Let’s face it. Growing a business is hard. Geopolitical tensions, market volatility and economic uncertainty are real challenges that executives must navigate to thrive amid the upheaval.
Your company’s future success depends on your ability to determine which strategies will sustain growth. It takes considerable effort. But we’re here to help you get there.
Before we get started, it’s important for you to have a deep understanding of your companys business direction, resources, strengths and capabilities. Complete visibility is key to making data-driven decisions. Then, you can evaluate the market and assess consumer needs to understand how those demands are being met by companies today.
In competitive markets, companies continually look for avenues to expand their market share and achieve growth. While increasing overall market size is difficult, smart firms can still gain share by creatively targeting underserved segments and optimizing their marketing strategies.
This article outlines 5 proven tactics to identify new opportunities and grab a bigger slice of the pie:
1. Analyze Your Current Market Share
Start by thoroughly analyzing your existing market share
- Assess share in total market vs. market segments
- Breakdown share demographically, geographically, by product line, channel etc.
- Identify rising and declining areas
- Benchmark against major competitors
- Determine factors driving share gains and losses
Look for patterns, growth potentials and vulnerabilities. This provides a fact-based foundation to build your game plan.
2. Focus on Solving Customer Needs
Customers buy solutions not products. Look beyond demographics to deeply understand customer needs and pain points.
- Conduct ethnographic research to spot unmet or underserved needs
- Analyze support calls and feedback to identify recurring problems
- Survey customers on desired improvements and buying factors
- Test concepts addressing key jobs-to-be-done
Meeting emerging needsThrough differentiated solutions opens new growth opportunities.
3. Find Adjacent Markets
Look for adjacent spaces such as customer segments, geographies, use cases or products where your capabilities can add value.
- Examine demographics with similar needs but different characteristics
- Consider new applications for your technology/product
- Research expansion into new but related categories
- Explore untapped regional/country markets
- Identify upsell/cross-sell potential within existing customers
Entering a tangential space is often easier than tackling entirely new markets.
4. Improve Marketing Effectiveness
Rethink marketing across the customer journey to attract, engage and retain more customers.
- Sharpen positioning and messaging by segment
- Refine channel mix and improve ROI
- Strengthen retention programs targeting at-risk users
- Cultivate influencers and brand advocates
- Leverage data and analytics to micro-target prospects
- Test innovative formats like interactive content or events
Smarter customer engagement boosts conversions and retention.
5. Launch Targeted Campaigns
Run hyper-targeted campaigns tailored to pockets of opportunity.
- Focus on high-potential customer subsets
- Create offers addressing specific pain points
- Test multi-channel outreach with relevant messaging
- Partner with influencers aligned to niche communities
- Double down on proven growth areas
Resource allocation to calculated initiatives drives measurable market share gains.
Continuously Assess and Adjust
- Measure campaign effectiveness through detailed attribution
- Link activities to market share growth results
- Pivot programs and marketing mix towards what works
- Maintain an agile portfolio of bets across multiple vectors
- Sustain momentum with disciplined execution
Ongoing optimization is key to driving steady market share expansion.
Overcoming Key Challenges
Here are some tips for addressing common issues:
Fragmentation: Tackle customer subgroups and micro-segments creatively. Multi-pronged approaches using tailored solutions work best.
Market Saturation: Focus on underpenetrated niches and buyer journey improvements to unlock growth.
Commoditization: Differentiate with positioning, branding and superior customer experiences.
Deep Pockets Rivals: Play to strengths like agility, innovation and customer intimacy. Leverage partnerships judiciously.
Channel Conflict: Use customer insights to align channel strategies. Ensure coherent cross-channel experiences.
With the right strategies and tenacity, companies can find pockets of growth and gain market share in even the most competitive and mature categories. The key is staying nimble, obsessively focused on target customers, and relentlessly improving marketing effectiveness. Companies need to keep exploring multiple vectors, run controlled experiments and scale what delivers results.
