5 Steps to Grow Your Business by Capturing Market Share

Whether you have a defined brand name within your industry or your organization is newly established, capturing market share is essential to sustained growth in 2023. This year, businesses can increase their revenue by converting existing customers within their niche, even amid the threats of a recession.  

Each company vies for its market share in its industry, competing for the patronage of a limited number of potential customers. Even if you are content with where your business is for the moment, fundamentally, all business is a zero-sum game. 

However, as an entrepreneur or business leader, you wouldn’t be reading this blog if you weren’t growth-oriented. Although you might have to adjust your strategies slightly, you must start with your customers’ needs to maintain prolonged growth.

How Relationships Help You Capture Market Share

Business growth seems objective from the outside, and often, we allow that air of objectivity to guide us in our relationships with customers. However, more business leaders are rediscovering that nurturing customer relationships is the key to growth.

No matter how good your product or service may be, the relationships you build influence long-term success. Instead of focusing on gaining new customers, consider valuing retention from existing customers or maintaining your quality so customers of competitors will want to make the switch.

Customer acquistion and retention statistics

The importance of relationships applies to all areas of operation, from developing long-term customer relationships to the associations and partnerships you build with other organizations. 

Creating strong relationships is valuable for outreach; fostering connections with your audience also safeguards against potential threats to your business. 

Building connections can take many forms. While there is much to be said for personal, one-on-one meetings with potential clients, all forms of communication can work towards the goal of fostering productive relationships. Well-crafted marketing content can do far more than simply get your message out to the masses; it’s a way for you to connect with an audience. 

Of course, if you want to capture market share, it takes more than simply being friendly. Let’s look at five steps to help you leverage your content to build meaningful relationships that will help your organization thrive. 

1. Understand Your Goals 

Despite being central to virtually every aspect of business, many professionals lack clear, actionable goals throughout their customer attraction journey. Simply aiming to establish fruitful relationships hardly does you any good. 

Instead, understanding what potential customers hope to achieve will help you map your customer’s journey and create strategically placed content to encourage them to convert. Clearly defining your target audience makes it easier to entice your warm leads who are strategically positioned to convert. 

It’s vital to reflect the interests of your target audience, prepare them for content in each part of their journey, and reinforce this relationship as you progress. Suppose your audience can see a parallel between their business and yours. In that case, they’re more likely to engage with your content—this need for shared understanding increases with the investment of the organization. 

“What works for a small product doesn’t work for a large B2B sale. If I’m hiring a platform on which I’m going to build my business, you better believe I want to know what a company is about – their values.” – Tom Schwab, Founder of Interview Valet, on a recent episode of the Joseph Studios’ podcast.

The ability to adapt and be flexible is hugely important as well. However, without a clear initial target, you can put your time, money, and energy into things that don’t translate into growing your business.

Remember the goals of your business and the niche you’re trying to capture before you begin tailoring your business to every potential customer. You don’t need every customer. Instead, you need brand advocates who align with the goals of your business. 

2. Invest Internally and Externally 

No matter what sector you operate in, you need to have a deep understanding of what your most valuable assets are, as well as what makes them valuable. Many innovative companies fail because they think their product is the only key to their success. 

As a business or marketing leader, you probably know of someone in your industry who has a very similar product. However, how do you differentiate yourself from others? If your relationship with your customers is not a primary differentiating factor, it might be time to readjust your strategy. 

The reality is that the top most valuable assets for any business are the relationships businesses have. Investing in your relationships with the people at every stage of your business pays exponentially. In addition to directly monetized partnerships, such as those with your customers and suppliers, internal relationships with your own team have a transformative impact on your ability to create sustainable growth. 

Despite this truth, the value of relationships can be difficult to quantify. Because of this, many newer businesses fail to appreciate the value of relationship-building. Those who recognize the critical nature of investing in connections, however, set themselves up to take market share from those who miss this critical point. 

3. Provide Real Value 

A connection built on personal rapport can be great. However, if you’re hoping to turn that relationship into a productive business opportunity, you need to establish that working with you will translate into a positive ROI (return on investment). 

Through your content, you can inform and engage your prospects as they work through the attraction and nurture stage of the marketing funnel. In the Internet age, you may not even be aware of the first time a member of your target audience engages with your website. The question is, do you have the right material to ensure they stick around? 

Before search engines, businesses either reached out to potential customers through a list of leads or a customer would reach out via referral or the phonebook. However, things have changed. 

Today, potential customers explore an organization’s website and content to determine the viability of business relationships. Although you may have leveraged a pop-up to entice a potential customer into a drip campaign, do you have enough pieces of content to inform, engage, and convert your audience?

Providing content and marketing material shouldn’t only be superficial and sales-focused. Instead, begin building the roadmap for how your customers can learn about your industry and your product in a way that instills trust and confidence. From case studies to blogs and sales collateral, each piece should complement the other in your lead’s journey to a conversion. Only then, can you hope to capture more market share.

4. Develop Meaningful Relationships

Once you’ve set yourself up to draw in high-value prospects, the next step is developing the relationships. While it can be tempting to jump straight to a hard sell as soon as you have someone’s attention, productive, lasting relationships often mean building on the trust you’ve established in the previous step. 

In essence, each potential customer is on a journey from exploration and discovery to consideration and then, hopefully, making a commitment to do business with you. This is true whether you’re selling physical products or offering long-term services. Recognizing where your customers are and having the structure to assist them at each step gives your audience the ability to work through a funnel at their own pace. 

5. Leverage Your Investments

Once you’ve formed a connection, you’re finally ready to turn potential customers into paying clients. Converting the relationships you’ve established into business growth is often easier said than done, though. 

There are many different methods for getting customers to take the final step. A well-placed call to action can remind those engaging with your content of how they can actualize the benefits of working with you. Likewise, reaching out with the right offers or promotions can tip the balance for people with whom you have already established your value. 

Like the previous steps, the best conversion strategy can depend on your business and your customers’ needs. Having already established credibility and trust allows you to guide prospects to the best selling point for them. 

Meet Your Growth Potential 

Whether you’re looking to appeal to an entirely new section of the market or engage with your existing audience on a deeper level, focusing on relationships allows you to reach the type of high-value prospects and get the most out of every visitor to your website. 

At Joseph Studios, we pair our proprietary Deep Insight® methodology with expert market research, intelligence and analysis, customer profiling, writing, and design to create and implement a strategy to create and capitalize on the relationships your business needs to thrive.

Want to learn more about how informed, multi-disciplinary organic marketing can transform your company? Schedule a free consultation call with our team of experts today!