When it comes to deciding how to exploit your marketing budget, many avenues need to be explored in order to boost your company’s online presence. From AdWords and social media advertising, to SEO and organic search, it can be difficult to know where your company can get a competitive advantage over other companies and products out there, especially those with bigger budgets than yours.
Some forms of marketing are very dependent on budget size. Take social media advertising, for example, where your exposure relies primarily on the amount of money that your company is prepared to spend. In that world, the higher budget will prevail (assuming of course that all parties are competent marketeers—something one should always assume).
How, then, does a SMB have a chance to face off against larger corporations with competing offers? The answer is quite simple: Compete where creativity, and not budget size, matters most.
Think outside the box
There is one field that has proven to be a game-changer for SMBs trying to compete against bigger budgets: Customer Engagement.
This is almost always either overlooked by companies or brushed off as something that can be accomplished solely by setting up social media accounts that occasionally post some content. If that’s what you’re doing, there’s no wonder you haven’t seen any impact.
Customer engagement, like all forms of marketing, should be approached with a systematic strategy in mind that will keep customers interacting with your brand for the long run, and not only sporadically here and there. Moreover, if done correctly, your customers will actually do much of your work for you by advocating for your brand online and generating content that will attract other buyers and improve your reliability.
How does it work?
We all know that unhappy users are much more likely to leave reviews and interact with brands online. The idea behind customer engagement is to efficiently target happy users—users that have used your service or bought your products and come out pleased—and propel them to engage with your brand online. Within this group, we like to call the most active of the bunch “power users”.
You can motivate your power users by showing them attention, whether through personalised messages or incentives, this is where you can get creative to convince these users to interact positively with your brand. This can be through reviews on various platforms, customer referrals, increased purchasing, sharing company content, or generating their own brand-related content.
Accessibility to SMBs
Customer engagement isn’t new, in fact, large corporations have been doing it for years. It has traditionally only been accessible to companies with larger budgets—the type of budgets that accommodate for a whole team dedicated to customer engagement and motivation.
Recently, however, things have changed. Technological developments of recent years have enabled companies to condense decades of knowledge in this space into automated platforms. Platforms like Innercircle, now offer SMBs the ability to target their power users with effective, automated campaigns that require very low maintenance, but provide a very speedy ROI (Read here how one brand boost their sales by 300% using this method).
Make creativity your competitive advantage
As a SMB with typically lower marketing budgets, it’s vital to choose your spend wisely. You want to invest your money in a vertical that will yield the highest return for your business. This is where you need to start thinking outside the box of the usual go-to marketing tactics and choose a path where the budget doesn’t decide your success.
As a smaller company you need to use the resources at hand more effectively than larger corporations and invest in avenues where creativity is key.
Turn your customers into your competitive edge with Innercircle’s all-in-one platform:
