Strategies for Expanding Your Market Reach

Market reach can be defined as your company’s footprint within your market. In other words, your market reach is how far and wide you’re known and able to sell in a particular market. While many businesses start out with an approach targeting a local market or customer base, expansion often means looking beyond a local target market.

In time and with growth, a market expansion strategy needs to be put in place. This is done to expand into new markets, and some businesses even start planning to expand into international markets with time.

Take Expansion at Your Own Pace

This isn’t to say that your company needs to start thinking about international expansion tomorrow. Still, it is to say that a growth strategy needs to incorporate long-term marketing strategies with expansion in mind. Think about how you plan to reach new customers, what you have done in the past that’s been successful, and how you can implement both temporary and ongoing strategies to repeat that success.

While expanding market reach is often an involved process, you can simplify it by using some proven best practices. To give you a head start, below are some effective strategies for expanding your market reach:

Re-Evaluate or Implement Your Lead Generation Process

Sales often start with leads. These are potential customers who have shown interest in what you have to sell, and qualified leads are customers whom you know have the means to make a purchase. In the case of B2B leads, a qualified lead is also someone within an organization who has the authority to make a purchase.

The reason leads are important is because they make the sales process easier. These are people who have already shown interest in what you have to sell, so now you just need to speak to what matters most to these leads in order to work on closing the sale.

Your New Market May Be Different – Plan Accordingly

A successful market expansion strategy typically involves creating or reevaluating a sales lead generation process. When creating or reevaluating your process, you may need to consider factors that you don’t think as much about in your local market.

For instance, is your company well-known in new markets? Are there differing pain points customers experience in a new market compared to your existing markets? Do potential customers spend time in varying places online and off in your new market compared to your existing market? The answers to these types of questions will help you formulate a solid lead generation strategy to more quickly gain a foothold as you expand your market reach.

Engage in Market Research

Whether you’re looking to expand into a new market or expand your market reach in an existing market, research is important. If you’re already serving customers in an existing market but want to gain greater market share, research can be streamlined since you have data from your existing sales to evaluate. If you’re planning to expand into new markets to grow your business’ footprint, the research process may be more involved.

When putting together research about your target customers or potential customers in specific areas, you want to look at things like the area’s competition, the available opportunities and resources in an area, and the potential pitfalls of operating in a specific area. These are considerations that will vary from market to market, and understanding all of these aspects of an expansion can help you avoid disruptions and delays.

Reconsider Your Key Performance Indicators

Key performance indicators (KPIs) are the metrics you use to determine whether the actions you take are successful and to what extent. KPIs can be used for marketing and other aspects of running a business, and they may include things like customer acquisition cost (CAC) and profit margins. When looking for effective strategies for expanding your market reach, KPIs can be incredibly helpful, but they can also become a double-edged sword.

While it’s good to have KPIs when running a business, you may need to reconsider your existing KPIs or create new ones during expansion or growth. The reason for this is that your goals during an expansionary period will likely look different compared to your goals on a day-to-day basis. When attempting to gain market share, you might find that your existing KPIs aren’t as important as new ones that should be implemented during the growth phase of your expansion.

Focus on the Correct KPIs

KPIs can also become a hindrance during expansion if you’re too focused on the wrong ones. Focusing too much on conversion rates when you should be focused on brand awareness while growing a brand in new market segments can cause you to lose focus on what’s really important.

Similarly, trying to measure your cost per lead (CPL) when you’re just gaining traction in a new market may not really tell you much of anything. You won’t get to know your true CPL until you’ve gained a foothold in a particular market to see the ins and outs of that operating area.

Adjust Your Resource Allocation

Like it or not, every business has limited resources to one degree or another. When expanding your market reach or expanding into new markets, there’s going to come a time when you’ll need to take a closer look at what you have to work with and prioritize.

The result of this evaluation can be as simple as redirecting marketing funds from a sales strategy to brand awareness content or as complex as restructuring entire departments within your company.

Whenever you redirect resources, it’s a good idea to make a plan for when that redirection will end. Failure to put in careful planning during a restructuring operation may mean you’re left with too few or too many resources in the wrong areas once you’ve achieved the next rung on the ladder of your market expansion strategy.

Essentially, you may only want to temporarily redirect certain assets during expansion and then settle them back in place after you’ve hit certain milestones. Once again, careful planning should be implemented before you embark on an expansion within a market in order to ensure you have the resources needed to continue the same level of service in existing markets.

Consider Your Capacity

In keeping with the above, now is also a good time to consider your current capacity for service and whether offering products and services in a larger market segment or new market is sustainable. After all, there’s no point in expanding your market reach if you’re not going to be able to serve a larger or new market.

It’s a good idea to think about current resources and what plans you have to obtain new resources to serve new market segments. You should also consider that a new market segment may not behave like the ones you’re used to serving. Expanding your market reach may mean you’re suddenly inundated with orders. Conversely, you may not have enough orders to sustain operations within a new market.

Some Trial and Error is to Be Expected

While research can provide some forethought here, you may not know what you’re dealing with until you’ve actively begun expansion. As such, have contingency plans to fall back on in case things shift. For example, try to have extra staff or other resources available until you’ve learned the new market through experience. This can save you from being caught short-handed if business suddenly takes off.

On the other hand, allocate resources to a new market expansion plan that you can draw back in if need be. Hiring a new staff to manage and work a new retail location in a new market may sound like the right idea, but if that new market is delayed in taking off, you may end up paying employees to stand around waiting. This balancing act may require some trial and error, but it’s smart to consider these things when putting together a plan to expand your company’s market reach.

Partner With a Professional

If you’re finding it challenging to run your business and focus on effective strategies for expanding your market reach, it’s likely time to seek solutions from a professional. This is particularly true when it comes to marketing your business.

A marketing partner can provide guidance in setting up strategies for reaching potential customers in new markets, and your marketing partner can also take care of a lot of the detail-oriented work that needs to be done during expansion.

Working with a marketing partner can also give you back the time required to develop strategies, put them in place, and measure the results. Expansion and growth can be time-consuming no matter the size of your operation, and working with a professional allows you to focus on running your business while having the ability to expand.

Contact E-Marketing Associates for Solutions to Expand Your Market Reach

At E-Marketing Associates, our team is laser-focused on helping companies grow to reach their full potential. We do this through a range of personalized marketing strategies, small business marketing software, and more.

Schedule a consultation with our experts today – We’d love to learn more about your goals!