growth strategy, you may need to secure buy-in from people that respond to all of the above. In my view, most strategies should incorporate all of these elements regardless, but how you position it may vary based on your audience.
We’ll take a quick dive into each of these types of persuasion to make it more practical.
Competition
Anecdotally, I’ve found that many executives, particularly those high up in a company’s org chart, are extremely competitive and obsess over what their competition is doing. As I write this guide in late December of 2022, Google’s CEO has reportedly put the company in ‘code red’ after an indirect competitor, OpenAI, released ChatGPT and prompted people to wonder if chat-based AI was the future of search (I don’t think so, but it’s certainly an open question).
For these kinds of decision-makers, highlight how your strategy either emulates something successful that a competitor is doing or would provide your company with a competitive advantage over a key competitor to immediately grab their attention.
Social proof
Other leaders look for social proof when determining how compelled they are by a strategy. This could take the form of trying to determine what the consensus is amongst other stakeholders, or what trusted advisors and consultants think about it.
If the stakeholder you’re trying to convince fits this mold, make sure you loop in the appropriate people into the initial development of your strategy. Not only will this likely make your strategy stronger by incorporating more varied viewpoints, but you can then use these people to advocate for the strategy on your behalf.
This is something I focused on when developing Aspiration’s SEO strategy. Before I presented the strategy to our CMO and VP of Marketing, I solicited input from:
- Director of Paid Search
- VP’s of Creative
- Sustainability Director
- Chief Impact Officer
- Senior Director of Brand
- Group Product Director
- Senior Director of Engineering
When it was finally time to present my strategy to the ultimate decision-makers, it was incredibly effective to point to the fact that all of the people I listed above had contributed to and signed off on the proposal. Rather than having to wait for further consensus-building, I instead secured buy-in to run with the strategy in that very meeting.
Excitement
Some decision-makers are highly motivated by novel and creative thinking. Therefore, trying to convince these folks that your strategy is compelling through spreadsheets is unlikely to grab their attention. Nor will they care much about a strategy that is heavily skewed towards fixing or iterating on existing things versus building new things.
Particularly when it comes to marketing channels like SEO or CRO, there is going to be some element of fixing and iteration, and those things are important. However, leading with that or focusing on that to the exclusion of new things is likely going to backfire. Think carefully about how these types of elements are incorporated into your strategy.
Logical
Lastly, many executives are most compelled by a strategy that appears logical, which generally translates to being backed up by quantitative research and data. These stakeholders are far more likely to be compelled by a strategy that estimates an ROI of X based on X, Y, and Z datapoints versus a strategy that is all about ‘big ideas’ and ‘disrupting the status quote’.
From my own experience, most decision-makers respond at least somewhat positively to these kinds of strategies. In the next section, we’ll deep dive into specific techniques to make your strategy more credible, which will especially resonate with this kind of person.
Credible and well-supported
No matter how experienced and credible you are, it’s important that your strategy itself is credible. Particularly in a large enterprise, you may not ever have the opportunity to present your organic growth strategy to the final decision-makers, and it’s very likely that they have no idea who you are or why they should care about what you have to say.
In the process of building a credible strategy, I recommend asking yourself the following questions:
- Have I seen this type of strategy before, either for a competitor or in another relevant context?
- Upon executing this strategy, can I measure progress and performance? How would I do that, exactly?
- Based on my understanding of my organization, is acting upon this strategy actually feasible?
- Do I know what the key assumptions are that I’m making? Do I know how I would respond if those assumptions don’t hold true?
- What is the full scope of what time and resources I want to succesfully execute on this strategy? What is the minimum viable amount of time and resources I need?
- What questions might I get about the details of my strategy, and do I have robust answers prepared?
- Can my strategy be stress-tested on a smaller scale if executing on the full strategy isn’t possible yet?
If you can answer all of these questions, your strategy is in prime position to demonstrate its credibility.
Easily understood and memorable
A great strategy needs to be easily understood and memorable. This may seem relatively unimportant compared to showing strategic alignment, compelling decision-makers, and building credibility. However, this anecdote from a client I worked with may help crystallize this point.
