As a small business, you may feel like you are fighting an uphill battle with your big-shot competition. Your website and blog may seem diminutive and ineffective for pulling sales compared to your big-named competitors.
You’ve heard that “content is king” and that every business should have a blog and top-of-the-line website content. But how do you compete when you have less manpower, resources, and dollars backing you up?
Fortunately, there are ways to rise and conquer with the heavy hitting competitors in your niche. Here are five tips:
Take Advantage of Your Lack of Barriers
No matter what industry you are in, the case is the same. The bigger the organization, the more approvals are needed – especially in highly regulated industries like healthcare, education, and insurance. It can take up to a month to “route” a blog post, article, or web page in some organizations. Use this to your advantage as a small business “blogger”. Your blog posts can be more frequent and more timely when your lead time is so short.
Whether you are tying your blog post to a current event or are going for a high frequency of posting, the lack of barriers is a huge advantage you have over bigger competitors.
Take a Stance
This January at BlogWorld Conference, travel blogger Gary Arndt said it best in his session titled “How to Compete Against Billion Dollar Media Empires and Win Engagement and Traffic.” He noted:
“If you want to get heard, share your personality.”
People online want to relate to other people, not other brands, so don’t be afraid to hide your voice – humor, personality, opinion – in your small business’ blog posts. Find a way to let your personality show while also highlighting your business expertise.
Falter on the side of controversial, edgy, and direct, and you will lead potential customers through an open funnel conversion.
Engage, Engage, Engage
Comment on blog posts and utilize social media channels to connect directly with potential and current customers, brand evangelists, and industry leaders.
Create a plan for “getting heard” that includes promotion of your content on various social media networks like Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Google+, and LinkedIn.
Ride on Someone Else’s Coat Tails
Guest blogging is an amazing way to project yourself as an expert in your field. Most publications these days offer guest posting opportunities – like Huffington Post and Forbes.
Well known Associate Editor of Copyblogger, Jon Morrow, suggests to use this method to leverage your reach, authority, and visibility.
Get creative
Repurpose FAQs, conduct interviews with happy customers, report on a recent industry news, create a how-to guide, hold a contest, write about a recent company event or create an infographic.
There are a million ways to get ideas for blog posts. Utilize the abundant online marketing and blogging resources on the Internet by doing simple keyword searches on queries like:
“blogging ideas” or “how to generate blog ideas”
You are not alone: There are multiple resources available to you to dominate your content marketing efforts.
Whether you bring on a third party (digital agency, content marketing firm, freelance blogger) or read up on maximizing your content marketing.
Tomara Armstrong
Love the blogging ideas! Thanks for the extra push–sometimes that blank screen is so intimidating 🙂
~2
Repurposing FAQs is something that I haven’t thought before. Thanks Allie!
Nice ideas, well stated.
A small company can be a LOT more responsive to customer needs as well as more impactful. The big ones often put their newest people to work on their smaller accounts — been there, done that — so your customer base is often the small and mid-sized companies when your decision maker is not intent on bragging about the Big Time Consulting Firm that he or she has hired to help them.
The challenge is not trying to be all things to all prospects. I have been in the business as Performance Management Company since 1984 and went through that stage of spending 1/2 of my time marketing, 1/2 of my time developing products and customizing, and 1/2 of my time actually delivering and making money. You cannot sustain that for long.
YEARS ago, I wrote up a paper called, Working Home, Selling Globally” about some ideas around business development. Most of those ideas are still good and you can see a blog post containing the download file at http://performancemanagementcompanyblog.com/2012/08/10/working-home-selling-globally/
Have fun out there.