Identify the data that defines your customers
Knowing the market and understanding the demographics/potential customers within a market is crucial. Knowing the data that captures your customers is the important first step for making better decisions. Whether it is population, age, households, businesses, schools or even affluence. The UK has a wealth of data that we use at the low levels of geography such as postcode sectors. Making assumptions about where your potential/current customers are is quite a blind approach to judging and making decisions on marketing and where to drive sales. Being metrically driven gives you the answers and direction.
Assess performance
Using customer locations you can calculate your market penetration. Market Penetration measures how many customers use a product or service compared to the total estimated market for that product or service. This gives you a great understanding of the operating capacity of your business and your customers. Current customer and sales data will show the picture of how well the business is performing and help to understand how customers interact with your business.
Find the gaps left
White space analysis is a structure used to find and understand gaps in a market. Find the places in your network that you or your franchisees aren’t servicing or selling in and fill the gaps. You already know how many sales you are making, look at how much more can be made. When looking at the untapped potential, finding how your customers interact with you to buy your product or service is crucial. For example, is there a certain drive time that most of your customers travel within before there is a drop in numbers? The more you understand about your customers, the better and more data-driven the decisions can be made such as adding a new location.
Use the data
Once you have your market size you know how much that opportunity is worth. Pair this with your current sales to find the potential still left. Understand your customer values and amounts to show you the current opportunity as a pound value. Once you have this, you can start to understand how much more the other potential customers across the network are worth. This is when you can look at the overheads and operational costs to find what is left to define budgets. When you know how much a customer(s) are worth, you can make decisions about budget limits and where to direct the budgets for them to get the best return on investment. For example, redirecting your marketing spending by understanding how much more revenue you can make.
Relay your findings to the network
Now that you have an understanding of the market size for the network and business, tell the network and start to educate your franchisees on how to make the best use of the opportunity they have. Work with the network to understand the value of the opportunity together and start to implement data-driven decisions that you and your franchisees can implement to increase the revenue and growth of the business. Move to the next level, together!
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