How Small Businesses can Dominate the Digital Marketing Landscape?

The digital marketing landscape is dominated by the bigger players, the powerful brands, and their stakeholders. However, this doesn’t mean that smaller businesses have to be intimidated or try and pick up whatever sloppy seconds these goliaths leave behind. It’s time for David to beat Goliath and this is how it can be done:

Your Size is your Strength, Not your Weakness

You are a flexible, dynamic, ambitious unit. There’s no way a larger entity can be as reactive or adaptive as you can be. You are local. You can pick up on the failures of big brands operating locally. This is your chief advantage. Fill niches and dominate them. Your size allows you to do this. You are in the perfect position to connect to the locals and penetrate their market from within. What big entities missed out on, you can surely learn from and apply to your business to help propel it to success.

Arm yourself with content marketing research tools like Google alerts and make use of various IFTTT recipes to increase your efficiency. According to Search Engine Watch, 70% of Twitter users expect a response from brands they reach out to, and 53% want a response in less than an hour. Be the first to know what people’s issues are and solve them via Twitter. Ka-ching! You just became the hero.

Social media allows for communication between brands and customers, but live stream goes a step further, revealing a much more authentic side of your business. Both Periscope and Meerkat allow you to broadcast a live stream of the world around you.

Risk Equals Reward

Don’t play it safe. Take risks. Let the world see what you’re about. Give it all you’ve got. And if doesn’t work out, then regroup and go again. This might sound like bad business advice but it’s what you need to do to build your base. This is a ‘nothing to lose’ situation. There’s no point playing it safe and languishing in startup limbo while you wait for a miracle. You have to create your own traction.

Lukewarm social media campaigns are useless, a waste of time, money, and resources. You could do something new, brave, and worthy of viral status for next to no cost and just a little time. What you need is creativity and the courage to not follow the safest path. Try the rocky, unlit street. That’s where you’ll find your treasure.

Use Unmetric to track and benchmark your next campaign so you can see how it stacks up against the competition and how it affects your social media KPIs.

When opportunity Knocks, be at the Door!

Opportunism is often thought of negatively. Criminals are those most often labelled opportunists. I think that needs to change. Heroes are opportunists too. In fact, stories of heroism are often about somebody seizing an opportunity to help someone. It’s not like they meticulously planned a life-saving maneuver weeks before the event.

The more engaged your customers are, the better your sales. Over the last couple of years, we’ve seen social media play a crucial role in this area. In fact, in 2014, total US sales that could be tracked to social media reached $3.3 billion. More recently, research found social influences more shoppers’ buying decisions than retail websites. (Search Engine Watch)

Compelling stats like the one above has led to the creation of more commerce-focused features for marketers and advertisers. For example, in 2015:

• Facebook introduced 360 Ads for immersive experiences.
• YouTube added 360 Ads for more impactful visuals.
• Instagram rolled out its action-oriented ad format.
• Pinterest announced the limited rollout of its Buyable Pins.
• Twitter continued testing its Buy button.

In 2016, you’ll want to explore more ways how you can integrate these features into your social media and content strategies.

Parting Words

In conclusion, let’s just say that the comfort zone is going to get you nowhere. You need to be ready and willing to put yourself out there, to make the best of every sliver of opportunity you see on the horizon, and to boldly go where no one has gone before. The scope is infinite, so as Buzz Lightyear puts it, “to infinity and beyond”.