How To Identify Business Opportunities

Abstract

SMARTech Convergence Series: Blog 3
SMARTech Convergence helps Marketing + Sales align geographically and concentrate on areas that are most likely to be profitable.

4 min read | By Justin Perry
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How to Identify Business Opportunities within the Marketplace

The life cycle of the marketplace determines how many people are looking for a solution, what they are searching for and how they view this solution.

However, the idea that the marketplace is created, expands, stagnates and contracts evenly across the entire world is a falsehood. While a marketplace could be in its final stages of maturity on one end of the globe, the same marketplace could be growing on the other end. The way that people look at a particular solution and their awareness of that solution will vary, and it may vary greatly, across different locations, countries and continents.

So, it’s important to understand how awareness, public perception, sentiment and concern are formed in specific geographic locations because, then, companies can capitalize on market segments where awareness is still spreading. This means that Marketing, Sales and Leadership will be able to determine exactly where and to whom it makes most sense to manufacture awareness and to drive efforts to reap that awareness.

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How to Leverage Marketplace Awareness Factors

The rules of business dictate that new and growing marketplaces present the best opportunities for cost-effective customer acquisition. If your company is the first to introduce the solution and define the marketplace and define the way people perceive the solution, it has the ability to gain the largest market share and the greatest brand equity.

Where to Prioritize Focus
That is why, at the second step of the SMARTech Journey, we focus primarily on identifying specific demographics that form new and growing marketplaces (or market segments) within the larger marketplace.

The idea is that, as a marketplace evolves and matures, companies are able to isolate geographic pockets of awareness because awareness does not spread evenly across the entire planet. In other words, while a product or service may not be new to people in the USA, it might be “cutting edge” for people in a developing country.

Leveraging the Marketplace Applied
Take Internet technology as an example. While the industry was developing fast in the United States and our nation was almost completely on fiber, there were developing nations that were just beginning to light up and connect to the Internet.

The result was that, at certain geographic locations, the marketplace for cable Internet was in the new or growing stages while, at the United States, it was already a contracting marketplace. That was an opportunity for companies to lengthen the life cycle of this technology and to capitalize on the demand in these specific countries or locations.

Identifying and leveraging such opportunities can be incredibly effective because companies can assign budgets and hone in on specific geographic pockets of potential customers that are most receptive and most aligned with the value proposition.

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This is Highly-Focused Customer Acquisition

As a result of this careful marketplace segmentation, companies can limit the resources required to drive awareness and they can also limit the scope of driving that awareness to people that are ready for the product or service.

The impact on the marketing budget will certainly be positive because marketing strategy and sales strategy can be fine-tuned to target a specific territory, or market segment, or demographic and the company can offer an extremely relevant solution to that marketplace.

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SMARTech Convergence + Marketplace Awareness Factors

SMARTech Convergence helps Marketing align geographically and concentrate on areas that are most likely to be profitable and it helps align Sales to be able to reap that awareness in those areas.

So, what happens ultimately is that the business can begin to uncover ways to drive down the blended cost to acquire a customer. The decision to invest marketing and sales dollars becomes less subjective because there is information about where customers are searching for solutions and how they’re searching.

In conclusion, by taking the SMARTech Journey and beginning to align Marketing and Sales with the customer and the marketplace, your company is eliminating reasons for failure because it’s no longer looking for customers in the wrong places.

What's Next?

Who Are Your True Competitors? 

Why your biggest competitors are not necessarily the companies that appear to be and how to discover your true competitors to gain competitive advantage.
Continue the Journey