How Small Businesses Can Compete With Larger Companies

When you run a small business, competition is fierce. You may not have the same scale or resources as large corporations, but there are still ways to make your business stand out in your area. Becoming more competitive involves several factors, from knowing your market to building brand awareness. 

Competing with other companies isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach, but there are techniques you can apply to create the competitive advantage you’re looking for. Explore your options for how to compete with other businesses so you can pinpoint which opportunities are the right fit.

Understand the Competitive Landscape

Before you can attempt to compete with other businesses in your industry, you have to understand the landscape. This process starts with market research to assess various factors like:

• Market trends: Assess sales data to determine what products or services your consumers buy most. Consider what factors could be driving these trends. For example, you may have a product that has a clear spike in sales in the summer. Or you might find that companies primarily invest in your services at the beginning of the year when they have new budgets.   
• Competition analytics: You must know your competitors in order to compete with them. Research their products and services to understand where they excel and where they fall behind. You can also analyze what percentage of the market each competitor has — this can help you determine which ones are best for you to compete with directly based on your business’s size. 
• Consumer behaviors: Consumer behaviors reveal what matters to your customers and how to reach them. For example, you might discover that most buyers in your industry discover businesses through an internet search. In this case, you can invest in digital marketing to increase visibility online. 

After collecting data and developing a stronger sense of your industry and competition, assess your current strengths and weaknesses. What are your unique selling propositions, and how can you communicate them to your audience? This initial conversation might spark marketing campaign ideas, product improvements and beyond. You should also approach your weaknesses honestly. Where does your company pale in comparison to competitors? What can you do to improve in this area?

Enhance the Customer Experience

Creating memorable and positive customer experiences is an excellent way to improve your reputation. When looking to improve the customer experience, you can:

• Research your customer base: You can only reach your audience when you understand them. Explore your customer base to get a sense of their core pain points and needs, so your business can better respond to them. It’s helpful to create buyer personas to develop clear directives and messaging for your team.  
• Assess the customer journey: When do customers decide they need your product or service? What are the common hurdles in the sales process that you can acknowledge early on? Getting a sense of your customer journey helps you see where your business can make signing on the dotted line easier. You might find gaps in the existing process that you can easily fill, like offering a demo of your product to sell customers what you have to offer.  
• Personalize engagement: A personalized customer experience is a strong one. Find ways to implement personalized engagement to make customers feel more valuable. This personalization can be as simple as sending emails based on the pages on your site that your leads recently viewed.
• Implement strong customer service: Your customer service team is often a new client’s first interaction with your organization. Whether they’re calling to learn more about your service or reaching out about a problem, the experience your team creates says a lot about your brand. To improve in this area, it’s helpful to have comprehensive training programs for customer-facing employees to ensure they facilitate strong customer interactions. 
• Leverage omnichannel marketing: Your audience wants an accessible and connected experience. Leveraging an omnichannel strategy involves implementing several means of interaction for your customers, such as social media, a website and print media. Make your messaging across these platforms consistent, so your branding is clear and your buyers feel connected to your identity. 
• Survey your customers: Your customers’ perspectives are valuable for understanding what’s working and what’s not. Send out surveys to your clients to get their opinions on things like email communications and overall responsiveness. Areas with poor scores could point to improvement opportunities.

Improve Cost Efficiency

It takes a lot to run a small business, and it’s easy for production costs to skyrocket as your company continues to grow. This makes it crucial to take stock of where your money is going and take steps to reduce your overall expenses.

To increase your cost efficiency, look at the following areas:

• Operating expenses: Assess the costs it takes to run your business, from maintaining inventory and paying rent to procuring office supplies. There’s a high chance there are opportunities to cut down on costs. For example, you may be keeping a massive stock of printer paper when most documents are managed digitally.
• Supplier costs: Your suppliers are responsible for a portion of your operating expenses, typically inventory. You may be paying more than you need for these supplies. Negotiating with suppliers can help you bring down costs — for instance, you might agree to buy in bulk for certain inventory items.
• Outsourcing options: Your employees are essential players in your organization’s core tasks — but there’s likely no reason to hire employees for non-core responsibilities, especially in the early stages of your small business. For example, instead of hiring an accounting team, you can outsource to a trusted provider.
• Automation opportunities: As a small business owner, you might still rely on more traditional methods in your workflow. Look for areas where repetitive employee tasks can be replaced with software automation, such as accounting software to replace your spreadsheets. Repetitive duties may require team members to work longer hours, which can require overtime pay. These inefficiencies can also lead to less time connecting with new customers or maintaining customer relationships, reducing profitability. 

Ensure Strong Customer Retention

Customer retention is key to growing your small business. While retaining customers helps ensure consistent revenue, it can also help you save in the long term. Often, the cost of retaining a customer is much lower than the cost of acquiring a new one — studies show that costs can be as much as five to seven times higher. 

