Effective Ways to Increase Market Share Online

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A company’s market share is the percentage of the total market it controls for products or services. The process of increasing market share never stops as you always have to try to win new customers.

If your competitors keep trying to win customers over, and you don’t, you won’t be competitive. Working to increase your market share means building on your success and growing for years and even decades. These steps will help you to succeed.

Spot new trends

If you want to increase your market share, innovation has to be part of your marketing strategy. Are there changes in technology affecting your industry? What new ideas are people talking about in industry forums? What are your customers talking about?

An awareness of new trends can help you to stay ahead of your competitors, whether this comes in the form of new products, new service delivery models, customized solutions or better customer support.

If you find ways to distinguish what you offer from your competitors, your company will be considered the one well worth supporting over the long term.

Increase customer engagement

Social media has provided the perfect way to increase communication with customers. Post content on a regular basis and encourage customers to comment and share it. Email them regularly.

Think about sending a survey after an order asking for feedback to help you improve the ordering process, delivery and any other issues. Customers are loyal to companies that can fix their problems and address their issues as soon as possible. Keep an open channel for ideas from customers. One of them may just turn into your next hit product.

Check out how fast your competitors respond to customers and then do better. If they respond within 24 hours, you can win over customers by offering a more immediate response. Improvements in technology have made real-time customer support possible.

When satisfied customers share their positive experiences online, you gain new customers. Gaining customers in this way increases your revenue without increasing your marketing expenses.

Develop a unique brand position

If your company is able to address a need in a different way from anyone else, you can occupy a unique brand position. Defining this position requires not only having different goods or services but you need a distinct tone of voice, look and personality.

You need to communicate this in everything your company does online to maintain and increase your market share. This will make it easier to attract new customers who want the same type of experience.

Employ smart hiring practices

Companies with the highest market share almost always have the most dedicated and skilled employees. Keeping the best employees on board reduces training and turnover expenses and allows your company to focus more on core competencies.

One proven way to attract the best employees is to offer competitive salaries and benefits but intangible benefits like casual work environments and flexible schedules also play a part.

Attracting top talent may be as simple as offering more flexibility in how and when people work. If your competitors are still expecting employees to report for duty in the morning and stay in the office every weekday until five, your flexible working conditions where employees are even allowed to work remotely could be very appealing.

Increasing your market share yields more revenue but also brings more customer engagement, loyalty and attention. There are many online strategies you can use to get a bigger share of the marketplace, such as spotting new trends, strengthening your customer relations, developing a unique brand position and employing smart hiring practices.

Brian O'Connell
Business Writer
Brian is a semi-retired business owner with 15 years experience covering small business, entrepreneurship, careers, and financial planning. He has appeared in dozens of top-tier national business publications, including Time, MSN Money, The Wall Street Journal, CNBC, The Street.com, Yahoo Finance, CBS Marketwatch, and many more,

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