Marketing

Accelerating Market Penetration: Growth Advisory Strategies for New Market Entry

As businesses seek to grow in new markets, they require a well-developed market entry strategy. A market entry strategy facilitates a visible, clear, comprehensive and valuable insights framework, which helps businesses explore the complexity of market expansion and ensure successful and sustainable growth in other new territories. Market entry strategy outlines diverse facts, including how a business plans to deliver goods and services to a new market and mark its presence there. This is a very important component related to the growth of a company or its expansion plan, which addresses potential barriers of market entry, competitors, regulatory landscape and consumer behaviour in a target market.

Understanding Market Penetration

Market penetration is a measure to identify how much a product or service is in use by customers compared to the total estimated market for the same product or service. Market penetration refers to the successful selling of goods and services in a specific market. Market penetration refers to the way market entry strategies are proposed or adopted with the intent to create value in the already existing market. However, such strategies can be performed through the entire business life cycle and could be more beneficial at the primary setup stages of a business. This helps the business to establish its current position and provides the direction required to expand the business to achieve successful business growth. In a broader sense, market penetration can be used to determine the potential market size. Suppose the total market is large; then, new entrants to the specific industry might be encouraged so that they can secure a market share or a good percentage of the total number of potential consumers. For instance, suppose the 300 million population of a country and out of 65 million are using their own mobile phones, then the market penetration of mobile phones in that country would be 22%. Accordingly, there are 235 million people left who are potential consumers of mobile phones, or we can say 78% of the population is still untapped. Such penetration numbers will showcase the potential for businesses to grow in mobile phone manufacturing. Similarly, market penetration can be easily used to analyse an industry as a whole to identify the potential for companies within the same industry to secure market share or increase their revenue through the sale of products or services. Considering the above example, the mobile phone market penetration is used to estimate whether mobile phone manufacturers can meet estimated revenues. In case the market is deemed to be saturated, it shows that the companies can easily dominate the large size of market share, thereby limiting such potential sales growth opportunities.

What is the Market Penetration Rate, and how is it calculated?

A very important component of market penetration is that it measures a company’s market penetration rate. However, this can be measured through the calculation of a company’s market penetration rate. A market penetration rate is a ratio which compares a company’s performance rate or growth against the total market size. The market penetration rate of a company is important to calculate as it enables a company or a business to compare where they have been, where they want to be, and how other competitor companies are performing. This enables a company or a business to create a business goal which can be tracked and calculated accordingly over a period of time.

In the process of calculating the market penetration of a company or a business, it is mandatory to know about the number of customers that have been secured in addition to the total market size. Market penetration Rate Number of customers Divided by TTMS, whereas TTMS refers to the total target market size. The total market size can be difficult to define if in case the company has wider geographical areas of business or if it sells goods online. The total market size does not mean the population of a specific area, but it means the total number of potential consumers that a company could have. Another way to calculate market penetration for any company is to focus on dollars. Market penetration rate = total sales dollar divided by TTMSP, whereas TTMSP is total target market sales potential.

Market Penetration for Companies

Market penetration is not specifically used on global and industry-wide scales to measure the scope and the products and services, as the same is widely used by companies to measure and assess their products and services market share. Market penetration refers to the specific number of potential customers who purchase the goods and services of a company rather than the competitor products of the same company. It can be widely expressed in terms of percentage, which means the company’s product or services represent a specific percentage of the total market for those specific products and services. In order to calculate the market penetration, the current or existing sales volume for all products and services is divided by the total sales volume of all similar kinds of products, which includes those products sold by the competitors. Suppose any company has a high market penetration percentage for its products and services; then the company will be considered a market leader in its industry. It is evident that market leaders have marketing advantages, due to the reason they can easily reach more potential customers because of their well-established products and services.

Market Penetration Strategies

Whenever a company or a business is trying to implement growth strategies or seeks to increase their sales growth of available products and services in the existing market to secure a higher market share, then the businesses need to use market penetration strategies. There are various ways to penetrate the market, including developing new markets, creating new products or services, penetrating the existing markets, etc. Using these kinds of strategic approaches likewise refining the product offerings, targeting underserved areas, implementing pricing models, and optimise the distribution channel is more likely to enhance the company’s domination in the market and acquire more acquisition. Moreover, by using market penetration strategies techniques, a company can easily experience strategic business growth.

Change Product Pricing

One of the most common market penetration strategies is to lower the prices of products or services. Businesses intend to generate high numbers of sales by increasing the number of products purchased and keeping the product prices lower for potential customers compared to alternate goods and services. Companies are more likely to pursue strategies of high prices depending upon the demand elasticity of the specific product and services, in the hope that this may generate high sales revenue and result in higher market penetration. This process also includes a good understanding of the consumer base and whether a low price rate will be able to attract more consumers, which is basically what a company intends to have for the long term.

