When you’re running a business, the share of the market you command is one very important way for you to measure success. Building your market share is one of the key targets for a business that’s just starting out, and monitoring and maintaining a healthy share of the attention, time and revenue of consumers should be a key priority for mature businesses.
You can’t build your market share without planning and research, and today we’re taking a look at this issue to help you make better decisions about how you can build your share of the market in a way that’s best for your business.
Research
Step one is to find out where you are in terms of market share already. It’s difficult to come to a full understanding of this by yourself. While the calculation is a relatively simple one – you simply divide your sales in a given period by the total sales for the industry over the same period to find out what proportion of the industry you make up – understanding the context that surrounds it in order to derive useful insights from the exercise is more challenging.
Working with a market research agency can get you not just an accurate read on your market share, but also insights into what it means as it changes over time. As you understand why your market share goes up or down, you can make better plans about how to affect in the way you want.
A Marketing Plan
One of the most direct tools you have to affect your share of the market, and persuade customers to spend their money with you is marketing. Each marketing push has to be carefully planned in order to be effective – there is some value to simply raising awareness of your brand and products, but to see a healthy return on your investment, each marketing effort needs to be hung on an event, a specific opportunity for customers to spend money, be that a sale, a new product launch or a seasonal event.
You also need to target the recipients of your marketing carefully, so you’re not paying extra to serve adverts to people who will never act on them. Good campaign planning identifies your audience, works out how to target them with the maximum possible accuracy and, crucially, tracks the success of the campaign in terms of money spent, conversions and sales, so that your plans can be updated if needs be.
Good campaign planning needs data to inform it, and it is well worth working with a market research firm to gather the data you need to target your customers effectively.