As a small business owner the first thing you need to realize is that you can’t and should not even try to compete with big business. Because, when you do that the first thought you have is to try to lower prices. This will never work and you’ll end up out of business. Instead you need to compete in other areas, such as service, value and reputation. As a small business you’re in a unique position to be able to do that. After all, you don’t need to earn billions of dollars to stay in the game like a big business does.
Being competitive as a small business all starts with understanding your audience and ends with smart growth tactics.
- Understand Your Audience – If you’ve heard it once you’ve heard it a thousand times; know your audience. You must know who your audience is and understand them on a deep level in order to be successful as a small business. It’s a huge key to dealing with competition from not only large business entities but other small businesses too.
- Build Relationships – Marketing for small businesses is more about building relationships than announcing the next sale or the next big thing. The closer you can be to your audience, the more they like you, the more they know you and the more they want to stick with you regardless of other factors that may exist in the environment.
- Stick to Your Mission – While everything is about the audience it all starts with your mission. Your mission is about what problems you plan to solve for your audience and why you’re the one to do it. If you’ve done the work to create a mission statement that does this, look at it before making any decisions in order to ensure you’re acknowledging your core values. Post it in a visible spot in your office.
- Manage Resources – Some days you’re rolling in money, others you’re scraping the seats of your vehicle for change for a soda. Banks often don’t give loans to small mom and pop business. Today there are options like Kabbage.com, PayPal Working Capital, and OnDeck.com which will provide short term loans for a fee. This can really help when you need inventory, or to pay your team and are waiting on a big invoice to be paid. You can argue about the high fees, but when It’s the difference between staying in business or not, it can be worth it.
- Handle Growth – Part of handling growth is to learn how to grow and contract as needed by using smart resources such as software that only charges for what you need, short term loans that you only get as needed, and contractors such as writers, virtual assistants, graphic designers, coders and so forth who only work when you need them on a project basis. You can use sites like Upwork.com and Elance.com to find contractors.
If you want to stay competitive as a small business you need to do all of these things on a regular basis using the data that is available to you based on the analytics you produce from your website, social media sites and marketing initiatives. This data along with your mission, should guide your actions and decisions for your business so that you can stay competitive for a long time to come.