Market Development: 7 Ways to Accelerate Organic Growth

You’ve entered a new market with an innovative product that would surely be a game changer, but sales just aren’t meeting management’s targets. His background research showed an impressive market growth rate, he conducted a needs analysis, voice of customer survey, and SWOT analysis to determine company specific solutions. His team spent months or years developing the product, getting the patents, pushing it through the front door process, but his company is still struggling to break into the market. How do you overcome obstacles and accelerate organic growth?

Try one of these 7 ideas to jumpstart that growth strategy:

1. Form alliances. You don’t have to do everything yourself, remember the old saying: “United there is strength”? What alliances can you form, is it with your customers, main opinion leaders, distributors or complementary suppliers? Are there accounts you can jointly approach, joint marketing activities you can both participate in? Collaborating with partners in an industry is a surefire way to accelerate growth because you will have multiple entry points into an account, however, don’t keep partnerships in your head or form them ad hoc. Get specific, write down the people and companies you’d like to collaborate with or types of companies, create a partnership plan, and get to work developing those relationships.
2. Implement a specific content plan. Segment your target audience and develop the right content based on industry, role, and stage of the buying cycle. The Market Development Manager and Application Manager are key to building personal relationships with prospects, however what content are you providing to prospects to help nurture them through their stages in the buying cycle? For chemical and engineering companies, this is more than a product data sheet. You can include things like total cost of ownership, helpful whitepapers and scientific studies, how-to guides, etc. Every market is different, and information is most useful if it comes from multiple areas within your company, so strive to generate content with input from R&D, marketing, sales, customer service, etc. and make sure all content fits into an overall strategy or fits your mission.
3. Have a good public relations campaign. This includes the placement of materials in both traditional formats and specialized magazines, but the Internet is increasingly important. Which publishers have you contacted with news about your product, have you sent them samples, can you relate the benefits of your product to current hot topics, eg lower energy costs or improved sustainability? Also, remember to segment your campaign, you don’t need to spread your product news across industries, target the magazines or sites your potential customers are most interested in. If you don’t know, ask them! Also, if the product is interesting, publishers, bloggers, etc. they should start contacting you for more information and writing their own stories, expanding their coverage and building their credibility. One last note, all content should be search engine optimized, this will ensure your chance of being found if a potential client or publisher is doing an internet search on a specific topic.
4. Social media. There’s a lot of hype in the industry about social media, but it’s really just another tool in the marketing toolkit; however, no marketing campaign would be complete these days without some form of social media strategy. Segmentation is just as important in this form of media as it is with traditional marketing, for example, is Facebook really the place a chemist goes to look for a solution to his coating problem? Probably not, but he can go to a LinkedIn liner group and look for answers from him. On the other hand, if he’s trying to drive a pull strategy and educate the consumer about the new Dura-life coatings, Facebook might be the place to be. The point is to know your target customers and where they are looking for information, then adjust your plan to suit their needs.
5. Work your events.Do you have a good strategy for events or fairs? Presenting data at a specific conference and having a plan for follow-up with leads can be very effective. By presenting or, better yet, co-presenting with a client, you are reaching a captive audience that is specifically interested in the area your new product serves. Be strategic in how you want to present data and benefits. After the presentation, direct them to your booth for a private demo, and then follow up after the lecture. This is where a targeted content strategy can help too, make sure you have the right content to offer while nurturing the lead, again, content needs to be specific to the industry, role and stage in the buying cycle. Can’t connect to the speaker circuit? Offer something interesting at your booth and market to attendees before the show to attract them. For example, if you’re offering a new bio-based plastic, ask people to bring in samples of your comparable petroleum-based plastic and test theirs against yours using some kind of simple property test. Make it a “research” study where you will share the results. The key is to have some kind of plan for the event, you can’t expect good results at the trade show if your idea is to show up and expect people to stop by the booth.
6. Create your own events. Webinars or live demo events for clients can pay for themselves if done right, or try hosting an event with one of your alliance partners to deliver even more content and offset production costs. Again, you should have good specific information to share with the group, choose a topic that is relevant to your industry or function, share data, case studies, etc. Showing how your product(s) has helped others. You can make it more interesting by sending samples of your product or literature to pre-registered attendees. Then follow up! Either with a phone call, email, direct mail, or all three.
7. Customer success stories: Co-marketing customer success stories, especially if your solution helped the customer with his brand strategy. For example, sustainable development is currently a buzzword, if your product helped the company improve the “Greenness” of their product or helped them reduce their carbon footprint, they may be willing to exploit that. The more success stories you can share about your new product, the more people will be willing to accept a new technology. Also, many times a client can’t get legal or marketing approval to share their name, but that’s not the end of the world, write the story without their specific name and replace the company name with something like “Fortune Client 500 in the medical device”. industry”

putting it all together

Using just one of the tips above will help you gain market acceptance for your product, but the key to organic growth is to be creative and overcome whatever obstacles come your way. The 7 tactics are ways to overcome problems with technology or brand awareness and lead generation; however, the secret to any of them is follow-through and persistence. If you don’t have a good follow-up process, you’re not maximizing your market development efforts. Finally, it’s not going to build relationships or gain market acceptance overnight, even smartphones that are clearly superior to cell phones only have 17% market penetration in the US cell phone market growth objectives.

cost

How much should you spend to accelerate organic growth? This can be a difficult question because you are spending money when new product sales are very early, one way to approach the cost is to consider it an investment, assess how much you want to generate in new product sales over the next 12 months (have account sales cycle times) and use a percentage of that. For example, suppose you want to increase sales by $500,000, then your total cost of creating and distributing content could be 10% or $50,000. Creating a budget will help you decide which of the 7 tactics above will be The most appropriate. If you’re not sure where to start, you could hire a consultant for a week who should be able to quickly assess the strengths of your market, business, and product, and then help you come up with an overall implementation plan.

References:

http://articles.cnn.com/2010-09-30/tech/gahran.smartphone.ownership_1_feature-phones-cell-phone-smartphones?_s=PM:TECH