6 Dragon-slaying strategies: Market growth for Followers & Challengers

With this Sunday being England’s St. George’s Day, and KAYBE being an England-based marketing agency, I sat down with directors Kris Britton and Christiane Pidde to figure out how we could tie a Turkish-born Roman army officer slaying a mythical creature into market growth (if you want to learn more about St. George, this fascinating English Heritage article is worth a read). The ‘Martyr of Marketing’ sounds awesome, but what does it even mean?

Then, it clicked: St. George took on a beast bigger than himself. Any business who has ever reached the pinnacle of their industry and called themselves the Market Leader has been through that journey from Market Follower taking on the Market Challenger to Market Challenger slaying the Market Leader and stealing the crown. No matter where you are on that journey, be it Market Follower or Market Challenger, we’re here to help you win the battle against the bigger competitor.

We’re going to look at three strategies for Market Followers to execute market growth, then move onto helping Market Challengers become the dominant force.

Market Followers

Niche targeting

If you can identify an overlooked niche within your industry, you can exploit that niche with less competition from bigger businesses. This allows a major market growth opportunity, as you’re able to dominate sales without the budget of a Market Challenger or Market Leader.

Critical to this is identifying consumer trends, which good marketers will already be doing in order to inform their future campaigns, strategies and investments. That could mean analysing your own internal data, such as sales trends, as well as keeping your finger on the pulse of changing consumer demands in the wider market and seeing how you can capitalise on those demands.

For example, if you’re in the footwear industry, the recent uptick in sunshine in the UK will probably lead to a rise in demand for summer footwear such as sandals & flip-flops. If you align that information with your own consumer demographics, you might find that the majority of your customers are aged over 50 and that, as news articles like this tell you, UK people over fifty have been increasingly engaged in walking as a form of exercise, including walking holidays, in recent years. Suddenly, investing marketing resources in walking sandals prior to the summer makes a lot of sense.

Strategic partnerships

Have you ever felt that you’re offering better products/services, and even creating better marketing content, than competitors with a larger market share than your business? It might feel unfair, but market growth will always be stunted by a restricted reach.

Building strategic partnerships & alliances can be a really effective way to increase your reach. This is very common in social media marketing (a really cost-effective market growth method for Market Followers); utilising the reach of influencers to increase brand awareness and build persona.

Lead Nurturing

Creating personal relationships with existing customers is really important for Market Followers. The majority of your sales will come from existing customers, so nurturing those relationships will yield excellent results. Maintaining existing customers is key to market growth – otherwise you’re just replacing old customers with new ones, which is not growing your market share and creates a more vulnerable customer base.

According to Zippia, as much as 65% of a company’s business comes from existing customers, but 72% will switch to a competitor after one bad experience. That’s nearly THREE QUARTERS of your customers giving their money to competitors if you don’t nurture the relationship after converting that initial sale.

This could be as simple as maintaining regular communication via emails, but the edge you have as a Market Follower is the ability to make that communication feel authentic and personal. Take advantage of that! A great example of this would be a hand-written note placed within the packaging when you ship an online order.

Market Challengers

Direct & disruptive

This is all about increasing your brand awareness and building a brand persona. While Market Followers might find they need to piggyback on more influential, further-reaching brands to do so, a Market Challenger will already have an established customer base and brand awareness.

You can utilise that with an aggressive or even disruptive marketing approach to steal more of the spotlight from the Market Leader. In 2013, Pepsi (yes, even a brand as big as Pepsi can be a Challenger) took an obvious (fun) shot at Market Leader Coca-Cola in a Halloween advert. As this analysis of Pepsi’s Halloween campaign against Coca-Cola explains, the direct approach garnered plenty of attention online.

Identify & innovate

Are customers dissatisfied with either the Market Leader or the industry as a whole? What are their pain points? Conducting consumer research and analysing data (both internal and external) allows you to identify areas of potential market growth.

We looked at how similar methods can help Market Followers with spotting trends, but your status as a Challenger provides you with a more comprehensive consumer database to use to your advantage.

With questionnaires, data analysis (such as consumer behaviour and buying trends) and consumer feedback, you can identify opportunities for innovations that could increase your market growth. An example of this would be a Challenger in the technology industry noticing a trend among older generations of frustration with Apple’s user interface being more modern and elaborate than what they’re used to from decades gone by and offering a more simple, easy-to-use phone with that messaging at the heart of its marketing content.

An offer they can’t refuse

If you’re confident in your products/services and customer service (why wouldn’t you be, after all?), maybe all it takes to draw customers away from competitors is to give them a taste.

HelloFresh do this to brilliant maket growth effect with offer codes marketed aggressively through outlets like social media and podcasts. These offers might start as high as 60% and work down in 10% increments to 30%. By that stage, the consumer has been subscribed for a month; drastically increasing the likelihood of customer retention.

With that said, it could be as simple as a one-time discount that draws the attention of a competitor’s customer. If you can work in harmony with your sales team, you could create a higher-conversion marketing strategy that targets people who are already actively considering switching to a new business.

Ask the experts

Blog posts like this are focused around market growth for you. We’re trying to help you accelerate your market growth from Market Follower to Market Challenger or Challenger to Market Leader. However, we know that it demands a team of experts who really know what strategies to deploy, what content to create and how to execute each campaign for the best results.

If you want a team of experts to deliver marketing campaigns, design a website, generate leads or provide any other marketing services, tailored to your business needs and restrictions, KAYBE enables you to still disrupt the market hierarchy. Follow in St. George’s footsteps and slay the dragon that dominates your industry by speaking to us and we’ll arm you with everything you need to succeed.