How to compete with the big boys online
Gareth Edwards, asociate eBusiness consultant at the B2B Centre, takes a look at how you can go up against the web's big boys and win.
A website called IdeasForTheKids.co.uk recently came third in the BT Excellence Online Awards in the "Best Kids Website" category; not bad for an SME based in Coventry. Since they are a B2B Centre member and client we were very pleased to hear of this success but the scale of the achievement only really comes into focus when you consider that first and second places went to the BBC CBeebies and Disney websites respectively.
So how can you play David to your sector's Goliaths? How about a combination of nifty business and marketing thinking and making use of some key eMarketing techniques – just like some of the B2B Centre's heroic clients.
How do you compete?
When B2B Centre consultants start working with clients to help them improve their websites or online businesses our initial questions aren't "What web tools are you using?" or "What platform is the site hosted on?"
We concentrate on the business questions first. How exactly do you make money? Tell us about the different sorts of visitors to your site. What's different about your product? Why do customers buy from you?
The reason we do this is to find out exactly how our clients are going up against their competition so that we can advise them on how best to utilise the eMarketing tools and practices available. Being able to answer these kinds of questions is vital if you want to establish a wining position or maybe even change the way you work now in order to find a better offer.
Let's look at just a couple of basic ways of standing up against larger opponents:
- Dare to be different
You could do something new or different: perhaps IdeasForTheKids.co.uk might come under that category.
If you have an entirely new product or service then you can exploit gaps in the market. ABC Desks, for instance, designs and produces specialised computer desks for use in the education market and is launching a range specifically for handicapped users for which there is little or no competition. Innovation like this doesn't even have to be in the actual product or service either. Improved packaging, using a new way of getting to customers like Lee Blake at 50Fifty Clothing who has an active MySpace account, or adding video clips of your products like Gillian Wesley does for her bridal corsets are examples of being different. - Sharp focus
Or you could just be very focused about the type of customers you deal with or the products and services that you offer. Adaptawear specialises in easy to put on clothing for the disabled (in fact it could go under the innovation heading too). The company's focus on one market means that it can demonstrate its passion, knowledge and expertise very easily. SMP Plastics is (as the name suggests) product focused and does loads of things with plastics. They could undoubtedly work with other materials but by only working in plastic they make it easier for themselves to target specific customers and for customers to see them as experts.
Big company blues
So how do you use your winning qualities to compete against companies with more money, more people, more outlets etc?
Well first maybe it is worth reflecting that more can be less. The very fact that they are bigger does give your competitors several disadvantages.
- Bigger companies may well be slow to respond to new customer requirements or market conditions. Inserts Direct recognised that small electrical components companies couldn't get threaded inserts quickly enough or in low volumes easily from the big suppliers. Inserts Direct has established an eCommerce site to exploit this gap and majors on its ability to supply small quantities from stock using overnight delivery if needs be.
What chinks are there in the armour of the big players in your industry? - Bigger companies are notoriously impersonal. SMEs can often compete simply because they put a face to a name. Michelle Higgs provides copy writing services in competition with PR and marketing agencies around the Midlands. She wins out when people want to know exactly who they are going to deal with and what knowledge and expertise that person has. The fact that Michelle has also written a number of social history books just adds to her credibility.
Consider making a virtue of your own experience and expertise and that of your team. The saying "people buy from people" is frequently true. - And finally large companies are simply not local. Why is that important? Well the major search engines found that more than 70% of searches were for local resources (Neilsen research). A lot of people want to deal with local businesses: it can be cheaper, they are usually more convenient to deal with and it helps the local economy.
The search engines have spent the last few years putting a lot of work into helping this process and small businesses can easily take advantage of this. Firstly sign up for the Google Local service: this literally puts you on the map (Google Maps at least) and enhances your chance of getting a high ranking for your chosen keywords. Secondly make geographical references in your website in both body text and in meta tags. Simply putting your address in full is helpful but it is worth adding references to regions, counties and towns and cities too. One of our most successful clients at this is DAW Consulting, where owner Dave Willetts has used page titles and address information to get very high rankings for searches for management and business consultancy both in the West Midlands and increasingly on a national basis.
Let's get competitive
Now we can focus on some specific techniques to help you compete.
- Make friends with a search engine
Perhaps the most obvious idea is to make sure that the search engines understand what your business is about and what your strengths are so that they can match your site to searches. The process of asking yourself the questions that we discussed earlier is a good start because it helps you to generate detailed keywords and phrases to add to meta tags and body text. The word "detailed" is important here.
Many of you will have completed basic optimisation on your websites and included top level keywords (e.g. "steel fabrications" or "accountancy services"). If there is a lot of competition then you may not have achieved particularly good rankings.
