For every small business owner, it’s vital to look for unique ways to increase your market share. At the beginning of setting up a business, the key priorities are to ensure that you create a product or service that’s likely to attract sustained demand from your target market. Without this, your new business will have little chance of successfully navigating through the first years of trading, which can be exceptionally difficult for any firm.
Once you’re enjoying sustainable revenue channels, it’s important to look for strategies that will increase your customer base, ideally by extending your brand reach to other markets or customers. While the process of increasing market share can be difficult to achieve, there are some key ways to simplify the process. In this article, some top tips will be explored that will help your small business to increase its market share.
Consider product sampling
If you create products that are to be consumed by your customers, it can be difficult to change their current preferences. They may already have a degree of brand loyalty to certain products, which can make it challenging to even get them to try your product over the offering of competitors.
However, by adopting a product sampling strategy, you can aim to win over new customers and gain market share. Product sampling (as the name suggests) is where potential customers are invited to taste your product, normally in a supermarket, shopping center, or at a trade show.
By giving free samples to the wider consumer population, you’re seeking to change buyer behavior with the ultimate aim of the customer preferring to buy your product over those offered by your competitors. In an increasingly crowded marketplace, this can be a key strategy to boost the brand recognition of your product and change the buying habits of consumers.
Boost your website visibility
It’s estimated that around 64% of small businesses have a company website. In 2023, all small businesses should aim to build a professional-looking and well-designed website as it is a key way to generate online sales and to build brand image. However, simply building a high-quality site is not enough to increase your market share as even the best-looking websites may not gain suitably high levels of online traffic.
To ensure that your website is highly visible, it’s of paramount importance that you adopt the best practices of search engine optimization (SEO). Simply put, these are the techniques that allow your website to rank more highly on organic web searches and therefore receive more traffic, which can ideally be converted into sales. You can read more detailed information about the current best practices of SEO by clicking here.
There are numerous strategies that combine to give improved SEO; in brief, these include undertaking keyword research to ensure that your content will gain traffic, ensuring that all web pages load quickly, and making sure the site is easy to navigate on a range of tech devices. Effective SEO is an ongoing process, as search engine criteria changes over time and your business will need to modify its web pages to ensure that they continue to be compliant.