There are few things more exciting than starting your own business. There’s nothing quite like the thrill of striking out on your own, taking your life into your own hands, and being able to take charge of the direction you want it to go in. Of course, that doesn’t mean that it’s not also a pretty terrifying experience as well. In fact, there are plenty of things when it comes to starting a business that are scary enough to put a lot of people off doing it entirely. One of the most common fears that a lot of small business owners have is how they’re going to be able to make an impression at all on the wider landscape. After all, even the smallest business is tasked with going up against some huge companies with marketing budgets that exceed your business’s entire yearly income. How are you every supposed to compete with that?
The internet has been a significant factor in the strength of a lot of smaller businesses, but it does raise a lot of problems as well. There are now more businesses than ever, all vying for the same, limited amount of attention from customers. While it’s never been easier to put your business out there into the world, it’s also never been easier to get lost in the crowd of businesses all trying to shout the loudest in order to get noticed.
But don’t despair, because there are things that you can do. In fact, there are surprising amounts of things that many small businesses and startups can do to get the attention of customers. Here are a few simple tips for how even the smallest business can have a big impact.
Get creative
One of the benefits of running a smaller business is that you’re in a better position than many larger ones to take risks and try something a little bit different every now and then. Huge companies often spend millions on their marketing strategies, so it’s hardly realistic to expect that they would be willing to put that money on the line by doing something unusual or creative. However, a small business is often working with a limited marketing budget, or perhaps even no budget at all. Because of this, you have more freedom than a larger business might have, and you should take advantage of that. Every year people become more and more desensitized to a lot of marketing and advertising techniques. Recent studies show that millennials simply aren’t interested in traditional marketing methods, being much more responsive to viral and content based marketing. But even within those more recent marketing methods and techniques, many customers are used to the standard techniques that are often used. Why not try something a little bit different? There are plenty of unusual ideas out there for marketing your business, from flash mobs to legal graffiti to viral video. The key is to connect whatever kind of marketing you’re using to your business and your product. Think about the appeal of your product and try to figure out what it is that is most attractive about it to customers. By combining that with the freedom to be creative that your business’s small size affords it, you have the opportunity to create something that’s going to have an impact greatly outweighing the limitations of your business.
Outsourcing
One of the hardest parts about running a small business is simply trying to get everything done with extremely limited resources. There’s a chance that your business is going to be made of only a small team of people, it might even just be you alone, and because of that, it’s surprisingly easy to find yourself becoming stretched thin. This is one of the main reasons why so many small business owners end up burning out, leading to their businesses collapsing altogether. Rather than trying to overexert yourself by trying to handle everything on your own, there is another option. Outsourcing has been the saving grace of many small businesses that has allowed them to keep functioning in the face of huge amounts of pressure. The idea behind outsourcing couldn’t be simpler. A business owner hires a freelancer or agency to take some of the aspects of the business off their hands to allow them to focus their energies elsewhere. There are hundreds of ways to outsource the marketing of your business in order to make an impact both on and offline. From designers to SEO agencies to pay per click advertising, outsourcing certain aspects of your business not only allow you to focus your energy on other things, but it puts your business in the hands of professionals with specific and dedicated skill sets.
Use your size to your advantage
It might sometimes feel like it, but the size of your business doesn’t always have to be a limitation. A large company might have the ability to reach millions of people all at once, but one thing that companies like that are often unable to do is to connect with people on an individual level. You might be in competition with big companies, but that doesn’t mean that you need to do everything on their terms. A lot of the time customers are more interested in smaller companies because it means that they are going to get a more personal experience. Use this attitude to your advantage. Use things like social media to connect and communicate directly with potential customers. You can dedicate time and energy to talking to customers individually because you’re not going to have to wade through thousands if not, even more, customers at a time in order to do it. This allows you to create an incredibly strong emotional bond with your customers which is not only going to increase their loyalty to your business but it’s also going to make them much more likely to spread the word about your business to other people. Word of mouth is one of the most valuable things to any small business, and by connecting with customers directly, you’re going to be able to encourage as much word of mouth marketing as possible.
Leave a Reply