The battle between small companies and large businesses has been ever-present. Ever since the industrial revolution allowed some companies to grow exponentially, while other, smaller companies struggled to stay afloat, the competition has been fierce.
Particularly in the current environment, owning a small business is no picnic. The Covid-19 pandemic has forced many small businesses out of business. The pandemic, followed by a recession, cut down the spending habits of many, while also increasing production cost, placing small business owners in a dicey situation.
Yet, there are ways to fight this. Today, we look at how small companies like wildlife control can compete with big businesses.
Table of Contents
1. Focus Your Efforts into Digital Marketing
Digital marketing has been a godsend for many small businesses over recent years. While marketing has always been hugely important to the growth of a business, this new digital age has opened up previously unprecedented avenues of marketing.
Today, you can seriously grow your small business simply by building a strong presence online. Obviously, it’s not a one size fits all type of solution, and you will need to experiment with a few alternative approaches before settling on one. But growing a business through your online presence works because it generates organic traffic.
Those are two very important words in digital marketing. By targeting people in your area, who might be interested in your service, you’re generating natural word of mouth. Simply by posting engaging, relevant content online.
2. Invest in Customer Service
Our digital connection has also meant the rise of customer reviews. That means, it can really pay off for customers to have a good experience with your customer service department, even if you’re a small business. Rather, many people would rather go back to a smaller company with strong customer service than a larger conglomerate where customer service is slow and unhelpful.
So providing fast help to your clients is a great way to turn them into repeat customers.
It also goes a long way towards that good word of mouth. Because it’s enough for one person to have a bad experience with your company for the word to spread, and for sales to be affected.
3. Don’t Skimp on Salary
It might be tempting, particularly as a small business trying to grow, to offer pitiful wages to your employees. But that’s also a surefire way to get some unhappy employees. And unhappy workers mean unhappy customers, because your employees represent your brand on the market.
It’s also highly important to focus on employee satisfaction because usually, as a small business, you only have a small number of people working for you. So you want to make sure those are the best people, who are going to give 110%. Because those are the people who can rival big businesses.
4. Engage with Your Local Community
This may sound repetitive, but there really is nothing more important, when running a small business, than engaging with your local community, and building a strong following. Sure, you may not have clients all over the world, but that won’t matter if you’ve got a comparatively small host of people who keep coming back to you.
And in order to do that, you want to get yourself out there. Participate in local fairs, and public events. Sponsor a marathon, or help out a local charity. All of these things may not get you known in Tokyo, say, but they will get local people to know your name. And as a small business, few things are more valuable than that, because these are going to be your main clients.
5. Listen to Feedback
There’s nothing nicer, as a customer, than to have your voice heard. So one thing you could do as a small business is to listen to your customers’ feedback, and act on it. That’s one thing you’ve got over big businesses. As a big business, not only is the influx of feedback very heavy, but it’s also much harder to implement change within a big company than for a small one.
So pay attention to what your customers say about you, particularly the things that keep popping up, and act on those. It may make you a better business, and at the very least, it will impress on your customers that they’re not wasting their breath.
6. Understand Who Your Audience is
One common mistake for small companies is to try and target everyone. That’s not gonna work, because most likely, not everyone will need your product or service. And in trying to talk to everyone, you let slip the customers who might’ve actually been interested.
Obviously, understanding and locking in your target audience is easier said than done. You’ll need to experiment a little, and pay a lot of attention to trends. But in the end, knowing your clientele can go a very long way in building a strong, profitable reputation for your brand.
