Acquiring Customers Without the Big Brand Recognition

Your first few customers are special. They are the users that make you feel accomplished because all your hard work is being recognized for the purpose it was supposed to fulfill. As you begin to grow your startup, it is a tough journey to find those first customers. On our latest Startup Central — SF Meetup Series, we invited the Vice President of Product Growth at Gainsight, Travis Kaufman, to share lessons he learned from creating the Go-to-Market playbook for Aptrinsic, a Series A backed startup that was acquired by Gainsight in 2018. Travis provides tips and insights on how to raise brand awareness through different marketing and promotional programs for your customers, and how establishing credibility in the get-go is important to develop long-lasting, loyal relationships.

A huge thank you to Travis Kauman, our friends at Gainsight, and all our attendees!

Shaping Your Story

Any successful startup today are the ones that know their target audience. “Understanding who you serve and why, is the key to differentiating yourself in a competitive marketplace,” Travis explains. Being as specific as possible will help you answer three very simple, but important questions your prospective customers will have; Why buy anything? Why now? and Why should they choose you? By answering these questions you’re able to focus your marketing efforts on the right audience and personalize content to cut through the noise to reach buyers and hit pipeline targets.

Creating Awareness

Although your startup can provide the necessary solutions for your target audience, you need to raise brand visibility to even get some of your first customers. Identifying and experimenting with different marketing programs that work best for your brand is an effective way of creating awareness, and it can also be in a cost-efficient manner.

“Invite influencers and subject matter experts to collaborate on thought leadership content,” Travis suggests. Whether you want to work on digital pieces like a webinar, industry study or blog article, it is a huge incentive to identify people and organizations that share the same audience. It elevates your presence if you are alongside recognizable and credible brands and agencies, promotes relationship building with these very same influencers, and your content has a far reach to be distributed across the media in an accessible manner.

Getting out there and actually meeting and talking to people is also a sure way to boost your brand. Physical events, such as participating in tradeshow conferences and exhibitions and organizing community MeetUps, can be great environments to meet many people in a single setting. “You can promote your thought leadership asset during speaking engagements, or be creative and attract people to your events by having speaker book signing,” Travis recommends.

Establishing Trust

So now you have solid traction of people knowing what your product and/or service is and who you are, but what is setting your business apart is how they can trust the results that you promised. Free trials are the best way for vendors to establish trust with prospective buyers, and Travis points out several elements in order for a trial experience to be successful:

1. Provide clear steps to realize value
2. Personalize the product tour
3. Prescribe onboarding checklist
4. Introduce tool-tips based on user behavior
5. Fill the empty state with benefits & CTAs
6. Re-engage users outside the product
7. Align with sales team/motion

With these steps, you can ensure that your customers fully recognize the scope of your business and why it can be valuable to their business operations both now and in the future. “You can create opportunities by converting freemium and trial customers to paying patrons,” Travis states.

If you enjoyed this read, come join us in one of our many free events in our Startup Central MeetUp — San Francisco.