How To Plan and Execute a SaaS Growth Strategy that Scales MRR

Quick summary

This guide explains how to build a SaaS Growth Strategy from the ground up, covering goal-setting, channel selection, content, product-led growth, and continuous iteration. Whether you're just finding traction or scaling fast, you’ll learn how to create a growth engine that drives real, compounding results. Check our blog for additional tips and insights you can apply to your SaaS strategy.

SaaS growth isn’t about “hacks”; it’s about systems

Every SaaS founder wants growth. But if scaling were as simple as chasing trends or throwing money at ads, every company would be thriving.

So, what actually moves the needle?

Real growth comes from building systems that do three things well:

Attract the right users
Deliver value early and properly
Keep them coming back

It’s not flashy. But it works. Whether you’re just starting out or trying to scale what’s already working, this is the foundation that drives real results.

In this Embarque guide, we’ll explain what a SaaS growth strategy really is and how to build one that fits your stage, goals, and resources.

But first…

Why listen to us?

At Embarque, we’ve helped 50+ SaaS companies grow through content-driven SEO and product-led strategies. From scrappy bootstrapped startups to post-Series A teams, we’ve seen what works—and what doesn’t.

Clients like Cleanvoice, SignHouse, and MentorCruise have tripled MRR, ranked for high-intent keywords, and owned top spots on Google. And none of it came from guesswork. It came from building systems that align content, search, and product experience with how real users buy.

This guide is everything we’ve learned doing that, applied directly to SaaS growth.

What is a SaaS growth strategy?

SaaS growth isn’t just about getting more users. It’s about building a sustainable and scalable system grows revenue, improve retention, and expand your product’s reach, all without relying on short-term wins or channel-specific “hacks.”

At its core, SaaS growth comes down to four things:

Growth = Acquisition + Activation + Retention + Expansion

Acquisition: Bringing in the right users
Activation: Helping them see value fast
Retention: Keeping them engaged over time
Expansion: Increasing usage, upgrades, or referrals

If any of these parts are weak, your growth stalls, no matter how much traffic or funding you have.

Why do you need a SaaS Growth Strategy?

Growth doesn’t have to feel chaotic. A strategy gives you control and turns guesswork into a repeatable system. Here’s why it matters:

It aligns your teams: Marketing, product, and customer success pull in the same direction, not running disconnected experiments. This is exactly how we help clients at Embarque, connecting content, SEO, and product to one unified growth engine.
It helps you prioritize: Instead of chasing every new channel or shiny trend, you focus on what actually moves the needle for your stage and product.
It compounds your wins: With the right sequencing, each part of your strategy builds on the last. This turns early momentum into long-term results.
It makes scaling repeatable: Growth becomes something you can model, measure, and optimize, not just hope for.
It saves time and money: When you know what’s working (and what’s not), you stop burning resources on tactics that don’t convert.
It helps you stay resilient: Algorithms change, and ads get expensive. A strong strategy gives you stability when outside conditions shift.

How do you design and execute a SaaS Growth Strategy?

In this section, we’ll walk through the exact steps to build a SaaS growth strategy that scales with your product, users, and revenue.

1. Assess your current stage and set clear objectives

Before you start chasing growth, it helps to know exactly where you are and what growth actually means for your business right now.

Most SaaS companies fall into one of three stages:

Early traction (Still validating product-market fit)
Scaling (Gaining steady growth with product-market fit)
Maturity (Expanding into new segments or optimizing revenue)

Your stage shapes everything: the metrics you track, the tactics that matter, and the channels worth your time.

That’s why goal-setting should match your reality, not someone else’s.

Here’s how to start:

Start with a quick SWOT analysis:

Strengths: What’s working right now?
Weaknesses: What's holding you back?
Opportunities: What trends or gaps can you leverage?
Threats: What risks or challenges are on the horizon?

This helps shift your thinking from reactive to strategic.

Define your North Star Metric (NSM):

This is the one metric that best reflects the value your product delivers. Think: Airbnb’s “nights booked” or Slack’s “messages sent.” This keeps your growth efforts focused on outcomes, not vanity metrics.

Tip: Don’t force metrics that don’t fit your stage. A pre-PMF startup shouldn’t obsess over MRR. Instead, focus on learning fast, validating assumptions, refining messaging, and nailing down the value prop.

2. Understand your target audience

You can’t grow if you don’t know who you’re growing for.

It’s tempting to think your product is “for everyone,” but real traction comes from deeply understanding the people who actually use and pay for, your product.

Knowing your audience shapes everything: what you build, how you market it, and where you show up.

Start by building out buyer personas.

These aren’t just demographics, but research-backed profiles that reflect real goals, pain points, and decision-making patterns. Ask:

What problems are they trying to solve?
What does success look like for them?
Who influences the buying decision?

