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Do You Know Your TAM?

MarketingDecision MakingData

Who are your customers? Do you have clear personas? Do you know how many there are of them?

What I can tell you is that if you're not well positioned in a market, you're going to struggle to go after the right customers from the start.

So today I want to teach you about 'Swag Maths'. So what is it?

  • TAM - Total Addressable Market - total available in market
  • SAM - Serviceable Available Market - proportion of the market that YOU fit
  • SOM - Serviceable Obtainable Market - realistic market share

By knowing the numbers of your market you can make decisions within those constraints.

I used to go to Audience Insights on Facebook to get these insights until they shut it off. These days I do it a bit more loosely with Google Ads.

It was reasonably easy to quickly see how my ecommerce clients grandiose ideas would perform. Most of their constraints were so poorly defined in the Insights tool, that they spent too much money AND in the wrong markets.

If you don't have any idea of how many customers you'll likely obtain, what will you know to do more or less of? You'll be in what the Chinese call a 'Pachinko Machine'. And I don't want that for you.

So, how well do you know your TAM, SAM and SOM? And how well does it stack up to you obtaining customers?