As with many moments in the life of a business, when your business matures and your market share has grown to a point when you start to see limits to your sales projections. This stagnation can be due to reaching a point within your current market where you can no longer gain incremental sales. At this point, it’s important for every business to look at this problem and see the growth opportunity ahead. If your current market is already fully saturated with your brand, the next step would be to grow into a new market. While there are a number of important factors to consider, market development can be hugely impactful for a business long term. A good business uses its ability to launch itself efficiently in a new area – to build up its brand from the ground and to push sales up to a good profit margin.
This sounds all well and good, but actually taking on that next opportunity can be daunting to even seasonal professionals. So what are the ways to build a market development strategy?
Deciding on the Market
Choosing a new market for sales growth can depend on many metrics. We frequently say that each business is critically unique. Even between those selling the same or similar products, there are factors that create differences between businesses. So when researching a new market for growth, your metrics will be just as unique but will include basic elements.
Initially, you will need to determine the market size or how many of your target audiences are within the market. Perhaps your growth comes from supporting a specific population size within an area. If your business relies on specific population size, you’ll need to be careful about market determination around that factor. This metric can fold into more complex customer demographics, as well. For instance, if your business relied on the population size of men aged 35 to 44, earning above $300k, and travels frequently for business. With an audience this specific and working within a target volume goal, you would need to be careful when choosing a new market. However, as careful as you need to be, there are plenty of tools and platforms that can provide multiple market options.
Once you have selected a few market options, you’ll need to review potential entry barriers that could prevent your business from growing. These barriers can include issues with language, legal, and infrastructure. Entering a new market will require some investment (time, money) on the part of any business. There are barriers natural to any new market like research & development or resourcing costs. On another side, the artificial barriers are caused by current businesses in the market. These ‘unnatural’ barriers could cause an issue through aggressive pricing strategies, product acquisitions, advertising control, legal blocks, or governmental support. All things that can keep new competitions from creating a foothold into a new market.
After selecting a market and reviewing potential barriers, our next step is to research competition. The most obvious way to start researching competition is to conduct online searches of your products or services. Remember as you’re conducting your search, to keep a wide net so you will find both direct and indirect competitors. As you’re creating lists of competitors, you can make notes on services/products, their website, content, social media presence, and more public information. These pieces can give an insightful look at how serious any competition truly is to your entry. Think through the information gathered for insights.
For instance, some questions you are can about the competitors could be:
- How many followers on social media do they have
- What kind of content are they publishing
- With what level of engagement
- Are their services directly aligned with yours or do they have more revenue opportunities
- What is the customer experience on the website?
- Is the site mobile-optimized?
- How are their online reviews?
- Are there areas of negative reviews that you can prepare for?
As a way to better understand competitors’ sales path, behave as a customer on their site. You can sign up for their newsletters, emails, or SMS texts.
Through all this market research, you can make it easier by tracking your efforts on a spreadsheet. As you find pieces of information, grade your findings in a way that best fits your needs.
Roadmap to Improvement
You’ve made notes on the differences between you and your biggest competitors. You have notated their size, services, customers, and more. From this information, we can now start identifying the gaps in the new market that you could fill. As you’ve gone through this research and learning process, you should have been able to identify specific gaps that you can capitalize on. Are the competitors weak on a social media strategy, then you should jump into a heavy presence there? Are there gaps in their service offerings, perhaps they don’t package services or offer discounts?
Helpful Resources for Research
After going through all these tips and guides on developing your market development strategy, we wouldn’t end there. We want to be a resource to business owners like yourself looking to grow their sales revenue and customer base. Below we will walk through some of the sites and resources that we use to conduct research into businesses within a market.
SEMRush: A great resource for competitive research and one of the best tools out there. The free option still delivers in-depth research across multiple factors like SEO, PPC, keyword research, and more. Their tools and interface are seamless and very user-friendly, even for those without deep knowledge.
SpyFu: This online analytics tool shows keywords that websites buy across Google properties. On the paid option, you can track all keywords your competitors are buying and see CPC details like cost and rank. Understanding CPC cost and rank can help you better optimize your own site to improve your rankings.
SimilarWeb: This tool has a quick overview of competitors’ online presence. This overview gives you details on competitors’ website traffic, referral sources, demographics, and more.
Owletter: Owletter tracks and analyzes emails sent from a website. This allows you to track your competitors’ email marketing and see what is and isn’t working for them. To get started, you’ll need to sign up to join your competitors’ email list. Then, every time you receive an email, Owletter will take a screenshot, analyze it, and alert you to any useful information.
Through any good growth strategy, you should continue testing your ideas, audiences, platforms, and anything else. This testing stage is vital to further explorations of your market strategy. Not all of your marketing should be tested, however. As you lay down evergreen campaigns to handle brand awareness or direct response, you can pivot your focus to testing ideas. We often choose one element or tactic to test at a time across multiple markets. For instance, testing paid search bidding strategies could be effective in your current market, however, it may be too inefficient in a new one. Other testing ideas can include pricing strategies, media channel tests, creative tests, and product enhancement tests. It’s not recommended to have too many variables tested at once, within the same testing scenario. However, conducting multiple tests across markets, channels, or platforms is highly recommended.
A Market Development strategy allows your business to explore opportunities of growth and expansion across new markets. With these guidelines, your business will have the framework needed to tackle a project of this size. Planning and flexibility are the cornerstones of developing a cost-efficient strategy that maintains a positive revenue.