How To Increase B2B Market Share In The Tech Industry?

B2B startups must always identify their actual market share in the pursuit of developing more actionable product marketing strategies. The market share is generally a measure of the potential within a market for a tech startup.

Estimating market share in contrast to competitors is one of the most essential steps in developing a value-driven go-to-market plan. B2B businesses analyze their potential markets via various tools and techniques to establish exactly how they intend to increase their market share.

Increasing market share generally represents highly effective product marketing and a talented team.

Consistently working to improve your B2B market share can develop significant economies of scale, enhanced brand reach, and recognition, and obviously a rapid increase in ROI.

Professionals estimate that increasing market share by 10% in the B2B industry can improve return on investment by 5%.

The tech industry is growing rapidly, and with that comes increased competition. If you want to maintain or increase your B2B market share in this industry, you need to be proactive and stay ahead of the curve. Here are 7 compelling strategies that teach you how to increase B2B market share in the tech industry in 2022.

Why It’s Essential for B2B Startups To Grow Their Market Share?

Growing market share through value-driven product marketing can have wonderful effects on the ROI potential and brand identity of a startup. Research identifies five benefits that real-life businesses have experienced as they grow their B2B market share rapidly.

1. Higher return on investment
2. Decreasing purchases-to-sales ratio
3. A decline in the customer acquisition cost
4. Higher-quality customer experiences
5. Ability to price products higher

Research data also identifies that the benefits of capturing a larger B2B market share are best for startups whose products are purchased infrequently by fragmented buyer personas.

Professionals discuss that B2B organizations are recommended to regularly analyze their market shares to achieve an ideal cost/benefit ratio from different marketing campaigns.

7 Ways To Increase Your B2B Market Share

Most startup founders consistently ponder upon how to increase their B2B market share in a highly competitive industry with almost homogeneous products. Chasm, as an established marketing consulting agency, has identified seven important factors that consistently enhance your B2B market share.

1 – Develop a Unique Brand Positioning

A unique identity is one of the most critical factors that can inspire B2B audiences by solving their pain points in a completely new way.

By leveraging your USP in every aspect of the branding and marketing strategy, B2B startups can engage a loyal following of potential customers simply by offering a distinguished solution.

Marketing teams must have the capability and resources to develop the brand tone, messaging, design, and content that appeals to the B2B audience. Conducting competitor research, identifying buyer personas, competitive analysis, and strategizing social listening are all popular ways B2B marketers deploy to understand their industry better.

The branding strategy should focus on personifying your company mission, the vision of the founders, and your unique message. The idea is to make a lasting impression on the B2B audiences whose values, ideas and needs you are trying to reflect through your branding.

2 – Keep Innovating Your Product

Virginia Rometty, the first female CEO of IBM once famously said “the only way you survive is you consistently transform into something else. It’s this idea of continuous transformation that makes you an innovation company.”

For B2B tech startups constant innovation is the name of the game if you wish to continue to grow your market share. One of the most popular examples of innovation is obviously Apple Inc. which follows the legacy of Steve Jobs who was once quoted as saying that “innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.”

Regularly updating your tech product should be a top business priority for startup entrepreneurs, as it allows you to reconnect with existing customers, identifies new audiences, and offers the opportunity to discover new use cases for your product.

B2B tech businesses innovate in many ways, for instance, launching a completely new product, adding new features to existing products, or improving the overall customer experience to name a few.

Product innovation as professionals discuss should be value-driven, and hence customer-focused. Researching & identifying new buyer personas, in addition to monitoring the competition are some of the most strategic ways startups identify areas of innovation within their systems.

3 – Market to Niche Audiences

As we mentioned above, buyer personas are at the core of a successful marketing strategy, and therefore necessary to win more B2B market share. Niche audiences are more closely related to your ideal customer profiles, and although smaller, has more potential to become your customers.

Engaging multiple niche segments is a very popular way tech providers establish their brand across a larger audience. IT solution provider Datto is possibly one of the most established examples of this strategy. Datto’s backup and remote management solutions are used across niche IT, hospitality, leisure & lifestyle, non-profits, medical, and entertainment segments with over 10 million global users.

4 – Find More Acquisition Opportunities

Developing new channels, partnerships and affiliate programs are all popular ways to enhance your demand generation capabilities. This requires input from both sales and marketing teams to invest resources in the right areas. Speaking of generating demand for products, we have a separate guide on demand-generating strategies that you might find helpful.

One of the simpler ways to find more sales opportunities is by listening to and requesting feedback from your existing customers. Important insights from customers can lead the direction of your B2B product marketing strategy, pricing decisions, product development, and process innovation.

A popular way for B2B startups to stir up brand recognition is through rewarding affiliate programs. Professional affiliate businesses are always on the lookout for commission-based opportunities. Startups can considerably increase market share while external affiliates generate leads through their distribution channels like a website, YouTube channel, Instagram profile, or Facebook page.

