Ever since big data become a buzz term companies have leveraged data they’ve collected to improve market penetration. This strategy has worked for the better part of the last ten years or so. Unfortunately, traditional online and social marketing platforms have gotten so saturated that it’s nearly impossible to penetrate certain demographics at this point. This is why it’s important to become skilled at leveraging existing data to penetrate saturated markets.
Fortunately, companies who are looking to get a leg up on the competition in these saturated markets are finding new ways to use information technology. While this might not be that surprising to anyone who regularly watches smart data trends, even some of the top marketing gurus have to admit that they never expected this kind of innovation to be primarily driven by SMBs.
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SMBs Develop New Sales Metrics
Market penetration traditionally measures the total adoption of a product or service compared to the total theoretical market for it. This has been used as a general metric since the beginning of modern data collection. When a company judged that the entire market for a particular product was saturated, they’d generally move on and look for the next big thing. Any further devotion of resources toward promotions in such a market wouldn’t have a high enough ROI for most companies to consider it worthwhile.
Two new metrics emerged that are challenging this paradigm. Smaller companies that sell replacement parts and accessories for products have been leveraging existing data they’ve collected about saturated markets. Statisticians noticed that in many cases the total amount of money spent on aftermarket expenditures related to the initial product or service actually outweighed the amount of money consumers originally spent to acquire things in the first place.
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Experts also noticed that in markets saturated by durable goods purchases were abandoned by the companies that sold the products in the first place once they became saturated. However, new opportunities arose within several years even in the most blanketed markets. Consumers naturally do have to replace broken products in the future and many will want an upgrade.
Once the large players were out of the way, SMBs who had invested in aftermarket retail and distribution opportunities experienced large sales increases. They were only able to establish clear trends, however, because of new mathematical subroutines that established trends in old data.
Saturated Market Case Studies
Initial case studies of these two metrics focused primarily on mobile phone retailers. It’s easy to see how this kind of statistical thinking can apply to this kind of market. However, it’s also applicable to industries that aren’t involved in direct sales of material goods.
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One recent study focused on marketing for fitness professionals, and came to many of the same conclusions after using a cloud-based analytical platform to examine data collected from the fitness industry. The market for personal trainers is extremely saturated. Analytic specialists found several trends that could help companies break into it, however.
Trainers who spent upwards of 25 percent of their time marketing themselves made a much larger impact in the market. Successful marketing activities included not only traditional ones but also audience targeting and client auditing to reduce the total marketplace to a more focused on.
Building a brand and getting clients as an Instagram fitness influencer, for instance, can be difficult because of how much competition there is. Those who focused their activities to one specific niche had a much better ROI overall than the general social network population.
Influencers Leverage Their Data Too
Influencers have collected information on hyperlinks from the general population for years. These new techniques require this existing data to get organized into large binary search trees that are similar to those used by file systems and blockchain solutions. Self-balancing tree structures allow searches in logarithmic time, which is helping influencers immediately discard huge numbers of potential customers.
Once they’ve located those who aren’t excluded by the search algorithm, they know who they can best build their brand with. This kind of technology is quickly taking over marketing on Instagram as well as most of the other social platforms.
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Marketing Techniques Conquer Saturated Markets
Even though these studies are very different, they both helped to prove that market targeting was extremely important when dealing with saturated markets. They also proved that leveraging existing data with self-balancing binary trees and blockchain technology can help experts to visualize trends that would otherwise be invisible.
It’s not difficult to imagine companies mining for clients in demographics that were long thought to be dead. This might very well be the end result of the development of techniques that can rule these once silent markets.