A top strategy for boosting customer retention is offering loyalty or incentive programs. When customers get rewarded for patronizing your business, they’re more likely to return for more rewards. These programs can help grow your customer base, too. Customers are 73% more likely to recommend a company to others if it has a good loyalty program.

Generally, the key to fostering long-term relationships with your customers is proving value to them beyond the first purchase. While loyalty programs are one way to achieve this, fostering engagement through personalized communication and promotion unique to the individual customer is an excellent way to deliver additional value. 

Embrace Agility and Adaptation

Competition between businesses demands agility and adaptability. Your organization needs to be ready to shift your overall strategy as the market changes.

A key practice for remaining agile is relying on a flexible business model. Build your strategy based on current market feedback and adjust direction as new feedback comes in. This flexibility could look like allocating more budget to marketing products during slow seasons or upping customer service support during peaks in demand.

To stay relevant, your small business needs to be willing to change and grow. Be open to experimenting with new products and services to better meet your client’s needs. Use customer surveys to learn more about what your buyers want and how you can best address these preferences. You might find avenues for product or service improvements, or discover a gap in the market your business can fill. 

In part, agility and adaptability are connected to company culture. Encourage your employees to share ideas and innovate as a way to promote the right mindset for change and get the support you need to implement new ideas. Just as you survey your customers for their input, survey your employees to get their thoughts. Creating an environment for idea-sharing breeds innovation and makes your company more agile.

Strengthen Community Engagement

As a small business, your presence is valuable to the local economy. Engaging in community events can be a great way to connect with local customers and raise brand awareness meaningfully. For example, as a contracting company, you might partner with a local restoration business to fix homes after fire or flood damage.

Community events can also help you connect with local customers. Participating in parades, fundraisers, business events and more can make your name more familiar to community members, and increase the likelihood that people will contact you when they need your product or service.

Sustainability initiatives are another way to engage with your community. A commitment to reducing your carbon footprint and supporting more eco-friendly practices can help you align with local values and encourage interaction with your organization.

Maximize Digital Marketing

Most people connect to both large and small businesses online. If your small business has little to no online presence, it practically doesn’t exist. Improving your website, being active on social media and creating digital marketing campaigns can raise awareness of your brand and make it easier for new customers to find you.

A key digital marketing strategy is search engine optimization (SEO). SEO makes your site more visible to search engines and helps your pages rank higher on search engine result pages. This means it’s easier for buyers to find you based on related searches.

Social media engagement is an ideal way to highlight new products or promotions while raising brand awareness. For example, you can use social media posts to share educational content about your industry, keeping your customer base more informed and funneling them to your sales pages to encourage a sale.  

Form Collaborative Partnerships

You don’t have to grow your business alone. Building strategic partnerships with other organizations can help make your business more competitive and expand your reach. A complementary business relationship can also connect your team with more resources and expertise.

A good example of a business partnership is a cross-promotional campaign. A cabinetry company might offer a discount with a local tile dealer for customers looking to renovate their kitchens. This partnership drives more business for both companies and can grow the customer base for each. You can also establish referral programs with other local companies to create mutually beneficial relationships. 

While you can connect with businesses in your area, you can also look for networking opportunities at industry events and conferences. It’s helpful to work with businesses that share the same audience or work in similar industries to ensure you support each other’s goals without being competitors. 

Outsource Your Call Answering to AnswerHero™

Customer interactions are an important aspect of growing your business and staying competitive, but a constantly ringing phone line can interfere with other valuable tasks. When your phone rings more than your team can handle, turn to a call answering service like AnswerHero™. 

When you partner with AnswerHero™, you can:

• Enhance productivity: Focus on the tasks that matter most to your business, and leave the simple phone interactions to our call agents. Whether it’s scheduling an appointment or taking a message, our agents ensure your customers are heard, and you have the space to work on high-value customer interactions and other duties that help you compete. Establish what types of calls you’d like to take, and leave the others to our team. 
• Improve customer communication: When your callers are greeted with a voicemail recording, it can feel like their needs don’t matter. Many of your callers won’t expect a call back — instead, they will contact your competitors. With AnswerHero™, your callers get to talk to a real person whenever they call, even if they just leave a message.
• Increase availability: You only work so many hours in a day, but customer calls might happen at any time. AnswerHero™ agents answer your phone around the clock, so customers can reach your business whenever they need to. Count on our agents to operate after hours, on weekends and during holidays. 
• Grow your small business: Constantly answering your phone might be holding you back. Trust our call agents to handle the job while you focus on growing your customer base and building customer loyalty. As your business grows, our services scale with you thanks to our contract-free pricing plans. 

Help Your Small Business Compete With AnswerHero™

Finding ways to help your small business compete successfully with larger businesses can be the push you need for growth. With AnswerHero™, you have the support and freedom to focus on the responsibilities that help your organization expand. Our call agents are fully bilingual to communicate with English-speaking and Spanish-speaking customers. With our flexible, no-contract service and transparent pricing, you can have confidence in your partnership with our team.

Get in touch with us today to learn more about our call answering services for small businesses.