5 – Expand Your Geographical Market

In the B2B tech industry, your competition can be based anywhere in the world, and it’s safe to assume that they will also be vouching for the attention of your customer base. Expanding your geographical area of operations can open new markets, identify new innovation opportunities, and identify your direct competitors.

As your startup begins to sustain itself and the local market is saturated, it is ideal to engage audiences from a wider geographical area. Professionals identify five ways B2B tech providers can expand their geographic reach to new markets:

• Develop new products & features for new markets
• Identify popular geographic channels e.g: social platforms, content types, etc.
• Build partnerships, affiliates, and collaborations
• Create location-based special promotions, offers, and discounts
• Optimize your SEO ranking and execute geolocation-based SEM ads

6 – Offer Competitive Pricing

A great way to engage larger audiences to increase your market share is by developing more competitive pricing strategies. When product prices are determined based on those of direct competitors (or closest ones), this is referred to as competitive pricing.

In a homogeneous market like B2B tech, competitive pricing remains a popular strategy as businesses, especially startups, want a more market-oriented model that determines price through demand and supply. Generally for any startup, there are three possible competitive pricing models that they can adopt:

• Lowest Price – choosing to set the price of your product slightly below the competition
• Highest Price – setting the price of your products slightly higher than the competition
• Price Match – matching the price of your product exactly the same as the competition

7 – Mergers and Acquisitions

Partnering with or entirely acquiring an already developed startup is an excellent way to not only have a ready product with rich features, but also an engaged audience who needs it as a solution.

A merger is when two different businesses come together to create a new entity. A popular way for startups to increase their B2B market share, mergers add great value to both businesses as each can expand into two new markets, increase their market share, and enhance their geographical footprint.

When speaking of acquisition, this strategy is more suggestable for mid-size or larger B2B organizations. By investing 50% or more ownership into another small organization, larger organizations acquire the established niche audience, acquire new human talent, expand their product portfolio and develop more growth opportunities in new geographical locations.

Examples of B2B Startups That Grew Their Market Share

There are many examples of B2B startups that have been able to grow their market share by offering unique solutions to common problems. We’ll now take a look at a few of these businesses and see what lessons can be learned from their success stories:

1 – Apixio

Cognitive computing provider, Apixio, competes with the likes of IBM’s Watson and Oracle’s Health Sciences platforms delivering data-driven insights to the healthcare sector. In the highly competitive data analytics industry ruled by corporate giants, Apixio used its unique brand positioning to grow its B2B market share and become a major market leader. In 2020, the company also launched 3 new products to engage larger market segments.

Integrating unique content marketing strategies and becoming a thought leader in the industry Apixio managed to increase website traffic, brand recognition, and revenue. To complement their radical growth, Apixio also acquired smaller big data analytics companies in 2020 while consistently attracting venture capitalist investments over the last 14 years.

2 – Airbase

Airbase is a B2B fintech startup focused on mid and small-sized companies providing them with a centralized expense management platform that synchronizes with their corporate credit cards and in-house expense management systems.

Airbase employed customer-focused research and innovation to increase the size of its B2B market share. By focusing on B2B buyers’ broader workflows and working capital management, Airbase gave organizations a transparent financial management solution. The software offers rich and time-saving features that attract organizations to elect a paid subscription.

3 – SalesForce

SalesForce is possibly the ideal example of a startup that was built from the ground up. Using a mix of growth strategies, the company became a beacon of cloud-based applications for business.

The initial strategy for growing their market share was simple, being customer-focused. Developing a CRM and consistently innovating it based on customer feedback and reviews was their ideal go-to-market strategy.

Over time, as the industry populated with smaller SaaS providers, SalesForce became an enablement organization. They provided other SaaS businesses the opportunity to develop and distribute their solutions using SaleForce tools. This invisible merger of resources and education for smaller businesses enabled SalesForce to become an industry thought leader.

Using multiple acquisitions, SalesForce grew its geographical reach while developing new products for its newly acquired markets. As competition from tech giants like Oracle and IBM grew, SalesForce went for an innovation strategy. They began to consistently monitor the competition to develop new features and innovate to keep their B2B customer base happy.

How Can Chasm Assist You To Grow Your B2B Market Share?

At Chasm, we offer our customers comprehensive product marketing consultation powered by a highly proficient team of analysts and consultants. Our team develops winning market strategies by analyzing the data-driven market and customer research, which not only helps in positioning the product but also enables us to find the ideal customer profiles the startup should target to increase revenue.

Our strategic product marketing strategies cost-effectively optimize brand recognition, improve sales efficiency, and ultimately grow your B2B market share. Through careful audience, competitive, and industry analyses, we create engaging action plans to attract your ideal B2B customers.

Conclusion

If you want to be a top player in the tech industry, start by looking at your business from the customer’s perspective. Understand what they need and want, and give it to them in a way that is easy for them to understand. Use our tips on how to increase B2B market share and watch your business thrive.

And in case you need help, you can always reach out to Chasm and take assistance from the effectiveness of our sales consulting services.

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