If you’re a small business owner who is looking to compete with major brands, implementing digital marketing techniques into your business model is one of the most effective ways to do so.
Why? Well, there are plenty of large companies with big budgets and robust digital marketing campaigns. If your company is smaller than theirs, you will be fighting an uphill battle if you go head to head on digital marketing alone.
You need to do things that they can’t or aren’t willing to do. This article will detail seven digital techniques that can give your small business the edge necessary to compete with major brands online.
1. Start a Blog
By far, one of the best ways to compete with more prominent brands is by starting your own blog or by taking over an existing blog that is poorly maintained. By writing interesting content for this blog (which should also include links back to your website), you can establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry.
In this day and age, you need to be thinking about how people will find you online before you even think about what products or services you can offer them.
2. Use a Video Marketing Service
Video is becoming more and more important with each passing day — especially on platforms like YouTube, which has over 1 billion users.
To compete with major brands, it is critical that your business has a YouTube channel where you upload videos showcasing your products or services.
You also want to include videos on other sites as well as they may give you a slight boost in search engine rankings due to the number of domains linking back to them.
3. Create an Instagram Page
There are now more than one billion active users on Instagram, which Facebook owns. This makes it the perfect platform for businesses to showcase their products and services while also linking back to their own website or blog.
When choosing an Instagram username for your business, you should try to keep it simple. For example, let’s say that your name is “Scott’s Towing.” Your username could simply be “scotts_towing,” where “_tow” can act as a keyword associated with your business.
4. Enhance Your Website’s Design
Having an aesthetically pleasing website is essential when trying to compete with major brands. The design of your site will ultimately determine how regularly it is visited. For instance, if you have an outdated website with a poor color scheme, chances are people in your industry won’t use it.
To stand out from the crowd, you need to hire a web design agency that has experience working on small business websites. Additionally, by creating a blog for your website (as detailed in step 1), you can enhance its value.
5. Use Pay-Per-Click Marketing
One of the most direct ways to compete with major brands is by using pay-per-click marketing on Google or Facebook. By creating a custom audience from the visitors that come to your site, you can then show them targeted ads.
By doing this, you will be able to see which advertising platforms yield the best results for your business — helping you decide how much money to spend on these platforms to maximize profits in the future.
6. Use SEO to Drive Traffic to Your Site
SEO is an acronym for search engine optimization, which is what you need to rank your site on Google or YouTube. SEO needs to be a top priority if you want people to see your business website or YouTube channel.
Google’s primary algorithm for ranking websites takes into account how many other sites are linking back to yours. By creating a blog for your website, you will have plenty of opportunities to get links from other sites — thus helping boost your rankings organically.
7. Make Use Of Geo-Targeting
Geo-targeting is where you advertise your products or services to people who are geographically close to your business.
The main benefit of this is that it reduces the cost of shipping for customers and allows them to pick up their product or service from your business location once they have paid for it online. This will drastically increase the likelihood of a sale being made.
The seven digital marketing tips we’ve provided in this article should help you get started thinking about how to compete with major brands. Using these strategies will help you increase your sale (and profit) potential, and in turn, you should start to see an increase in customer spending. Also, you will soon find that consumers seek you out online before they even think about checking out what competitors have to offer.