Growing market share requires methodical analysis of served markets and customer needs. Companies need to identify whitespace opportunities and deploy targeted initiatives leveraging their unique strengths. They should constantly measure outcomes and optimize the marketing mix based on learnings. With the right strategies, market share expansion is achievable without radical product changes or large investments. Companies that stay laser-focused on high-potential opportunities and improve their marketing return on investment will see their market share steadily rise.
Direct competitor analysis
Direct competitors offer similar products or services. For example, Coca-Cola and Pepsi, or Netflix and Hulu.
Conduct comprehensive research on where your business stands in the marketplace. You should know how key players are building a competitive edge and positioning their products or services. Then, find out how these companies size up against your business. These questions can help you get started.
- Which brands are growing and why?
- What is their unique value proposition?
- How are they marketing their offerings?
- What competitive advantage do you have over them?
Take IKEA, for example. In 2022, the company entered a new market, opening its first store in Chile. Before deciding to expand, IKEA did extensive research, most likely looking at competitors like Sodimac that already had 74 outlets in the country.
Understanding your competitors—from performance to product portfolios and new product development (NPD) to strategic direction—will help you identify growth opportunities.
Complementary product and service analysis
You should monitor the performance of products and services that complement your business.
That means sweet spreads and butter brands should analyse market trends in bread and savoury biscuits. Another example: tomato sauce manufacturers monitoring performance of the pasta category.
This research helps you:
- Understand how your customers use your product in conjunction with others
- Detect new needs, opportunities and threats
- Develop new offerings or redesign your products
- Sell more effectively
Let’s say a company that produces fresh ground coffee pods wants to expand retail distribution. Sales data for pod coffee machines like Nespresso and Dolce Gusto can estimate market potential and demand.
Trends in complementary sectors should be considered when making investment decisions. Use this information to guide your product innovation strategy and gain market share.
If your company has reached a high level of maturity in your current market, a diversification analysis will help you understand how and where to grow. But you must have the right skills, resources and business models to successfully expand into new categories.
First, analyse any sectors that could benefit from your offering. Then, quantify the growth potential and understand the competitive landscape for each. Look at market sizes, shares, growth rates, unit prices, per capita sales and brand positioning. You’ll want to answer these important questions before making investment decisions.
- Do you have the capacity and tools to diversify?
- Do you have applicable resources in other industries and could gain economies of scale?
- Will diversifying dilute your brand reputation? Should you use a new brand in this new industry?
- Do the potential financial gains outweigh the risks?
British investment firm easyGroup uses a diversification strategy for long-term business growth. easyGroup first created easyJet, a low-cost air carrier, but extended its business model across other industries like FMCG, entertainment, e-commerce and technology. And the company even created competition for easyJet with the launch of easyBus and easyCar. This gives consumers various travel options while bringing in new revenue streams.
Diversification can bring in more customers, income security and consistent demand when executed successfully because your company transforms alongside consumer needs.
Marketing Formula – Market Share, Market Growth, Market Size & Sales Growth
Why should you monitor your company’s growth?
Monitoring it helps evaluate your company’s growth by examining how you progress relative to the overall market growth. A thriving company will see its market share increase faster than that of the competition. Any tiny shift in the market distribution in stable markets can disrupt well-balanced market forces.
What is market growth?
The percentage increase in the overall size and value of a market over a specific period. Emphasizes a company’s position within the existing market. Concentrates on the expansion and overall health of the entire market. Company’s sales or revenue divided by total market sales or revenue, multiplied by 100.
How do you know if a market is growing?
Measure the Market Growth Rate: Do some math: subtract the old size from the new one, divide that by the old size, and then multiply by 100 to get the growth rate as a percentage. A positive growth rate means the market is getting bigger – it’s expanding. This shows that the market is growing in size.
How to calculate market growth rate?
To calculate the market growth rate: Market Growth Rate = ( New Sales − Old Sales/ Old Sales ) × 100 Market Growth Rate= ( 1 1.5−1 )×100=50% This means the market experienced a 50% growth in sales from last year to this year. Also See: How to Create a Growth Marketing Funnel? Here are the top tips to improve your company’s market presence:
