The economy is slowing down due to several factors, including inflation, but that does not mean your business has to slow down. Indeed, the current market provides an excellent opportunity for strong companies to ramp up efforts to reach their target audiences and engage with those aligned with their brand.
Why Expand Into New Markets?
You know you have a good product or service that meets your customers' needs, are proud of what you’ve accomplished, and built your business from the ground up. You may even have a loyal following of customers who love your brand and spread awareness through word of mouth.
Yet, as the economy has slowed, you’ve noticed your sales have stagnated, and you’ve started to wonder if it might be time to reach out to new markets — regions, demographics, industries, etc.
Sure, expansion involves risk, but you already know that building and maintaining a successful business includes risk. The rewards that balance out the risk are potentially exponential, especially if you already have a product or service that does well in its current market.
When you branch out from your current market, you stand to make more revenue, diversify your buyer base, create a competitive advantage, gain access to new talent, and improve efficiency within your business. Compared to those rewards, the risks are minimal. Every business has growth plateaus. You can see them either as a negative or a gift to reach out and grab.
Let’s look at these four unexpected benefits of a successful market expansion.
1. Reaching New Potential Buyers
When you first established your business and brand, you identified your target persona, the ideal client whose problem you solve with your product or service.
When you expand your brand into new markets, you can find more of that same audience, already primed and ready to hear about, and invest in, your solution to their pressing issue.
Even better, as you engage in market research, you may have an entirely new persona to explore, meet, and engage. Your product or service may meet a new set of needs you never realized before you considered expanding.
Furthermore, meeting this new persona can encourage you to design and create new or slightly different products and services tailored to this new audience, region, or industry.
Remember, Amazon began as a company selling used books online. Look at how they’ve expanded today.
2. Refining Your Competitive Advantage
Market expansion also gives you a competitive advantage over similar companies.
It is healthy in business to understand your competition, to dig into what their customers love about them, and to help you develop your approach to marketing that allows your shared clientele to see what makes you stand out and apart from the rest.
When you enter a new market, you already have the competitive advantage of learning about all the existing players on the board and setting yourself to be unique among them. Your messaging in this new market will make that point clear. Your targeted audience should be buying from you.
You won’t just be the new kid on the block for your new market; you’ll be the new and better kid on the block.
3. Deepening Alignment to Your Mission
Many businesses don’t think about how the expansion will affect them as a business when they expand into new markets.
Market expansion is an excellent time to tighten up your ship. You can pull your team together and revisit your vision, purpose, and positioning statement. This preemptive approach will help you gain strategic alignment within your organization, identifying key players in your company who can rise into leadership positions and allowing those unwilling to grow with the brand to plan their exit strategies.
Aligning your company will garner buy-in to your expansion and growth from your internal teams by raising awareness of who you are helping, why we are helping those clients, and the expected achievement outcome.
In short, expanding into new markets helps you figure out who is with you and who is better off leaving the company, allowing your business to grow in still more significant ways.
4. Boosting Operational Efficiencies
Finally, expansion into new markets encourages you to tighten your ship in another way — operational efficiencies.
If you already have strong production and delivery of products and services in your market, you must consider practical ways to grow that model. Depending on your expansion, the increased demand and potential change in geography can also shake up operations. Expansion is a great time to fix any problems, explore your leadership in those departments, and get your operations on track to expand.
Take a look at our playbook on how to improve efficiency by removing pain points here.
You Can Grow Bigger and Better
Business growth is always an opportunity not just to get bigger but to get truly better. Take the opportunity and improve all aspects of your business as you grow. Check out the article 10 B2B Marketing Strategies to Fuel Your Business Growth for more on building your business.
