How Small Businesses Compete With Bigger Brands for Customer Attention
Big brands have loads of cash, loyal employees, and years of history behind their names. Small businesses have one big advantage—the ability to experiment and iterate quickly and approach their prospects with a non-corporate feel. The playing field might not be as skewed as it appears, and many small businesses employ clever tactics to compete with the giants better than people would believe.
Small businesses do not stand a chance if they try to fight larger brands dollar for dollar. The real battleground is finding channels and methods of messaging that larger companies neglect or cannot replicate as well as their more compact counterparts due to their size and the structure of the businesses. Those that embrace the odds can win a huge chunk of the market without spending seven figures on a marketing budget.
Finding the Gaps in Overcrowded Channels
When everyone else is flooding a channel, inflating prices and making it ineffective become inevitable. Bigger brands can swallow those costs. Smaller businesses have to be clever about how and where they market.
Of course, there are ad formats and channels that absolutely work and are just not recognized because they are not the obvious choice in positioning an ad. While competitors spend their corporate budgets on the beaten path, a business that explores underutilized avenues can create an unexpected treasure. It is not about blindly following someone else’s recipe. It is about finding the right ad format to communicate what the business needs to the right audience.
Making Every Dollar Count
Limited budgets drive creativity. They force businesses to test, analyze, and figure out what works. When there is no margin for error, people learn what works much faster.
Ad formats show excellent returns that don’t cost a lot to implement. Instead of inflating cost-per-1,000-impression ads, businesses can look at cost-per-acquisition ads. After all, these stay constant and can be scaled up incrementally to ensure the continued funding of the business model’s operations. Some businesses are seeing strong returns with options that larger brands overlook entirely, including competitive popunder CPM rates that deliver reach without the premium pricing of more crowded channels.
Building on What Works
The predictability of customer acquisition costs is incredibly valuable. A larger organization can endure the wild ups and downs of a 20% conversion rate, but smaller organizations can build a good case for success around a 5% conversion rate. The theme of slow scaling comes back, as it minimizes risk while keeping the business nimble.
With the testing of so many ad formats, businesses always know what works. They are not wasting money on trendy ideas that only float in the first quarter of a randomly chosen year.
Agility Is an Advantage
Larger companies and smaller companies all have operational structures, but larger companies have more moving components that operate at a different pace to that of small organizations. There are checks to get, structures to adhere to, and a larger brand must contend with multiple unofficial approvals before any exchange with a consumer happens.
Campaigns that might normally take a single digit of time to build can become weeks-long endeavors thanks to the unacceptably slow response from larger organizational components.
Smaller organizations can still awkwardly adhere to a brand guideline and still afford to forge a new path for corporate identity while still being relatable to their audience.
Building the Voice of Authenticity Comes First
Corporate voices feel corporate for a reason. People engineer them as such. They optimize voices until there is no semblance of uniqueness. Sanitize messages for universal inclusion. The product feels less like a person and more like a number targeting anyone who would like a free gift or item.
Small businesses don’t have this problem.
If nothing else is considered, small audiences prefer to work with brands they trust. Trust comes from excellent communication. Small brands that adopt an authentic tone have an advantage.
Consider Testing Diverse Messaging
Acquiring consumers is easier when they feel that the message is personal rather than an automated response laden with sanitized, inclusive messaging that covers all bases. It doesn’t mean that marketing on social media platforms should be chaotic.
Businesses with relatable personas should adopt this approach by targeting their communications to people who would love the messaging rather than pursuing everyone under the sun as a potential customer
Know Which Customers Not to Compete Over
Some customers are just not worth competing for. Some channels are not worth investing in if it means competing with larger companies.
In this regard, not many ad formats beat good messaging in the right place, targeting the right audience who, because of their numbers, don’t affect the bottom line of a larger organization
Staying Lean and Adaptable
Businesses winning these “mini battles” consistently set metrics based on what will determine success as opposed to merely replicating their larger counterparts regarding what constitutes victory. Lesser organizations have differing agendas in what seems like the same game. They adhere to slightly different rules than their larger counterparts while still measuring “success” for want of a better word by different means.
Economic climates shift. Channels become ineffective over time or audiences outgrow what once worked. Leaner companies adapt without structural trauma.
Marketing budgets cover multiple channels as changes occur in real-time. Different ad formats can be tested in no time without wasting resources waiting for someone to sign off on things. All this happens without causing further damage to larger organizations trying to navigate issues with their operating environment.
Smaller organizations do not need seven-figure budgets, just clever ideas, such as the ones referenced in this article, that illuminate the way forward for other organizations so they can remain in the public eye as credible competitors in this market for the foreseeable future.
This competition between smaller scale organizations and larger corporate players may become rife from time to time but with the tools available today, it is feasible to acquire a sizeable market share every once in a while if only organizations exercise due diligence, keep an eye on what is happening and on occasion test the waters as other companies have done, that are currently getting everything they wish for and then some!
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