New startup companies are created every day, many with a lot of potential. But even with an amazing product or service, nearly 90% of startups fail to survive.
This begs the question: what’s the key to helping your startup succeed past the first few years of launching your product?
First, you need to determine the right market for your startup. Don’t overlook critical aspects such as location, competitors, pricing, and the overall receptiveness towards your product or service. These and many other factors are taken into account to ensure you land the right target markets and achieve product-market fit.
Next, your company needs to seek for customer advocates who can help you meet the needs of customers. If these people are found in the early stages of a startup, you won’t need to make a drastic change in operations in the future.
Happy customer advocates will help spread your brand and product through word-of-mouth and social media. These channels have a higher chance of converting leads into customers given the personal referrals --- and they’re free!
To find your ideal customer advocates:
Remember, your first customers are always the most important. Once you've got them, treat them with respect and show you value them. Soon, you can turn them into your brand advocates and, with their help, attract a more significant customer pool.
Customers don't just fall into your lap, especially in the startup stage. So how do you grow your customer base from here?
Customer growth is most effectively achieved by the employment of customer advocates who are then integrated into the startup company's running setup. Their job is to study customers' needs and wants. From there, they develop accessible avenues to aid your startup in satisfying its customers in a swift and cost-effective approach.
One final tip is to measure your customer advocacy. This provides core insights into what’s applicable and offers opportunities for upgrades and optimization. It's also vital for fostering loyalty and retaining your customers while effectively reducing costs.
While it seems difficult to quantify, you can accurately measure your customer advocacy by presenting customers with a survey to rate your products or services. Please note that the objective isn’t to obtain 100% approval, but to achieve a generally satisfied customer base. (No matter how hard you try, there will always be customers who aren’t happy with your products or services.)
Here are several tools you can implement to measure your company’s customer advocacy:
Finding your ideal customer advocates and then measuring their satisfaction is critical to your startup company’s long-term *success. For questions about customer advocacy, please contact AbstractOps (the original source of this content) at hello@abstractops.com.
*Even the most successful company can fail from one month to the next if compliance measures aren’t in place and/or employees aren’t happy. To see if Stratus can help keep your startup compliant, book a consultation today!