How to get those answers:

Talk to users. Customer interviews uncover pain points and motivations you can’t get from dashboards, and surveys you spot patterns at scale.
Dig into analytics. Tools like Google Analytics and Hotjar show how people interact with your site, where they drop off, what they click, and how they convert.
Listen where they talk. Social media, forums, Reddit, and review sites are goldmines for honest, unfiltered feedback. These channels reveal objections, unmet needs, and emerging trends.

Once you’ve got the data, turn it into buyer personas. For example, when we worked with MentorCruise, a SaaS company that connects mentees with career coaches, we identified that their best users weren’t just job seekers but mid-career professionals looking for personalized career growth.

So, we tailored messaging, mentor profiles, and onboarding flows to this group. The result? We achieved improved user retention and scaled more predictably.

Bottom line: Knowing your audience isn’t just a research task, it’s the foundation of every growth decision you’ll make.

3. Choose the right growth channels

Not every marketing channel will work for your SaaS growth strategy, and trying to be everywhere usually spreads you too thin. The goal isn’t to do more; it’s to focus on the channels that actually move the needle for your product, audience, and growth stage.

Start by narrowing the field:

Look at your audience. Where do they spend time? Are they searching Google, active on LinkedIn, or lurking in niche Slack communities?
Consider your stage. Early-stage startups often benefit most from content, SEO, and partnerships. Mature SaaS companies may scale with paid channels or product-led loops.
Align with your resources. A few well-executed channels outperform a scattered presence across many.

How to implement:

Audit what’s already working. Use tools like GA4, Semrush, or attribution platforms to trace where your conversions are coming from.
Run small tests. Test a few channels (SEO, content, paid, affiliates) on a small scale. Measure by cost, impact, and effort.
Double down on winners. Once a channel proves effective, go deeper. Create more content, improve targeting, or expand into similar formats.

For example, when MentorCruise partnered with Embarque, they were investing in content—but it wasn’t converting. We tested a focused SEO strategy around high-intent keywords tied directly to their core use cases.

The result? An 800% increase in monthly recurring revenue and 2M+ organic visits annually, without burning budget on scattered tactics.

The takeaway: Don’t chase trends. Find the few channels that align with your audience and stage, then execute with focus and consistency.

4. Develop a compelling value proposition

If a potential customer asked, “Why should I choose your product over the others?”, would your answer be crystal clear?

Your value proposition is that answer. It’s not just a tagline. It's the core message that explains why your product is the best choice for your audience, and in the crowded SaaS space, where buyers have options, clarity here can be the difference between growth and churn.

Here’s how to build a value proposition that works:

Start with the customer. What are they trying to achieve (jobs)? What’s frustrating them (pains)? What would success look like (gains)?
Map your product to those needs:
- Pain relievers: How do your features remove roadblocks or solve frustrations?
- Gain creators: What positive results do you enable?
- Product & services: Which specific parts of your product deliver that value?

Use the Value Proposition Canvas to visualize this. It forces alignment between what you offer and what customers actually want.

Test and refine your message:
- Run A/B tests on landing pages to see what resonates.
- Interview users to learn what message actually “clicked” for them.
- Keep your messaging consistent across your site, emails, and ads. Repetition builds clarity.

For instance, when we worked with Cleanvoice, a SaaS that uses artificial intelligence to scrub out filler words in audio recordings, on SEO, we didn’t list features to stand out from the crowd. Instead, we led with outcomes such as:

“Edit your video podcast in 3 clicks. With studio-quality.”
“Edit your podcast in 10 mins. Automatically.”

These value propositions spoke directly to what podcasters care about and set them apart from generic tools.

Bottom line: A strong value proposition isn’t fluff. It’s how you cut through noise, speak your users’ language, and convert interest into growth.

5. Implement product-led growth strategies

We’ve seen it time and time again: the most sustainable SaaS growth often doesn’t start with ads but with the product. Product-Led Growth (PLG) is about creating a user experience so seamless and valuable that users naturally convert, retain, and spread the word.

PLG works when your product:

Accelerates time-to-value with intuitive onboarding
Lowers barriers to entry via freemium models or free trials
Continuously improves based on real user behavior and feedback

How to apply PLG effectively:

Refine onboarding: Guide users to their first “aha” moment as fast as possible. Use tooltips, milestone tracking, or interactive walkthroughs to help them see value early.
Enable low-friction trials: Depending on your stage and model, choose between a freemium or trial-based experience to let users experience the product before committing.
Close the loop with feedback: Use in-app surveys, session recordings, and analytics tools to understand what’s working (and what’s not) so you can iterate quickly.

For example, when Growform, a multi-step form builder, came to us, they had decent traffic but lagged in conversions. We shifted focus from pure SEO to action-based growth, analyzing and improving the paths users took inside the product to reach conversion faster.

This led to:

11.6% increase in view-to-trial conversion
18% lift in users reaching the signup page
Triple-digit monthly signups and significant revenue gains

By aligning growth efforts with user behavior inside the product, we helped Growform build a self-sustaining growth loop, one that started with experience, not ad spend.