Create New Product

Although the market penetration occurs with the existing products and services, a company may be able to solve the issue of its valuable consumers using a new innovative product. This can be a risky option as it cannot ensure a guarantee towards market adoption. Thus, it is advised for companies to invest in research and development to analyse the pros and cons of existing products and services, analyse the existing gap, identify where the products or services fall short of customer expectations and develop a new product.

Target New Boundaries

With the proliferation of online sales, a number of businesses may have to access a wider market space than they realise. Moreover, it can be possible with a service company that can be restricted to a particular place or region; the company or business should proceed and implement market penetration strategies to move or develop and expand their businesses in new areas. Without moving to other spaces, businesses may be able to fund operations in new sites by leveraging success at existing places.

Seek Partnerships

Companies instead of going to new places to operate businesses, companies need to penetrate new markets by engaging with new ideas and people who are able to work with them.

Innovate the Existing products and services

It is evident that by using the new innovative techniques in old products and services, companies need to innovate or update their existing products or services. This showcases the timely release and launch of new products or services in the market, which means the updated ones. The company is more likely to improve and offer new benefits to their potential customers who have already experienced the old products and services for a long time and may be further attracted towards the upgrade and update of new products in the market to have a positive experience.

Acquire new companies (M&A)

Basically, through partnership engagement, two separate businesses come together or are aligned over a period of time to share business success. Moreover, the acquisition gives birth to new entities legally joined together to work on the same platform to access new potential markets, labour skill sets, and intangible assets such as goodwill, research and development, etc.

Create Promotional Opportunities

 This can be used for those companies who do not want to lower their products and services permanently, must penetrate new markets, and offer temporary promotional opportunities. Such a business strategy can easily attract more new customers at low prices for a temporary period. However, it is advised that such a strategy may result in short-term success, as it is more likely to attract incorrect consumers, especially at times if a company or a business is a high-quality company.

Educational Marketing to inform customers

Companies can easily penetrate the market by enlightening potential buyers about their innovative products and services. By informing about the advantages and unique product features, companies are more likely to attract a wider scope of potential consumers. Such an approach is very important to make an effective and sound market penetration strategy, as it is true that informed customers are supposed to make favourable, biased decisions about the purchase of goods or services. Moreover, education regarding products and services creates more customer retention and builds a more loyal consumer base.

Why do Companies use market penetration strategies?

Market penetration strategies are generally used to increase a company’s number of customers and sales. It is an act to gain an in-depth presence within a market through employing various market penetrating strategies, which help to increase a company how deep it can engrain in a new market so that the company could have greater short-term and long-term success and financial health. It is better for companies to be aligned with the market trends, and customers want to stay at the forefront of the ever-evolving competitive market landscape.

Explore the benefits of market penetration for businesses.

Market penetration is crucially important for businesses that aim to grow and expand in market shares. The process includes the increase of sales of existing products and services in an established market space. Companies can keep their focus on market penetration, easily capitalise their current offering of products and services, and increase their customer base, which ultimately results in the growth of revenue. One of the benefits of market penetration is the potential to increase the market share of any business. By targeting the existing customer base and encouraging them to purchase new offerings related to goods and services, businesses can easily attain competitive advantages. Moreover, market penetration enables companies to leverage their business/brand reputation and customer loyalty, which helps easily introduce new products and services in the market successfully.

In terms of market penetration benefits, for most companies, it is evident that those who increase their market penetration are more likely to increase their sales volume. This is possible because the market strategies often entail increasing the number of customers served. Companies are more likely to experience other benefits from market penetration as it leads to higher visibility of new products and services, and the markets start to recognise better the potential benefits that a company is able to offer. It helps a company or a business brand equity to increase, as the public opinion of such a company or business improves as the company penetrates the new market. Companies are more likely to leverage market penetration by being more strategic with what kind of products and services they are going to offer the potential customers. Instead of charging high prices, companies can easily get a deeper presence in a new market and be able to set their own prices for innovative products and services or enhance products accordingly. In most, market penetration can happen through product differentiation and conveying the unique benefits of the same product or services to potential consumers.

Exploring the disadvantage of market penetration for businesses.

Although market penetration is more likely to improve business operations at the same time, it has inherited characteristics of business risks. Whenever a companies or business plans for new market penetration or offer new products and services to consumers, it also has the risk of diminishing its existing business image, developing a wrong image or reputation among its customers, or sometimes attracting a consumer base which does not align in accordance to their business strategic plan. If the products or services become less popular, then the company may be forced towards liquidate its products by selling them at low prices if the company no longer resonates with the consumers in the market where they penetrate. However, companies often perform market segmentation to attract the rightful customers. It is evident that market penetration may likely increase the risk of wrong customers being served.

Conclusion

Market penetration strategies are important aspects for businesses that aim to thrive in competitive landscapes. By strategically increasing product or service adoption within established markets, companies can rapidly expand their market presence and revenue streams. However, these strategies must be carefully developed and implemented accordingly to align with market dynamics and consumer preferences by mitigating the risks of brand dilution and attracting incompatible customer bases. Ultimately, a good understanding of market penetration enables businesses to capitalise on growth opportunities while navigating inherent challenges effectively.

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