Do You Know Your Business’ Geographic Market?
For the majority of companies, there is a variety of factors that determine whether a customer will work with you or not. Many of those factors you can control, like the quality of your products, availability of inventory, and customer service, but there are some factors that aren’t in your control. One of those factors is your company’s geographic market.
What is geographic market?
Your business’ geographic market measures the number of miles that customers are willing to travel in order to work with you. If you’re beyond that maximum distance, then that customer is extremely unlikely to do business with you. The geographic market for any particular business will vary within different industries, markets, and regions. However, the majority of companies, especially brick and mortar ones, have a specific geographic market.
To learn what your business’ geographic market is, you have to understand where your customers are coming from. Once you know where they are coming from, you can discover patterns and see whether distance is a factor and how important of a factor it is for developing your customer base.
Why geographic market matters for your business
If distance is an important factor for your company, it will be difficult or impossible to keep customers who are beyond that range. For example, the majority of heavy equipment dealers have a service area with a 60 mile radius at the most. The reason for this maximum distance is that beyond that range the dealer won’t be able to travel quickly enough to a customer who requires emergency equipment service.
When you struggle to gain and retain customers beyond a specific range or outside of a particular geographic market, it’s not worth trying to sell your products and services to customers who aren’t located in that market. You’ll be spinning your wheels and wasting your marketing resources on them. For that reason, it’s crucial to understand how far the reach is for your specific business.
Use your geographic market to focus your strategy
Although distance from a customer is not something you can typically control, you can use the knowledge of who is more likely to work with you than others to your advantage. By understanding your geographic market, you can focus your marketing within that range and only target prospects who have a lot more potential for your business. In the long run, this targeting will save you money, help you tailor your marketing and sales messaging, and become highly skilled at serving the customers in your specific area. All of these things are conducive to long term growth.
To understand your company’s geographic market, it’s important to conduct a Zintoro market analysis of potential customers to determine how large your potential market is and exactly what the distance is for your maximum reach. This analysis will help guide your business strategy and keep you from wasting resources.
What is your geographic market? Do you know how to identify prospects within that market, so you can convert them to customers?
Get help identifying who your best target customers are.