For companies today, growth is like oxygen. Maintaining share of market and slowly growing along with the category doesn’t cut it anymore. To the market, investors, and leaders alike, if you’re not growing, you’re dying, day by day.
And growth clearly is important. It drives company valuation. Growth helps you access investment more easily. Growth engages employees and keeps them stickier. Growth can create FOMO amongst your prospects and your competitors. And growth gives you momentum, which leads to more growth.
But growth is elusive. While one branch of marketing suggests that all you need to do is implement performance marketing to start reeling in new users, the truth is it’s hard to achieve.
So, when seeking growth, where should you turn to first? You might be surprised to hear you should start with your current customers. This sounds counter-intuitive – if you already have them, then how will you grow?
Most organizations tend to treat the customer journey as a roadmap to closing. Once converted, their attention turns to finding new prospects to convert – that the customer journey ends with a sale. The truth is that it starts there.
Here are 5 ways that you can drive growth from current customers.
1. Better understand and optimize their journey to conversion
No matter how well you are converting prospects into users, there are likely parts of the process of conversion that can be improved and optimized. Review how current customers became buyers/users and identify process breaks, gaps, and leaks that are softening conversion. For example:
- Explore the reasons that prospects don’t convert. You might find simple outages in user experience, process, or communication.
- Scour landing pages for opportunities to optimize language, focus, design, etc.
- Review the customer journey for outages – where are you not meeting the needs of the customer?
- Read and optimize phone scripts used by meeting setters, SDR/BDRs, schedulers, etc.
2. On-board new users to ensure they begin using your product
You may have converted a customer into a sale, but that is just that start. You need to ensure that they begin using and gaining value from your product or service. For example, develop better on-boarding tools, education resources, FAQs, and institute a customer success function to check in on new users. This practice will help ensure that customers don’t convert and then jump ship before they’ve even gotten started.
3. Improve customer engagement to turn users into fans
Just because customers use your products or services doesn’t make them loyal supporters of your brand. It’s important to communicate and engage with them for them to feel they are connected beyond the transactional, and that your product/service is more than just its attributes. Engage them with content that relevantly provides value, and offer tips, testimonials, and hacks that they can use to extract more value from your offering. For B2B customers, ensure you’re staying in touch, providing business reviews and updates.
This type of engagement can do a lot of positive things for your business, from helping insulate customers from your competition, to getting them to recommend you to others.
4. Increase lifetime value of current customers
Current users have chosen you for a specific solution you provide. But they may not know about others you have – or higher tiers of your offering they might grow into. So make sure you cross-sell and up-sell them to make sure they know about your additional offerings. This can lead to material incremental growth for your company.
5. And finally, learn from them to improve your offerings, your marketing, and your success
A less obvious but no less tangible way current users can help you grow is to learn from them to create the conditions for growth. Dig into your customer data to know what makes them tick. Learn from their choices, actions, and preferences to create useful personas, journey maps, and segmentations. And consider doing surveys asking them what you can do better or how to improve. The understanding you gain here will help every other aspect of your growth – including how best to convert new customers.
*Originally published in MediaPost’s Marketing Insider 3.7.24
Michael Baer's Stratecution Stories 