Scalability is all about smarter ways to acquire new consumers – but don’t forget to ensure they exist in the first place! Susie Stanford looks at how quantifying the addressable market is the first step to creating a successful smarter customer acquisition strategy.
An effective customer acquisition strategy is the easiest way to achieve organic growth. What’s not so easy, however, is making sure you have the right data to show you who and where these new customers are. Quantifying the addressable market isn’t always straightforward, but it certainly is important, evidenced by the 42% of startups that fail because of the lack of market need.
Whether it’s a b2b or a b2c strategy, businesses are often overly dependent on subjective information such as the view of a small sample of customers. Another common mistake is to regard the market as static, taking little account of the impact of moving trends. Our in house customer acquisition and retention teamwork with our portfolio companies to navigate these difficulties. Using a combination of approaches it is possible to build good-quality data on the size and nature of almost any market. Top-down analysis, based on broad market size statistics and the proportion of this market the business can serve, is a good start.
In this report, Susie looks at how through bottom-up analysis and selecting accurate sources of data, you can build a more detailed picture of the customer base and properly segment the market.
Get this process right and it can be a powerful driver of growth, but it’s all reliant on up-to-date and accurate data. By providing a means with which to constantly evaluate what’s working – and what’s not – data offers companies an unparalleled opportunity to win more customers and to understand how this was achieved in order to repeat the trick.
