A Short & Simple Guide To Increasing Your Market Share
Apple launched the iPhone in the year 2007. The device gloated a full touchscreen, internet capabilities, and multiplicity of personalization options. Back then, these features were rare before the iPhone was introduced. Having all these features on one phone was very intriguing. Because of this particular reason, Apple was able to stand out from the competition and built a solid reputation as well as a loyal customer base. In the first year of the iPhone release, Apple captured a 3% market share.
Currently, almost half of the market shares are owned by Apple globally, which means half of the total mobile phone owners have an iPhone.
Being a business owner, knowing your market share helps you to understand how you work out against competitors. When it comes to increasing market share, it means making sophisticated marketing decisions that promote overall sales and customer retention.
Let’s have a look at how brands can increase their market share.
What Does Increasing Market Share Means?
Increasing market share means boosting your sales efforts as an individual business by employing new or supplementary strategies to help you reach there.
Market Share can be defined as the percentage of overall sales in an industry produced by a specific brand.
In a nutshell, market share is calculated by dividing a company’s total sales over a specified period by the particular industry’s total sales over the same period. For, e.g., when calculating a market share for company A in 2019,
Market Share = Company’s total sales in 2019/Industry’s total sales in 2019
So basically, market share is how much you are making as a business in your industry and how that measures up against your competitors.
Concluding, to increase your market share in the industry, you must increase your sales. Although it sounds pretty simple, it isn’t a cakewalk. So let’s dive into its details.
5 Ways To Increase Your Market Share
There are five ways how you can increase your market share:
- Identify your niche and stick with it
Your brand needs to have some unique characteristics that will help it stand out from the competition. For instance, all products of Apple have their logo and sleek finish.
Apple’s logo acts like a distinguishing characteristic that enables people to identify their brand’s products in a blink of an eye when kept among look-alike items. Likewise, if you, as a company, are able to establish a recognizable brand identity while creating products or services of better quality than your competitors, you will be more likely to find and capture a more significant market share.
As a marketer, you must also consider the marketing materials that can contribute to boosting your market share. For example, if you have a popular YouTube channel, you should keep working on it to expand the reach of your products.
- Innovate as the industry does
Today Sony’s PlayStation owns the majority of the home video game console market share. The sole reason behind this is Sony has always discovered ways to innovate and update their products faster than their competition. Today they are ruling the market because they adapt quickly, giving something new to their customer base always. These innovations are crucial to keep up with the trend, stay competitive, and increase your market share.
If your brand fails to innovate in a way that it reflects the advancements, it might end up lagging behind and eventually forgotten.
- Engage with your customers
Customers love it when brands acknowledge them, and who knows what “they” want to see better than “them”? That means asking your customers directly is another way to increase your market share.
For example, you can send an intricately designed survey to your loyal customers, asking them about the design, features, or updates they’d like to see. These insights will help you in visualizing substantial ways to enhance your products or services, which will lead to an increase in your market share.
Although it’s not necessarily essential to engage with customers via surveys only. People have started spending the majority of their time on social media. Interacting with your audience via platforms like Instagram stories can be very useful. This is a low cost of engaging with your customers and finding out where you stand in the industry from the audience’s point of view.
- Consider an acquisition
Another way of increasing your market share is by acquiring a company that lines up well with your products or services. You will have to conduct research, but you might also end up gaining a potentially huge market share.
Typically companies go for acquisition to either gain a more significant market share or expand the scale of their products. Acquiring a competitor company should be a well-thought decision so that it is a positive addition to your company.
- Continue to please your customers
When it comes to creating a loyal customer base, Netflix’s game is quite strong. It keeps on adding new original shows and refining its platform to give better experience. As a result, Netflix is a leading streaming service in the market. The secret ingredient is that Netflix keeps its customers happy by offering exceptional experiences, such as displaying most favorite shows of an individual on the top or show suggestions.
Likewise, Apple continues to be a leader in the mobile market because it keeps on upgrading its products and adding value to people’s lives.
By observing your market share and discovering ways to increase it, you will be able to establish your brand in a more stable position in your industry while boosting your customer retention rates.
These were the five ways of increasing your market share. Let us know how these strategies work out for your business via the comments below.