Small business marketing can be more powerfully authentic than marketing from a multinational giant.
Small business owners usually care about starting or developing their business. They care about the quality of service and products, they care about the customer and they care about their reputation.
Employees for large companies also care, but everybody knows that they are an employee, and haven’t taken taken the ultimate financial risk.
You would think that small companies would realise their advantage, but that is not my experience. I find that the smaller businesses I meet or work with often give up their special qualities and feel disempowered when faced with better known or better funded competitors. They say things like:
“They advertise all the time, we can’t afford to.”
“They pay their people far more than we can so they get better results.”
“We’ll never be invited to quote against them.”
This is not only counterproductive but probably has no basis in reality.
What can you do to beat the bigger competitor?
Then forget all about them and focus on what your customers value about you, and what gets you excited in your business.
Work out how you can be different from your competitors, as well as how you can look different and seem different.
Find one way to be better than them. (It may only be something quite small but it is very important.)
Continue to do this one thing better and in your marketing tell your prospects and your clients that you do it better, and show them no-nonsense proof, so they know, too.
This approach is not about having a vast marketing budget: it is about thinking. To be honest you want your competitor to spend a fortune on marketing so you don’t have to. They can do the heavy work for you! The more people have heard of them the less educating you have to do.
Thinking is not always easy. To get some questions that will help you think about what is special about your business visit Spark into Marketing
Competitors can be one way to help you find out what is special about your business, as at least you can be different from them. Having a larger competitor keeps a business on its toes and can be an enormous benefit. If they didn’t exist you would have to make them up.