The trick is to optimise around your detailed keywords and phrases: add new web pages focusing in on particular aspects of what you do. The benefit of this is there will be less competition on these detailed keywords. This may not mean masses of traffic but people who do use these keywords in their searches are likely to be a bit more serious about buying from you. Needasafe, a Dudley based safe supplier, has seen a major growth in business by going through this process and making sure that its specialised products can be found by professionals searching for a particular specification.
Attention to detail and understanding in-depth what potential customers are looking for is a powerful way of keeping ahead of the big boys.
Search engines aren't the only method of promotion to your audience, of course. There are a number of other mechanisms that are easy for you to use. - Directories
Trade and local services directories can be very powerful, if used wisely. SMP Plastics, who we talked about with regard to their focus, realised that in their industry buyers are using on-line directories to short cut the search process. The B2B Centre helped them review what was available and eventually SMP chose Applegate. Applegate offer a free entry but SMP decided in this case that it was worth paying for a more prominent entry.
Because SMP concentrated their resources in one area their message was as obvious as those of bigger firms who had multiple smaller directory entries. It paid off too as the company doubled turnover in the first year of using directories in this way. - Pay per click
For some of our clients pay per click advertising has been a very successful method of "punching above their weight". Defensive Driver Training generated a massive amount of business by switching from traditional marketing activity to using Google Adwords and saved nearly £50,000 in costs.
They are able to compete against bigger rivals by carefully selecting the keywords that will trigger an ad being displayed and making sure that their ads are attractive enough to stimulate a click through.
If you want to understand online advertising and the options available read the online advertising guide on e-Skills UK's Business IT Guide website. - eBay
Pizzazz, a specialist gifts retailer based in Nuneaton, has used another strategy to give itself some competitive advantage. The company was an early entrant into eBay shops and has used this trading arena to good advantage. It benefits because there is less competition on searches for particular categories within eBay than there are for natural searches. It is also able to use its excellent feedback scores to establish credibility and a high "comfort factor" for prospective customers: they come across as being "nicer" people to work with than a large impersonal organisation.
To understand what online selling can do for your business and the options available read the selling online guide on the Business IT Guide website.
If you're feeling more adventurous and wish to sell from your own website, explore the options available in the online transactions guide. - Online PR
Gaining press coverage both online and in hard copy is another powerful tool to help compete against large players. Press coverage is great at stressing characteristics such as location, individual personality and innovative or "different" products. Jayne Roberts at Longbarn Village, an upmarket shopping location near Alcester, has been able to get coverage in local and regional publications by organising wedding shows, craft markets and a lot of charity events.
This effort generates real visitors to the location but also benefits Jayne by giving her a better than average Google PR rating and a lot of inbound links from well ranked websites (newspapers and the like). This is a great help when trying to get better keyword ranking, especially in the crowded retail sector. - Email campaigns
Thoughtful use of email can completely remove some of the advantages that big companies have over smaller ones in acquiring new customers. Gas Street Works, a digital media agency based in Birmingham, has achieved a lot of success by tailoring their campaigns very carefully to the different target customers they are after.
Messages are focused around the interests of a particular industry or even customer and highlight what Gas Street Works have done in that area. And any links are to galleries of appropriate video and graphical content. Prospective customers are lead through a sales process without them really being aware of it!
It is a far cry from receiving a corporate email with no information that's relevant to you and a link which just goes to the home page.
For help running email campaigns read the promoting your business using email guide on the Business IT Guide website. - Website content
One of the biggest issues that the B2B Centre encounters is that companies put a lot of effort into getting people to their website but then don't really do justice to themselves in terms of promoting themselves, their products and services, their strengths and their successes. When you get visitors to your website you have to be prepared to blow your own trumpet and ensure that you take people through a process that leads them to making a purchase, emailing you or ringing up.
A key piece of advice is to state your proposition clearly.
In other words who are you, what do you do, why should someone buy from you. It is really important not to assume that visitors will just be able to pick it up from a bit of text and a couple of pictures.
Squab Storage, a domestic and commercial self-storage company based near Leamington Spa, get the message across in a neat set of bullet points and a graphic that highlights the low cost nature of the service. It looks professional and sets out the company's services in an appealing way.
CLM Training, providers of quality related training and consultancy, uses a number of devices to get the proposition across. A strapline associated with the logo states what the benefit of working with them is, a rotating Flash banner highlights what offers there are to different sectors and a table shows the different quality standards that they cover.
Vitis PR are able to articulate their focus on the IT and telecommunications sector with just some straightforward, well written text.
Just do it
Big companies aren't invincible. In fact they have some real disadvantages that you can exploit. Think about what you are good at and then try out any one of the ideas and techniques that we have just discussed to see just what opportunities there are for you to go up against the big boys...and win.
For more information on the National B2B Centre please click here.
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AccountingWEB.co.uk - 10-Jun-2008
Categories: e-Business
Story read: 2872
