If you’re running a business, then you need to be an expert on your industry, your product and your customers. You’re in the position you’re in because you are passionate about your sector, whether it’s fashion, literature or organic produce – not necessarily only about selling that product, and creating a marketing strategy, but you have to become familiar with this world if you want to succeed. When you start researching marketing techniques, you’re going to come across unfamiliar terms, and rather than being paralysed or annoyed by them, you need to dig into the language and find out what these terms of art mean in order to deploy the ideas behind them effectively and drive your business towards success.
One of those terms is ‘mindshare’, and that’s what we’re putting under the microscope today. What is mindshare, why is it good and how do you grow it?
Customer Choice
When a consumer needs a new t-shirt, pint of milk, vacuum cleaner or bank account, they have dozens, hundreds or even thousands of options available. Their decision isn’t necessarily dictated by pricing, it’s made by brand loyalty. Customers can only make choices between the brands they’re aware of and trust – and the more of that ‘mindshare’ you dominate, the more they’ll choose you!
Sometimes you can dominate mindshare to the extent that your brand becomes synonymous with the product! Think of ‘Hoover’, a brand name so powerful it’s come to eclipse the somewhat dry product name ‘vacuum cleaner’.
Growing Mindshare
To grow mindshare, you need to make sure you’re thinking about Brand: your brand isn’t just your adverts. You build your brand with every interaction a customer has with you, from the huge to the tiny. You need to make sure you’re addressing as many customers as possible with your marketing to grow your mindshare in the biggest proportion of the market – scale is vital here!
It doesn’t help to think of your market in simple terms – you need to keep an overview of all the different groups involved and ensure your marketing is speaking to many different customers in a way that appeals to them.
Click through for a market segmentation definition and examples – but in brief, market segmentation is the process of dividing your market into different groups (segments) and prioritising how you target each group to create the biggest effect for a more efficient outlay.
Mindshare is a slow thing to grow – you need to provide consistent marketing, products and services for a long time, but the reward for this effort is incalculable!
