How to out-market your big-budget competitors online (1)
What do you do when your competition is the big budget multinational in one of the skyscrapers at the other side of town?
Originally published at www.wildreams.co.
What do you do when your competition’s ad budget alone is probably more than your entire gross income per annum?
What do you do when your product is equally as good but you do not have the budget to pay all the top 50 influencers to help promote your campaign?
Sounds like a David and Goliath situation, right?
Yes. Goliath’s fall all the time. But how to make them is what I am about t to show you.
The marketplace is a really tough place filled with sharks and dinosaurs disguised as big-budget competitors, ready to eat up all your marketing efforts with just a small part of their mouths.
But if you would make these few changes here and there, you would probably be already ahead of them before they even realise you are worth paying attention to.
But by then, it would be probably too late.
1. Check out what your big budget competitors are doing
You should probably do a thorough competitive analysis of what your competitors are doing online.
Recently, we got a client who wanted to hit the top spot in their niche with the use of their online assets.
One of the first things we did was to examine the online strategies of their top 5 big-budget competitors.
We checked several things like how often they post, the kind of contents they put out, which of their contents people seem to like the most, the areas there are they lagging behind etc.
Those are just some of the things you would have to be sure of so you know exactly what you are up against.
2. Work on the weaknesses of your big-budget competitors
As part of the competitive analysis process, you should have to examine the areas each of your big-budget competitors are lagging behind.
But you do not stop there. You would have to develop a strategy and plan on how turn those weaknesses into strengths for you.
For example, if your competition posts content on social media once a day, you might want to make yours 4, 5, or 6 times daily (depending on whether it would be right for your target audience or not).
NB- Replicating what your big-budget competition is doing is just an easy way to shoot yourself in the foot. As you do not yet have the budget for that.
Your best bet would be to exploit the weaknesses of your competitors to the best of your capacity, giving followers an experience they cannot get anywhere else.
3. Your graphics and other visual contents have to uber awesome
It is basic online marketing knowledge, the amount of good visual content can do to your online assets as opposed to just text.
If you are in doubt, Google is your friend. Prove me wrong if you can.
This is why we spend way more time in our office, trying to get our graphics, pictures and other visual contents right than we do anything else.
Yes, there are tools like Canva and Adobe Spark online that you could use to edit your graphics.
But none of them would ever be good enough when placed side-by-side with something done by a really good graphics designer.
So, if you are really serious about competing with the big budgets, you should fire a staff this moment or just stop collecting a salary.
Then use the money to hire a graphics designer or creative digital agency with a solid team to crush your graphics for you.
4. Your content needs a human touch
The online space is now tired of brands talking at them. Brands should be talking To people not talking At them.
No matter what you are trying to promote, if you are going to really stand out in this, you have got to quit communicating online like bots.
You are talking to people, so you have to always strike them in the right places.
(Also read- Brands should learn to follow humans)
You should connect with your niche audience in their own language and based on what they go through as humans.
This is something that many big brands have still not realised and small brands are really crushing them to their game at this.
Which of the smaller budget companies around these days do you see crushing the big-budgets to their game in the online marketing space?
…to be continued