At most agencies, the first 4-6 weeks of an SEO & Content campaign look like this:
- Have a kickoff call
- Conduct a technical and content audit
- Perform a competitor audit
- Do some keyword research
- Mash it all together into a strategy deck and present it to your point of contact
- Start executing on relevant deliverables
- Report on progress monthly and/or quarterly
To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with this approach. What I have found though is that in the gap between presenting your strategy and then reporting on it a month or more later, your client is very likely to forget what the strategy actually is.
This isn’t their fault; they have many other responsibilities and it’s easy to get bogged down in the weeds of JIRA ticket about fixing the XML sitemap or getting the brand tone just right on a specific blog post.
With one particular client (who will remain anonymous), when my team got to the quarterly business review, we were excited to share the progress we had made so far. Unfortunately, this meeting got quickly derailed when the VP of Marketing, who only joined the most important meetings, expressed frustration that we didn’t have a clear strategy and felt we were just doing deliverables for deliverables sake versus really working on things that mattered to the business.
From our perspective, the VP was wrong; everything we were doing was in service of an SEO & Content strategy they had already signed off. What became clear though was that in the intervening months, they had simply forgotten what the strategy was. Our mistake wasn’t that our strategy was poor – it was that it simply wasn’t digestible enough to be memorable. And if your key decision-makers can’t remember your strategy, it’s not doing you any good.
My advice to tackle this potential problem head-on is to be able to describe your strategy in 3 different ways
- In detail. This likely means in the form of a slide deck, in a 30 to 60-minute meeting
- Elevator pitch. Describe the key elements of your strategy in 30 seconds or less.
- Summary statement. Distill your strategy down to its absolute core and summarize it in a single, memorable sentence.
How to Build Your Own Organic Growth Strategy
We’ve learned what an organic growth strategy is, and the four key elements that make them great. Now, it’s time to learn how to build your own.
In this section, I’ll walk through the process I use to develop enterprise-level organic growth strategies. This foundational workflow can and should be adjusted to your specific set of circumstances.
Understand the current business, marketing, and organic growth strategy
As discussed previously, make sure that at the very least you identify and understand the current business and marketing strategy. This knowledge is what will properly ground your own organic growth strategy and help make sure you’re not focusing on the wrong things.
If your company already has an existing organic growth strategy, make sure you understand what that is as well. In the next step, you’ll want to analyze and audit it to generate your own ideas.
Analyze and audit the existing state of organic growth
Depending on your purview at the company, this could be a relatively quick and focused part of the process, or be a sprawling exercise involving multiple team members, agency partners, and more.
In broad strokes though, you want to gather the following information:
- What organic channels are currently active?
- What are our primary marketing assets (i.e. website, blog, newsletter, social media accounts, YouTube channel, etc.)?
- How are those channels and assets performing? Is the business currently growing organically, and if so, at what rate and do we expect it to continue?
Getting the answers to these questions is where you and your team’s and partner’s expertise comes in. While this guide won’t be discussing specific analyses or audits to do in-depth, but you’ll likely find the answers to the questions about through things like:
- Review of your website analytics (i.e. Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, etc.)
- Content inventory analysis and audit
- Technical SEO audit
- CRM audit
- Social following review
- Keyword ranking overview and gap analysis
Tip: Summarize the main takeaways from each of these analyses in 3-5 sentences, and aggregate them all into one place. It’s very difficult to remember everything from across multiple deep dives and analyses, so having a single place to remind yourself of the key details is helpful.
With a thorough understanding of your company’s current standing, it’s time to see if you can learn anything from your competitors that should be incorporated into your own strategy.
Review the competitive landscape
Understanding how your competitors are growing organically can spark ideas of your own. If they are doing something that works well, you may be able to copy and (importantly) put a unique twist on it. You should also figure out in a competitor analysis where the competition is weak, either because they aren’t trying a particular tactic or because their execution of it isn’t working.
My biggest piece of advice for doing competitor analyses is look at both your direct and indirect competitors.
I’ve often found that looking at indirect competitors is more useful than looking at direct ones, especially when it comes to things like content. For example, the websites with the most-shared, highest-ranking content are likely not websites from your company’s business, but you can still learn from them.
