When it comes to content marketing bigger businesses with deep pockets obviously have an advantage over smaller businesses that cannot spend lots of money on creating high-quality content. Since most of my clients are one-person businesses and small businesses, I can totally relate to it. Most of them have budgetary constraints and they often have to adjust my rates accordingly (without stretching my own resources, of course).
This Huffington Post article quotes Forbes.com that 40% of brands use content marketing channels such as blogs these days. In 2013 the biggest beverage company Coca-Cola launched its content marketing strategy with a big fanfare and it became a case study for many big and small content marketing companies. The above-linked article throws some light on the ways you can score over big businesses. How can you compete with them and sometimes how can you even beat them?
You cannot beat big businesses with quantity. At the most you can publish 2-3 blog posts per day whereas a big company like Salesforce can publish 10-15 high-quality blog posts every day (they can even publish more if they want to). Then, it is not just about publishing blog posts and articles. You also need to market your content, and in fact this can be the biggest challenge faced by a small business. Bigger businesses have many channels at their disposal because they can spend their money on quality content as well as marketing channels. A small business can spend some money on getting quality content, but when it comes to marketing that content, not many options at lower rates are available. Nonetheless, some options ARE available.
Anyway, here are a few things you can do to remain in the game and sometimes even beat the bigger players:
- Create authoritative content.
- Focus on building your personal brand
- Establish a one-one rapport with your audience that a bigger business cannot manage
- Create engaging content
- Be innovative and give your own personal quest to existing content from big business
- Establish a vibrant presence on social media and social networking channels
- Study your audience carefully and create content accordingly
- Show more agility in tweaking your content according to audience-demand
- Write like a person rather than a company representative
- Respond to Twitter and Facebook queries as soon as possible
- Promote others to enjoy reciprocity