Starting a new business is not without it’s own challenges, the most pertinent one being having to compete with the big dogs of the industry.
Established players in an industry have all the budgets to commit to research and development, creating brand awareness through several touchpoints, investing in marketing on different fronts and more, but this is not the reality for most small businesses.
But does that mean that’s the end of the road for small businesses? Well, the answer is NO. Lack of bogus resources doesn’t mean a business is doomed to fail.
Our intention in this guide is to recommend some proven strategies that can help small businesses and startups thrive in the face of fierce competition.
Table of Contents
1. Create a Niche and Specialize
Small Business shouldn’t start off as a jack-of-all-service-provider, a better strategy would be to niche down.
Ultimately niching down is one smart way to cut off a large chunk of the competition of you. Even when budget is not an issue, it still works to take a different approach that ultra-targeting a small niche of customers.
People today prefer to deal with small businesses that specializes at doing one thing, a startup that is trying to be too broad or too generic will be swept off by the tide of competition.
One of the possible ways to survive in a competitive industry is to create your own niche and market and own it.
Most big players would mostly have a lot of products and services as their offerings, small businesses on the other hand can focus on a specific niche with a pragmatic goal of becoming the go-to source for specific products or services.
This is one proven way for small businesses to weed out non-interested audience, be increasingly noticeable amidst the growing competition and appear differentiated from their larger competitors.
2. Hangout with your customers
Also created in each the next line of action will be to find out when your customers and go to the internet. The idea is to find out where they spend their time and be around them.
Let let’s say you run copywriting agency looking for B2B SaaS clients, LinkedIn will be these best platform for you to create your online presence followed by Twitter. That’s because these two platforms are the preferred platform of choice for captains of small businesses across different industry.
If you continue to share top-notch tips on B2B SaaS writing; how it’s different from other forms of writing and why the need such contents to give clearer picture of what their offer is and how their business can thrive.
Depending on the nature of your business, you should capture places and platforms where you can connect with your prospective clients, the goal is to get your business in front of the right audience leveraging all the applicable platforms at your reach; be it Quora, TikTok, Facebook etc.
3. Provide Exceptional Customer Service
The ability to properly interact with your customers and get some valuable feedbacks from them is a huge blessing to small businesses that can you use that to their own advantage.
Building a good rapport and providing exceptional customer service should be your sidekick.
Most big players are more concerned about the big picture, and that for them might be bottom line solutions amidst their bottlenecks and bureaucracy.
Small businesses can take advantage of this weakness by streamlining customer’s service in a way that they are able to deliver beyond the expectations of their customers.
4. Put Technology to good use
another smart way for small businesses to compete with the well established brands in their industry is by digitizing their business activities through the use of modern technologies.
There are numerous ways small businesses can tap in to evolving technologies to supercharge their business performance, from business automation to customer relationship management, there are several software and tools suitable for developing their brand and engaging with their prospects in the most productive way.
Repetitive tasks, such as sorting and sending out orders, email outreaches, cross-platform social media marketing can be automated, this way they can be sure to free up time and put to a better use the available resources.
5. Focus on Quality
Value begets Value!
The watchword here is to focus on quality offerings at all time, not just in product or service deliverables alone, but in all other aspects of the business; from branding to product design, business touchpoints and marketing channels. Quality must be the watchword of every small business if they’d want to compete effectively wit much bigger players.
By offering high-quality products or services, small businesses can build a loyal customer base that is willing to pay a premium for their offerings. Additionally, focusing on quality can help small businesses differentiate themselves from competitors that prioritize cost over quality.
6. Build a strong reputation
Every business, large or small should actively build a strong reputation around their businesses. Small business at first shouldn’t have an issue managing their online repute.
A strong online presence and timely engagement with customers to provide solution to their will help boost your brand perception which is a plus to fortify a small business reputation.
It’s not just about customer service, a company must have a customer-centric approach and always seeking ways to get feedback and reviews from the larger community.
Companies that listen to the feedback of their customers grows quickly and significantly. Small businesses are at advantage when it comes to making quick changes and adjustment to suit customers expectations based on feedbacks, for your larger competitors this may be an issue.
7. Localized Brand contents
Branded content that is designed for your local audience is another winning strategy for local businesses.
The feedbacks you get from customers and survey response will give insight to help understand the market better.
It will also help you to create the best content strategy that speaks directly to the need of your customers and also create personalized content that commands the much needed awareness for your brand.
8. Leverage Marketing Trends
Small businesses should keep abreast of latest trends in the marketing world. Experimenting with marketing trends can help you connect better with your audience and maintain your relevance.
While the big dogs have a lot of resources at their fingertips to deploy for experimentation of marketing trends, small business also have something unique to wield; and that’s their agility.
Even with a small budget, small businesses can hone their nimbleness to capitalize on emerging trends in the marketing sphere.
Small businesses have no rigid communication and implementation structure like their larger counterpart, that way they can communicate and launch in lesser time without having to go through lengthy approval processes.
Trendspotting: For this to work, small businesses have to be on the look out for trending issues the industry even ones outside their industry and then create a marketing concept that helps you ride on the trend to promote your business.
Trends usually breakout from social media platforms, industry breaking news, evolvement in Technology and other innovation.
9. Create a strong digital footprint
Every small business should harness the power of having a strong digital presence.
Digital marketing is modern way of doing business, small businesses can use the most reliable digital marketing channels such as social media marketing, email marketing, search engine marketing, search engine optimization and web positioning.
Having a proper business website to project your products or service round the clock to your prospective customers is core to digitizing your business.
Things we recommend you do include, creating local presence on Google my business profile for all your outlets and locations, creating a YouTube channel for your business, creating social media marketing channels on the platforms that relates to your business, create a website consisting of all the important information about your business including all the important and money pages.
Social Media channels can help you gather important feedbacks much quickly, you can also run paid campaigns (PPC) to expand your reach. Facebook and Instagram offers PPC promotion to small businesses through the meta Business platform, more like it is the Google Ads platform for running search marketing campaigns.