6. Create and optimize high-quality content

Content is more than just a traffic driver. We believe it’s a growth engine. When aligned with the customer journey and optimized for search, it can attract the right users, build trust, and turn readers into paying customers.

This step includes:

Mapping content to each stage of the funnel, from awareness to decision
Optimizing for both search intent and conversion
Keeping content fresh, accurate, and competitive

You can implement these by:

Starting with keyword research: Identify high-intent queries that align with your product and audience. Use a blend of long-tail keywords (for targeted traffic) and competitive head terms (for reach and authority).
Build a strategic content calendar: Plan around product features, seasonal trends, and user questions to ensure consistent publishing and value.
Create conversion-focused content: Don’t just write to rank, write to convert. Blog posts, case studies, and landing pages should address user pain points while guiding them toward your product.
Optimize and refresh: Regularly update older content. Refine CTAs, add new data, and improve on-page SEO to maintain rankings and user trust.

For example, when Stagetimer, a SaaS offering a remote-controlled countdown timer tool for live events, approached us, they had no SEO strategy and were receiving just 40–50 monthly visitors.

As an experienced SaaS SEO agency, we recognized the need for an in-depth content plan and subsequently developed a comprehensive SEO strategy focused on three key areas:

Landing page optimization targeting high-intent keywords to attract users actively seeking countdown timer solutions.
Blog content creation, enhancing Stagetimer's authority and relevance in the niche.
Programmatic SEO implementation for scalable content creation that matched user search behavior.

This strategic approach led to a significant 3x increase in organic traffic growth, effectively establishing Stagetimer's online presence in a competitive market.

Bottom line: An approach like ours will show that content, when mapped to intent and actively optimized, can power both awareness and acquisition, especially for product-led SaaS companies.

7. Measure, analyze, and iterate

SaaS growth isn’t linear, and it’s definitely not a one-and-done process. The best companies treat growth as a loop, not a ladder: they measure, learn, and improve continuously.

To keep your SaaS growth system working optimally, you need to:

Track KPIs: Monitor metrics like signups, activation rate, churn, LTV, and conversion rates, whatever aligns with your growth goals.
Analyze behavior: Go beyond vanity metrics. Use tools like Mixpanel, Amplitude, or GA4 to uncover how users interact with your product and where they drop off.
Iterate based on insight: Use data to form hypotheses, run tests, and fine-tune your approach continuously.

How to implement it:

Build live dashboards: Tools like Google Data Studio or Looker let you visualize key metrics in real time. Make sure they’re tied to relevant outcomes, like trial-to-paid conversion or onboarding success.
Schedule regular reviews: Weekly or monthly reviews help catch what’s working (or not) before it snowballs. Involve cross-functional teams to get a complete picture.
A/B test continuously: Run controlled experiments on emails, landing pages, or pricing pages. Keep iterations small and results statistically significant.
Collect qualitative insights: Use exit surveys, user interviews, and feedback forms to learn what numbers don’t reveal

Whether you're optimizing a pricing page or scaling content, iteration is where compounding growth happens. We’ve seen clients double conversion rates just by refining one onboarding flow or headline, because they had the data to back it up.

The takeaway: The goal isn’t just to track what happened. It’s to know what to do next, and do it faster than your competitors.

8. Scale what works

Once you've figured out what’s driving real growth, the next move is simple: do more of it. Scaling effectively means resisting the urge to chase every new tactic and instead doubling down on what consistently moves the needle.

This is the step where you:

Allocate more to high-performing channels
Streamline workflows to handle growth efficiently
Expand your team or toolset to keep the momentum going

Here’s how to scale what works:

Audit performance regularly: Use tools like Google Analytics, Ahrefs, or Mixpanel to track which campaigns, content, or channels are consistently delivering ROI.
Shift resources strategically: Increase spend, content output, or headcount in the areas that have proven results, whether that’s SEO, paid, or product-led initiatives.
Automate repetitive tasks: Use tools like HubSpot, Zapier, or Buffer to automate repetitive tasks like lead nurturing, reporting, or content scheduling.
Delegate and scale operations: Bring in freelancers, agencies, or new hires to maintain quality and efficiency as you grow.

At Embarque, this is often where our clients see the biggest wins. For example, after Cleanvoice saw strong initial traction with SEO-driven content, we helped them scale output strategically, focusing only on what had proven to convert.

The result? A 300% increase in MRR in six months

The takeaway: Don’t spread yourself thin chasing new tactics. Find your leverage points and pour fuel on them.

Turn strategy into scalable growth with Embarque

A strong SaaS growth strategy is about doing the right things in the right order. From aligning teams to scaling what works, the steps we’ve covered are designed to help you grow sustainably. If you’re looking for a partner to help you build that system, that’s where we come in.

Embarque helps SaaS companies scale through full-service SEO and product-led content. We don’t just drive traffic, we help you attract the right users and turn them into long-term customers.

Book a free consultation and let’s talk about how we can grow your SaaS.