Today we’ll be looking in customer share and why this is one more important than market share, in our opinion. We’ll explain why the first should be your point of focus when creating your content, selling your products and services, and when deciding over an advertisement plan.
Some decades ago, businesses were all about market share- we’ll soon see why. But times have changed, the number of businesses has increased and most of them tend to go for customer share instead. Basically, we have evolved into caring more about our customer than our value on the market – and this is a good thing.
Let’s see why!
Market Share
We’ll begin by detailing you the basics of market share – why it is applied, still beneficial, and why it is losing the fight with customer share.
A business, or a website, or anything that promotes content and products/ services, will usually go for market share if they want to satisfy as many people out there as possible. Naturally, even you would like for someone, when he or she enters your shop, to find everything they need right there.
Therefore, this was the marketing strategy that was mostly applied back in the day. Nowadays, this is beneficial mainly for supermarkets or for those shops that sell our day to day items – however, this does not apply all the time.
Market Share vs. Customer Share
Let’s discuss a simple example. Some years ago, if you wanted to get a new PC or change some parts in the one you had at home, you just had to go to an electronics store. In there, you had the highest chances of finding what you were looking for.
Instead, nowadays, when you are looking for components for your PC, you will be going to the places that sell only what you are looking for. If you want a better video board, you’ll go to a certain store – or better, online shop -; the same applies to almost every single thing we need.
Customer Share
Basically, when choosing to focus on Customer Share per Category, a business will analyze what its current customers are interested in. For example, if an online shop sells all kinds of items, but most of the customers seem to be interested in Furniture/ Housing, then that shop would better focus their attention on what the users want.
Naturally, if a business sees the interests of its customers, it will know how to market their content. Of course, if 50% of the users are interested in chairs and you decide to market car tires, then you will probably lose a lot of those customers.
In order to come up with the Customer Share per Category metric, you have to divide the total number of customers that fall within a certain category with the total number of customers of your business, and then multiply the result with 100.
The Bottom Line
Basically, if you are a product or service provider, you decide on what to sell or provide. However, it is always a good idea to look into what the customer wants – at the end of the day, you might decide that you want to be the best on the market at selling the X category of products rather than selling everything you can get your hands on.