Market Share Matters

Yes, market share matters, big time! How much you might ask? “The Profit Impact Project for Market Strategies”, a Harvard study, has identified 37 factors relating to the success of a business, and market share at the top.

There is a linear relationship between market share and pre-tax ROI. As a company gains a bigger slice of the market, its economics of scale creates more profitability. Supply chain costs are reduced, and a larger market share enables a business to charge more from customers. However, to become a large player in whatever market you’re in, whether it’s a successful restaurant franchise, hotel chain, amazon partner, or eBay power seller, your online star rating makes the difference. So, if you boil down what matters when it comes to market share it’s the online star rating as much as the value of your product or service. These 3 factors will set you apart from your competitors. I cannot judge or dictate how to improve your product or service, most likely you already have an idea. However, how do you earn a high star rating? By delivering consistent value of your product and service and capturing customer appreciation via their 5-star rating. How do you make sure the customer leaves a 5-star rating? Offer them an auto-populated 5-star prompt after each online or tablet register checkout. Humans are all about convenience these days, customers, especially happy ones just after a purchase will not leave a review worse than 5-stars. By using a reputation platform your organization will start accumulating a plethora of 5-star ratings, even if you get the occasional product return or low review.  

Your business must start thinking in terms of market share, it needs to know who the key competitors are and what positive and negative things are being said about your business and theirs! How do you find out this information? Some reputation management systems offer a feature like Irevu’s “competitor analysis” which lets you know exactly what’s being said about your competition. This way you can focus on the positive things being said about the performance of your business, adjust for the negatives, and hit your competitors hard on their negative characteristics. However, you will not know this information without a software reading all the keywords and phrases written about your competition online.

Now, you might be thinking, “our organization can afford to operate at a loss for a few quarters and we’ll just crush our competition the way Amazon did.” This type of strategy has an expiration and then it’s back to the need of capturing customer satisfaction. So, start using a reputation management system, it’s a necessity.