Start putting best-in-class examples of different organic growth assets and use them as inspiration for how you could leverage them in your own situation.
For example, a website like Nerdwallet ranks for over 1.2 million keywords on Page 1 of Google, driving an estimated 16.6 million site visits each month from organic search.* Now, while it’s very likely that your company isn’t trying to compete with Nerdwallet and rank for the same keywords, what they’ve accomplished from an SEO & Content perspective is undeniably impressive. Learning from how they structure individual articles (lots of short paragraphs, lists, and images to keep the reader engaged), how they demonstrate credibility (author information listed on each article, with links to full author bio pages), and how they build out content hubs (~10 major content hubs, multiple carousels with featured content and timely content, etc.) could absolutely help your own website rank for the keywords most important to your business.
*Data comes from SEMrush’s Organic Research Report, pulled December 2022
Conduct internal interviews
The last step in the information-gathering phase is to conduct internal interviews with as many relevant teams as you possibly can.
Who to talk to
The teams you should be talking to will vary by company. Typically though, helpful teams to talk to are:
- Product
- Sales
- Marketing
- Paid/Performance
- Brand
- Creative
- Engineering
Product teams should have the best understanding of your core products/services, your ideal customer profile (ICP), and the product roadmap. All of this information should be incorporated into your organic growth strategy.
Sales teams can also provide excellent insight into ICP, value proposition, objections/pain points, and common customer questions.
On the marketing side, speaking with Paid/Performance team can help you understand how those channels acquire customers, and give you key data on things like which landing pages perform the best. Brand teams are the ideal partners in making sure the tactical details in your strategy are aligned with the brand, and who your key partners are. lastly, creative teams often have great ideas when it comes to content assets that should be incorporated into your plans.
Engineering teams are sometimes nestled under Product, but if they’re not, it’s important to meet with them as well. Particularly on the SEO and CRO side, a lot of the actions you may want to take in your strategy will need to be actually implemented by Engineering, so it’s important to learn things like what their bandwidth is, how they operate, etc.
The specific people you interview on each team is only important insofar as you need to get solid information from them. That doesn’t necessarily mean talking to the team or department lead, but you should probably look to interview folks who have been a part of the company for a while (1+ year) so that you get a full picture of their situations.
What to ask them
During your internal interviews, the three main things you’re trying to accomplish are:
- Hear their own ideas and learn from their expertise
- Gut check some of your own half-formed ideas
- Make these teams feel included in the process
I’ve found that last point to be particularly important – if you can give other important teams a sense of ownership of the organic growth strategy, you’re much more likely to get their support later down the road.
Keeping these goals in mind will help you formulate the specific questions you have for each team. A few basic examples of question to ask are:
- What are your current priorities and initiatives?
- What do you think of our current organic growth efforts?
- What do you think we should be doing that we aren’t?
- Is there anything we’ve tried in the past that worked really well?
- Conversely, was there anything we tried that really didn’t work?
Put together a first draft of your strategy
With all of your information gathered, it’s time to start putting it all together in the form of a first draft of your organic growth strategy. Strategy-building is deep work, so I recommend finding some time to disconnect and just focus on thinking.
As a reminder, your strategy needs to have
- A clear goal
- A guiding insight
- A set of actions/tactics
Start by defining your goal. Remember that your goal should be in lockstep with the broader business and marketing goals.
Once you’ve settled on your primary goal, think about, in broad strokes, what you think you need to accomplish it.
Lastly, based on the information you’ve gathered and your own expertise, what are the primary actions you would need to take to execute against that guiding insight and achieve your primary goal?
This may feel nebulous, so I’ll highlight 3 quick, hypothetical examples.
Examples
Let’s say your company’s primary goal now is to expand into a new overseas market. Your goal might be to increase brand awareness by X amount in that target market in the next 12 months. Your guiding insight is that your company needs a new website (or section of the existing website) to establish a foothold and gain online visibility in that market. Your set of actions could be then be to work with Product/Engineering to build an SEO-friendly regional website, build a content and social strategy based on insights from the Product team, and build out a testing roadmap to see how you can convert customers best in this country.
