With multi-million dollar advertising budgets and whole teams of staff devoted to marketing, you’d be forgiven for thinking that big corporation marketing is in a league of its own. However, if you’re a small business, then you might well be able to benefit from these methods. That’s because the best marketing strategies are almost always scalable – so they’ll often still be useful even if they seem at first glance to be a bit too big. This post will look at some of the major marketing strategies of big global businesses, and how you as a small business can steal their ideas in order to grow.
Writing and posting
Publishing written content is one of the hallmarks of the modern CEO, and it’s an almost essential part of the job. Platforms such as LinkedIn and Medium are common places to see business leaders from big firms write about their company’s development, and what they produce is often then focused on and dissected by journalists, clients, and consumers.
The problem is that a global corporation – and those who work for it – are always going to have large audiences in place already. Millions of people follow Mark Zuckerberg, for example, because his product (Facebook) is one that they use and one in which they’re interested. For a smaller organization or company looking to borrow this sort of tactic, it may actually seem impossible. But there is a way forward. By working with a reputable guest blogging service, you can have written content produced for you and then seen by plenty of potential customers. That way, you can get exposure – and save time.
Social media
There are very few big corporations (especially the consumer-facing ones) that don’t have a social media presence these days. It’s considered almost a prerequisite for so many types of business, and this isn’t going to go away. Big companies, therefore, have large marketing budgets that they spend on boosting their Facebook, Twitter and other posts, and small businesses can also do this. After all, if you focus on a local town or city, then you won’t need millions of followers: you can simply pay less and receive a smaller yet more niche audience instead.
Paid social media marketing has become a real boon for small businesses, especially in terms of its scalability. The more difficult task for a small business relative to a large one lies in organic social media marketing. Coca-Cola might have over a hundred million Facebook followers, for example, but that’s because their product is well known in the mass market. As an unknown small business, your firm may either have to pay for access to social audiences – or simply wait until it has enough customers that it can build an organic audience naturally.
In the modern age, there are lots of different marketing options to choose from – especially given the power that the internet holds. Researching the alternative methods is one way to select what’s right for you, but the sneaky way to do it is to borrow from the big guys. While you might not be able to achieve the same reach as Coca-Cola overnight, it’s still possible to scale big corporation methods down and use them to your advantage.