Why Your Geographic Market Matters
Why Your Geographic Market Matters
Guest writers Debbie Frakes and Steve Clegg write about why your geographic market matters, and how this concept directly impacts your business.
Why Geographic Market Matters for Your Business
When it comes to whether someone will work with a company or not, there are a wide variety of factors that come into play. Many of those factors are things you can control, like your parts availability, quality of customer service, and how effective your technicians are. But there are some other factors that are not in your control. For equipment dealers, one of those is your geographic market.
What is an equipment dealer’s geographic market?
Distance for geographic market is one of the most important business metrics for your dealership. It measures the number of miles and travel time that a customer will travel in order to work with you or buy products from you. The geographic market for a business can vary, based on the industry, market, or region that a company is located in. But if distance is a factor for your business, like it is for equipment dealers, then a customer is very unlikely to do business with you if you’re beyond that distance.
In order to learn what the distance for geographic market is for your dealership, you must understand where your current customers are coming from. After knowing how far away from you most of your customers are, you’ll be able to recognize patterns, see if there are any outliers, and know how important a factor distance is for building your customer base.
Why distance for geographic market matters for you
If a prospect is beyond the maximum range people are willing to travel to work with you, then it will be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to turn them into a customer. In general, most equipment dealers have a maximum service area within a 60-mile radius. The reason for this limit is that with a greater distance than that, it’s too difficult for your field service trucks to respond quickly enough to an emergency service situation.
Geographic market is one of the most important business metrics for you to pay attention to, because if a customer is beyond that 60-mile range, you don’t want to expend any resources going after them. You should use this metric to focus your marketing and sales strategy on targeting people who are within your maximum distance and, therefore, more likely to work with you.
How to use geographic market to your advantage
Although you can’t control how far your dealership is from any given customer, you can use knowledge of geographic market, like other business metrics, to make your marketing and sales efforts more effective. You should only be targeting prospects within your dealer’s range, because they have a much greater potential for your business.
Over the long term, this type of geographic targeting will save your dealership money, help you tailor your marketing and sales messaging, and allow you to become highly skilled at serving customers in your specific area. All these activities are conducive to your long-term growth and success.
If you want to understand your dealership’s geographic market and other key business metrics for your operation, then we recommend conducting a market analysis through our partner, Zintoro. It will 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.
Schedule a Zintoro market analysis today.