Marketshare

Impressions. Likes. Clicks. 

These are all trackable metrics across digital ads, search, and social media. They’re performance indicators–hints at how well an ad, page, or post is performing, but while we watch out for these performance metrics, we’re most interested in the big picture: how is your marketing affecting your market share? 

Defining Your Slice of the Pie

Your market share is your percent of sales compared to the total possible sales in your industry. 

For companies and organizations with national or international reach, your market share could be a percentage of the entire industry’s market. 

Businesses with a local consumer base, on the other hand, will be focused on the local and/or regional market within their reach. 

Why It Matters 

Market share is your most important performance metric because it clarifies whether your business is growing, beating out competitors, staying stagnant, or falling behind. 

While numbers of qualified leads and conversions gained through a campaign suggest business growth, it’s market share numbers that shed light on the full picture. 

Keeping track of your market share on a quarterly basis can…

  • Provide an overall benchmark that helps clarify and define goals 
  • Give context to the value of likes, clicks, leads, and conversions 

Benchmark and Goals 

Once you know your share of the market, you’ll immediately have a benchmark and a broad goal that you can narrow down. 

After calculating your market share, your goal will be one of two things: defend or grow

A defensive goal means you’re already dominating your market and want to prevent competitors from stealing away your customer base. At this stage, your focus is high on retention and prevention. 

Defending Market Share with Retention 

Retention keeps your current customers happy. This involves great customer service so when competitors try to undercut your price or improve their performance, your customers don’t want to risk leaving their positive experience for the competing one. 

From a marketing perspective, this could look like marketing customer loyalty programs, or dominating the digital space so whenever your competition shows up online, you do too. 

While retention is the primary goal, there’s always some client turnover. Even loyal customers might move out of your service area or have other life experiences that transition them away from your business. 

This means while you market for retention, your digital outreach also serves a dual purpose of recruiting new customers to replace any who have gone away. 

Growing Market Share 

If you’re not the dominant entity in your industry, your goal is probably to grow your market share. 

Every role in a company has an impact on market share. Sales, customer service, manufacturing, and quality control all impact the outreach, product or service, and experience of the customer, so growing your share of the market isn’t an endeavor we take on alone. 

However, marketing departments and agencies have a big role to play in assisting your other teams. 

At the top of the sales funnel, we take a look at what the competition is doing well to gain qualified leads and try to both replicate and exceed that with our own tactics. In fact, digital platforms like Google Ads actually have their own “market share” metrics in their reports. As we run campaigns, we’re aware of how often our ads are displayed compared to competitor ads. 

Putting Clicks and Conversions In Context 

Yes, we absolutely look at performance data like the reach and engagement stats of our campaigns. However, it’s the market share that gives this data its context. 

If marketing conversions are up, but market share is down, things are still headed in the wrong direction. This could lead to investigating customer service and retention issues. And you might be thinking, why does my marketing team need to know about that

But marketing actually has its hands in almost every stage of the customer journey. 

For example, Google’s Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines state that “If the page is primarily for shopping or includes financial transactions, then it should have satisfying customer service information” and that a brand’s/website’s/content creator’s reputation is an important factor. Suddenly, a customer service issue is a marketing issue as considerations like reputation management, chatbots, and social monitoring come into play. 

All this to say, understanding your market share can help you pinpoint where issues might be happening in your funnel, and bringing your marketing team into those conversations can help you find solutions. 

Growing Your Market Share with Conquest Marketing 

When clients are looking to increase their market share, we help them reach their goal with conquest marketing. 

Conquest marketing focuses on researching and reaching potential clients within your audience who aren’t already working with you. It utilizes a variety of marketing tools and methods to reach the right people with the right message at the right time. 

Social: Posts are awesome ways to reinforce your brand to existing and potential customers. Ads help you reach your targeted audience and reinforce your offers to them with pinpoint specificity. 

But remember, many social media users want to be able to reach businesses through messaging on social: if you’re going to have a presence there, make sure you’re ready and willing to connect. 

Google Ads: With targeted ads, you can reach internet users all across the web, on apps, and more. Along with social endeavors, Google Ads can help drive traffic to the website, improving web stats and helping SEO while also generating leads. 

SEO: If the client is searching for your products, services, or brand, you want SEO to make your website show up. 

Email & Automation: You’ve got the leads, now follow up with targeted emails and automation to allow your sales team to guide them through the customer journey. 

E-books, videos, and many additional types of content can also be utilized within conquest marketing. It’s all in service of reaching the people within your audience you haven’t connected with yet and introducing them to the product/service they’ve been waiting for: yours. 

Do that, keep your current customers loyal, and watch your market share rise. Just make sure to keep your marketing team in on the conversation.

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