As small business owners know – or will soon find out – trying to chase down larger enterprise-level competitors to compete on market share or advertising spend is not just an exercise in frustration, but it’s in the long run its futile as well. That’s the bad news.
The good news is that small businesses have something that the bureaucratic “big boys” often lack: a deep, personal understanding of what their prospects experience on a day-to-day basis. In other words, they often have a leadership advantage that translates into more credibility and more customers.
To exploit this advantage, below we highlight 3 killer leadership concepts in small business marketing:
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Celebrate Being a Small Business!
Rather than trying to convey to prospects that they are “just as good as big companies”, small businesses should head completely in the other direction and leverage the fact that they can do things that, as noted above, their bigger competitors can’t do – or at least, not as well. This can include responsiveness, personal attention, investing quality time with each customer, and ensuring customer success after purchase (this is especially important in B2B relationships).
In this way, instead of perceiving their size as a weakness that has to be fortified, small businesses should use their size as a profitable competitive advantage!
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Publish a Steady Stream of Thought Leadership Content
Of all the leadership concepts in small business on this list, this one may seem the most surprising – if not the strangest. After all, aren’t big companies loaded with thought leadership content? Believe or not, but the answer is no!
Yes, some big companies do a good job on the thought leadership content front. But most of them do a bad job, and a few are of the train wreck variety. A quick visit to their blog or online resource section reveals that it’s just not a strategic priority, and hasn’t been for a while.
Small businesses can and should capitalize on this opportunity by pushing out a steady stream of quality thought leadership content via their blog and other assets (e.g. ebooks, reports, white papers, etc.), and drawing attention to these through their social media and email/newsletter marketing.
And by “steady stream” we don’t mean once a week or a few times a month. The best practice is to publish one blog post a week, and one ebook a month. If this isn’t feasible due to budget constraints, then the minimum is three blog posts a week and one ebook every three months.
As always, the content has to be intelligent and prospect-focused. It can’t be “content for the sake of content” or a sales pitch. Both of those will backfire and damage a small business’s brand and reputation.
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Target Buyer Personas
At Leap Clixx, buyer persona development is among our favorite leadership concepts in small businesses. This isn’t because the process itself is creative and fun -- although it’s both! Rather, it’s because just as with thought leadership content, big companies tend to do a surprisingly bad job targeting buyer personas. Instead, they let focus on pushing high volumes, rather than working with prospects and truly engineering relationships. In other words: they don’t really know or care who they’re selling to, as long as they make the sale.
Small business owners can capitalize on this vulnerability (and that’s precisely what it is!) by targeting buyer personas, and creating thought leadership content and messaging that resonates with different customer groups. This doesn’t just lead to more sales overall, but it leads to more profitable customers – including many that have fled big companies that only cared about grabbing their money, and not about solving their problems.
Learn More
At Leap Clixx, we integrate all of these killer leadership concepts in small business marketing –both for our own inbound marketing campaigns, as well as for our customers nationwide. To learn more, contact us today and take advantage of your free, friendly and very informative consultation. We guarantee you’ll learn something new and profitable!
Or if you're simply interested in learning more about more inbound marketing best practices, download our FREE eBook today:
Topics: Inbound Marketing
