Building an Effective Business Strategy
At first I didn’t know how to respond to this question; but the fact is, small businesses and startups have it made today to compete with big companies. Technology makes it so. Even when I started up in 1990, technology gave me an edge to compete against larger competitors (i.e., Excel).
Ed Beane, a close friend who had Sears (remember them?) as his main account (he did artwork for them in his five-person studio) once said, “When Sears calls and says jump, I say how high?” Another one of Ed’s saying was: “Act big, think big, be big.” Impressions count, and as mentioned, your website is the single most important marketing tactic in your arsenal. How does your website make people react when they land on it? What kind of impression do you make when you zoom a call, or make a person sales call?
It’s not the number of people you have, but the quality of the people you have. The great equalizer I’ve said is time: you or your competitors have equal amounts of time in a day: 24 hours. How many of those hours are you willing to throw at a problem? The inefficiency of large companies is well-known; a photographer I once did business with gave me a great compliment when he said, “You get more done by 9AM than most people do in the entire day.”
I had great mentors like Ed Beane. Startups and small businesses simply need to focus, create a strategy and then execute with the anticipate, react and adapt strategy discussed. Here are some other thoughts to consider.
Leverage niche targeting: Focus on specific audiences instead of broad markets. Don’t aim at everyone: pick a market, an audience and fire away! It’s not a ready, aim fire game anymore; it’s a ready, fire, aim and fire again!
Invest in content marketing: Blogging, video marketing, and social media create organic visibility. Content is how you beat competition, and AI can help you. Just ask it. While larger companies had a huge advantage before AI, even the large company can’t compete. Why? Because AI itself is drawing the large company’s content! What they know, you can now know. You simply have to fold in your unique experience. And if you say as a startup you have no experience, then get some!
For example, take a project on pro bono to get the experience. Even larger companies use this tactic. A large – actually the largest plumbing company in the world – used this strategy to break into the American market with their product. They simply identified key projects they wanted their products in, and then pitched the value chain participants to put them in there – for nothing. After four or five of these project wins, they started penetrating the specifications, and the rest is history.
All startups need a portfolio to present, so get one!
Maximize free tools: Use Google My Business, social media groups, and SEO. Tools abound, and information abounds. Even investing a few bucks into AI will pay off for you. You won’t need investors all the time!
Partner with influencers or micro-influencers: They offer cost-effective exposure. You can’t conquer a city by yourself, nor can you conquer a market by yourself. There are established people already there – and they are NOT your competitors. For example, during the downturn of 2009, nothing was moving. We became a distributor of a product and when we purchased the product at the lowest price (100 units), we became the company’s largest North American customers. We began selling that product to other distributors in a two-for-one sale, and within a month purchased another 100 units and became the global leader. There’s a sad ending that story, however. When the company realized what we were doing, they fired us. Why? Because we were disrupters – and were upsetting some of their largest customers who were selling their other products. Do you realize how much we learned from that experience – a case where a small company like our 25 people threatened and a much larger company with outlets throughout the United States?
Keep reading our series on How to Target and Hit the Right Customers: Deep Dive Insights.