Maybe your company’s goal is to bring a new product to market. Your goal might be to support this launch and contribute X% of the target sales through organic sources. Your guiding insight might be that getting the beta version of the product in the hands of super users will build excitement for it. Your specific tactics might then be to build a landing page on your website encouraging sign-ups, leveraging email marketing to push for sign-ups once the beta is ready, building out guides/tutorials/FAQs on the blog and YouTube channel, and hosting an AMA on a social site like Reddit.
Or, you may have learned that brand has been losing marketshare over the past several years. Therefore, your goal is to use organic growth to reverse that trend and increase your share of voice by X% compared to competitors. Your guiding insight is that the brand has lost marketshare because competitors are outranking your website for your most important keywords. To address this, your tactics include modernizing the product page template, building out new product-category pages, and refreshing content that used to rank well but is now outdated.
Build up your strategy's credibility
Now that you’re armed with a first draft of your strategy, it’s time to stress-test it by trying to build up its credibility.
As discussed previously, you need to ask yourself several questions about your strategy and come up with compelling answers to them. If you can’t do that, you likely need to tweak your guiding insight of set of tactics.
In the example above about the company looking to expand into a new market, one of the potential tactics is to build out a new, regional website. However, you may have found out through your interviews with the Engineering team that they have extremely limited bandwidth for a project like that, making your guiding insight’s feasibility quite low. Therefore, you shouldn’t just present your strategy as is. Instead, you could point to the fact that all of your major competitors have country-specific websites in that market, and make the case that more resources are needed to ensure you can compete.
Put together a second draft of your strategy
After completing your credibility-building exercise, you likely need to create a second draft of your initial strategy. Hopefully, your due diligence up to this point makes this second-draft phase relatively quick and painless.
Build a strategy report
With your core strategy defined, it’s time to build out the strategy report you’ll use to present your ideas to key decision-makers.
The specific format you use to build your report will likely vary based on your own personal preferences, how your company operates, etc. The key things to remember, regardless of format, are:
- Highlight how your organic growth strategy supports broader business and marketing objectives
- Design your report to be compelling to the stakeholders you’re trying to showcase the merits of your strategy to
- Demonstrate the credibility of the strategy throughout the report (a great appendix section can be a game-changer here)
- Summarize the core of the strategy succinctly right at the top, and keep returning to it throughout to ensure it’s remembered
Personally, I use a modified version of the deck template that Tom Critchlow of the SEO MBA put together for strategy decks. I find it works well because it summarizes everything decision-makers need to know in the first 5-10 slides of the presentation, and can be used to effectively tell a clear story. Below is an image from the post linked-to above that summarizes it perfectly.
Side note: Tom Critchlow’s course is by far the best online course I’ve taken and useful even for people who don’t have ‘SEO’ in their job title. I strongly recommend checking it out.
Get peer feedback on your strategy report and apply the finishing touches
The final step to complete your enterprise-level organic growth strategy is to get peer feedback on it before presenting it to the ultimate decision-makers.
A good place to start when it comes to getting peer feedback is to go back to the people on other teams you interviewed during the information-gathering phase. Not only is this a great way to get more of their expert insight, but following up with them and showing how their help informed the ultimate strategy can help build cross-team relationships and make working together even easier.
Incorporate the feedback that you think is helpful, update your strategy report, and give yourself a few minutes to celebrate the great work you’ve done. It’s finally time to present, and if you’ve followed the steps in this guide, you’ve given yourself every shot to get sign-off on your ideas and start bringing your strategy to life.
Summary
This guide is around 5,000 words long, so if you’ve made it to the end, well done. Here’s a quick summary of everything covered here if you need a refresher:
- An organic growth strategy is a specific deployment of actions, guided by a core insight, in pursuit of a clear goal related to organic growth.
- The four key elements of a great strategy are that it is aligned with the broader business and marketing strategy, it’s compelling to key decision-makers, it’s credible and well-supported, and that it’s easily understood and memorable
- To build an enterprise-level strategy, you need to gather information from the existing organic growth strategy, competitors, and peers; you need to define your strategy; you need to build the credibility of your strategy; and you need to get peer feedback before presenting it to the decision-makers