For today's post, I'd like to do something a little different: an exercise to illustrate potential market share growth.

I think it could be a valuable exercise for many businesses, to look at the volume of their potential customer across geographic areas and evaluate whether their media and sales revenues are aligned with those potentials.

So let's get started. I'm giving you the somewhat abbreviated version, but you'll get the idea.

First, we consider the customer. Who are they? What are their demographic and behavioral characteristics? Are they older retired folks or young couples with children? Do they live in cities, have disposable incomes or take ski vacations?



Where can we find them, not only in volume but in concentration? New York, Philadelphia?



Then we ask, how do our sales compare? Are we selling where we should be on a macro level?



And we see that yes, in general, our areas where we see top sales generally align. However, those areas that don't represent enormous opportunity.

And what if we look closer? Are there areas of opportunity on the individual DMA-level? We see that there are significant areas of opportunity to target sections of the city where our segment lives and yet doesn't deliver revenue.



We have to ask, why aren't we seeing alignment here? Is it because we have low media reach compared to the volume of households we should be targeting?

In performing this exercise many many times, I've found that most companies do not have sufficient media reach across their markets. Or they haven't targeted their customer properly through marketing campaigns.

It may seem simplistic, but merely understanding the gaps between current and potential sales, and where those big opportunities are, can be a huge help in achieving market share growth.