🔥 Think Big, Grow Bigger: 5 Big Business Marketing Takeaways You Can Use For Your Business

Hey Business Owners,

When we’re reading business articles, the same few massive company names come up time and time again. Despite the fact that there’s over 33 million small businesses in the US in 2023.

It starts to become easy to compare your brand identity, offerings, and marketing to these massive companies. Instead of feeling stuck in comparison, why not take their high level strategies and apply the relevant pieces to your business?

In today’s newsletter, we’ll delve into marketing lessons I’ve learned from working with Fortune 100 companies over the years that you can leverage.

In 10 minutes or less, you’ll learn:

✅ five marketing lessons to help your business grow long-term

✅ actionable takeaways you can take today to get started

🥳 Lesson 1: Stay Customer Focused

Successful Fortune 100 companies put the customer first. Each product or service they offer solves a customer need. Each ad, email, customer service phone call, post, sign, etc. aims to make customers feel seen, heard, and inspired to take action.

How they prioritize customers for advertising often starts with investments into market research, collecting customer feedback, and then further personalizing the ad creative and adjusting the audience targeting before launching their campaign.

The Small Business Advantage: You know your individual customers more personally than large companies regardless of how much they pay for customer research. Use this knowledge to tailor your marketing to create an even higher level of customer service and satisfaction.

Actionable Takeaway: Start a CRM (customer relationship management) database to keep track of what you learn about your customers and add notes. There’s a handful of free CRM software and even more paid software tools out there. One place you could start is HubSpot*

✍️ Lesson 2: Consistency, Consistency, Consistency

In order to build emotional connection and mental availability in customer’s minds, you need two things: a strong brand identity and consistency expressing that brand identity over a long period of time. Big businesses will keep consistent visual + sonic branding as well as messaging such as taglines or reasons to believe/why them the same across all channels.

Note: Sometimes, even big businesses don’t keep consistency in their brand identity for a variety of reasons: too many stakeholders involved, re-branding, or A/B testing new messaging. Results of being inconsistent widely vary depending on how established the brand previous way, but it can cause confusion with current and prospective customers who’ve come to expect a certain identity from their brand.

The Small Business Advantage: Your business is likely niched down which means you can tell an even more authentic story and address your audience with an even more specific problem than a Fortune 100 company can. Pair your identity and that consistency together and it will make it easier to gain, keep ideal customers, and make your business a leader in your niche space.

Actionable Takeaway: Create a brand style guide to ensure your brand identity stays consistent every time whether you, an employee, or an external partner is doing the marketing. You’ll want to include your logos + proper usage, color palette, fonts, tone of voice, key messaging, and any visual + sonic assets. One place to start: Canva

📈 Lesson 3: Data-Informed Decisions

Big businesses heavily rely on data in order to make informed marketing decisions. Using data from various measurement vendors can help you learn more about your customer’s behavior, whether or not they liked your most recent marketing campaign, and can be used to help refine your marketing strategy.

The Small Business Advantage: Data tells you where you’ve been at a specific point in time, not necessarily exactly where you’re going. Small Businesses have a serious advantage of agility. You’re able to move fast to learn from real-time data and make efficient adjustments to your marketing to keep you on track to meet and exceed your goal.

Actionable Takeaway: Before you start planning your next marketing effort, be clear on your key performance indicators (KPIs) and what you’re trying to achieve. Once you know what you’re trying to do and how you’ll measure success, you’ll be able to filter and use only the relevant data to make an informed choice foryour campaign.

💻️ Lesson 4: Getting Savvy with Digital Marketing

Big players have big budgets which allows them to harness the entire world of digital marketing and run campaigns on key channels their customers love. In order to break through the noise, they have to maintain that large presence, if not exceed it, in order to stay competitive.

The Small Business Advantage: You can be cost efficient, personal, and flexible in a way big businesses dream they still could but no longer can. While you may not be able to budget to be on every channel, you can pick the ones that matter most to your customers and have a thoughtful and strong presence there.

Actionable Takeaway: Find the top two channels you can best reach your ideal customer by getting their direct feedback from a survey or a conversation. Remember: You’re never done catching up on the latest tools and tactics, but what you can control is learning where to best show up and then making an effort to do so.

🧠 Lesson 5: Staying Open-Minded

Big companies have dedicated organizations and teams for specific functions such as market research or innovation to find the next big thing they can tap into. Successful ones will maintain their current efforts while staying open to and actually following through on testing and learning behind the scenes.

The Small Business Advantage: While smaller businesses may not get the option to have entire dedicated teams to similar functions, you can thrive by remaining open to feedback and inspiration and enacting change infinitely faster than big business.

Actionable Takeaway: Create multiple ways employees can share innovative ideas and insights with you to keep the business growing. Make time to go through the ideas and vet properly.

LET’S CHAT! Send me an email at [email protected]

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^{*Disclaimer: None of the tools linked in this email are sponsors. They’re free tools I’ve come across and found helpful.}

ABOUT VERSA STRATEGY

Chandler Kirkman is the driving force behind Versa Strategy. She’s on a mission to elevate businesses’ marketing and empower Creative Strategists to think big picture about the business landscape.

In the past decade, Chandler has consulted with over a hundred businesses of various specialities from Fortune 100 companies to local small businesses. By infusing branding, advertising, and marketing efforts with her signature blend of creativity, strategic thinking, and enthusiasm, she cultivates a dynamic and empathetic approach that helps business owners better connect with their customers.