Has Your Company Found Its Brand/Advocate Fit?

Everyone talks about achieving product/market fit, but what about achieving brand/advocate fit? After all, developing a passionate base of customer evangelists is one of the most powerful things a growing company can do.

If you’ve got customers who go out of their way to talk about you and your product, you know you’re doing something right. These supporters can be a huge asset for your business, but developing that kind of loyalty and brand devotion doesn’t just happen overnight. It requires spot-on alignment between what you’re promising, what your customers actually want, and what you can deliver.
In the video below, Dan Rodrigues, founder and CEO of Kareo (an OpenView portfolio company) talks about when he knew his company had struck the right balance.

Achieving Your Brand/Advocate Fit

Naturally, every business and every market is unique. But in the video above, Rodrigues explains how his business struck a chord with a particularly tricky group of buyers — physicians and small practice medical providers. As it turns out, the key wasn’t harping on features — it was actually tapping into the powerful personal value Kareo provided that was tied in with the business value.
“A lot of the physicians (we were engaging) went to medical school to help people, and had a dream of going out and opening their own practice. With the tools and support that Kareo provides, we could help them live and fulfill that dream,” Rodrigues says. “And we’ve adapted a lot of our marketing around that — empowering the small practice and celebrating independent physician practices against the big industrialized medicine you see today.”

Key Takeaways

1) Understand your market first, and then listen to customers’ stories
When Kareo started selling into physicians in smaller practices, Rodrigues says the company discovered its sweet spot.
“Our product and customer model really worked for them,” Rodrigues says. “We started hearing stories from customers who were historically buying software that was designed for bigger physician groups or hospitals. They were paying a lot of money for the software, and the companies (selling the software) were promising the world but underdelivering. We came in with a refreshing approach that was very easy and affordable, and that really resonated.”
2) Shape your message around your customers’ pain points and desires
As Rodrigues and his team started to think about how do elevate its messaging around affordability and ease-of-use, the company discovered a handful of other pain points its buyers were experiencing, as well.
“We found that physicians and small practices were under a lot of financial, regulatory, and technological pressure,” Rodrigues recalls. “And (many of those) physicians were asking themselves: Do I need to go join a hospital, or get out of private practice?”
With the tools and support Kareo provided, the company provided an opportunity to avoid that step, and it began adapting its marketing messaging to specifically address that desire.
Where does buyer insights research fit into discovering your brand/advocate fit? Read this post to find out.


 
Photo by: Horia Varlan