As business owners, we often think that we’ve successfully carried out a business goal when a customer buys our product and uses it.
But in my experience, that isn’t the right definition of success.
For example, in my business, one of our products helps customers create opt-in pop-up forms to build an email list. They use our product for the reason it’s been built. But in my books, that doesn’t necessarily mean that we’ve had a win.
What customers really want is to get leads and grow their business. I may have helped them with a great product, but if they’re unable to leverage it to achieve their bigger goals, then we have a success gap.
So, a success gap is when a customer uses your product to carry out a task but they still fail to meet their bigger goal. Why does this happen?
One reason is that they don’t know how to use the product well. Or they need other skills that must complement your tool to achieve success. And very often, customers don’t have defined goals and are using your tool to achieve a vague goal, like making more money.
But why worry about success gaps? Isn’t it enough to build a product and let customers find their own way to deal with other issues?
My answer to this is “No!”
And in the rest of this post, I’ll break down why success gaps are opportunities for any business to take its growth to the next level.
EDUCATE YOUR CUSTOMERS
One way to address success gaps, especially a lack of knowledge in customers, is to create helpful content. This could be in the form of blog posts, online courses, or live and recorded video material.
This may seem like a lot of work, but the benefits are more than worth it. Here are a few positive outcomes that you can expect when you educate your customers:
• Build appreciation for your content. When customers see that you give more, they’ll develop a sense of loyalty toward your business.
• Prevent customer churn since you’ll be providing more information to your customers than your competition will be.
• Boost your search engine optimization (SEO). When you create helpful content, search engines take note. And you’ll increase your chances of getting ranked for relevant keywords.
In my business, we create a prolific number of blog posts and even have a “university” where we teach conversion optimization. It helps us become the best in our field and cater to more customers.
BECOME INNOVATIVE
When you listen to your customers and their needs, that’s when you can pick up new ideas for your product.
You’ll be able to develop new features that create an edge over your competitors.
And to do this, getting customer feedback is a major activity. It’s important to ask your customer support staff to track and document common pain points. And to add feature request forms on your website so that customers can make a request for features they want to see.
Finally, another important way to listen to people and pick up ideas is to see what people are saying on social media.
I credit the growth of my blog to listening to questions people shared on Twitter and then creating posts that answered their questions.
GROW YOUR BUSINESS BY LEVERAGING SUCCESS GAPS
In my own business, being aware of success gaps has led to my brand’s growth in directions that I might not have followed.
For example, even though there were plenty of form tools and opt-in pop-up tools in the market, I still bought or partnered with other businesses to make a form tool and an opt-in form tool. The existing products were either unintuitive or were not being updated regularly.
Using success gaps has enabled me to improve the tools I have and also build or buy new plugins that help small businesses get sophisticated marketing tools.
I recommend focusing on success gaps to take your business from doing well to being a market leader. When you’re working with success gaps, you’re not just adding features, you’re solving important problems and making a difference in your area of work.
Founder of WPBeginner, the largest free WordPress resource site. Over 15 million website owners use our software to build better websites.