Taking Down the Giant: Be the Thought Leader Your Customers Are Looking For

This is the second post in a three-part series that will highlight a few ways smaller startups and expansion stage companies can win against big competitors. To read the intro to the series, click here. To read the first post, click here.

In the entertainment world, there are a few crafty tricks that directors and producers use to make diminutive thespians look like larger-than-life superstars.

For example, one particularly common tactic is “forced perspective.” A filmmaker might scale down the size of certain objects next to smaller actors to make them look bigger, or place shorter actors in the foreground of shots to make them look taller — think Tom Cruise, who stands just 5’7” tall, in “Top Gun” or “Mission Impossible”. Sylvester Stallone is another example. Any guess how tall he is… a towering 5’9”.

But those filmmakers’ goal is obvious: when it comes to size, influence, and capability, perception is sometimes reality.

That’s an important lesson for smaller startup and expansion stage businesses trying to compete with larger corporations in their markets. While there are benefits to being small — including the agility, responsiveness, and personal touch that startups and expansion stage companies can offer their customers — there are also times that it helps to appear bigger.

And, no, I’m not suggesting that you need to trick your prospects into thinking you’re bigger than you are. That won’t do anyone any good. What I am saying is that you can be a small company and still be a BIG resource for your customers.

As online marketing guru Lee Odden writes on his excellent blog, TopRank, the concept of forced perspective comes into play when startup and expansion stage businesses leverage their online presence to provide the resources and expertise that their customers and prospects need — benefits that they might usually expect from industry giants, rather than comparatively small competitors.

So, how can you do that? Become a thought leader.

Invest in starting a corporate blog. Create content that speaks to your customers pain points (but don’t try to pitch them on your products with it!). Publish case studies that address common problems. Write about the ecosystem that your solution resides in. Offer help to the person that’s buying your solution with tips, tricks, and how-to articles. Identify, contact, and build relationships with the influencers (authors, bloggers, analysts, etc.) in your industry.

Each of those things will help build your reputation as a true thought leader in your space. And if you do it right, those things won’t exhaust your marketing budget.

In his post, Odden suggests a few easy–to–implement tactics:

1. Start a blog: Quite simply, a blog is easy to create (WordPress is free and can be integrated into your website) and, as Odden points out, it provides numerous social media, inbound marketing, and SEO benefits. Have each of your employees pick a specific topic to cover and make sure to focus on the things that matter to your customers.
2. Create a newsletter and social presence: As your blogging takes off, you’ll have a lot of great content to share with your customers and prospects. Create an opt-in signup page for the newsletter, pick the best posts from each week (or month) and send it out to your customers on a predetermined day. Also make sure to share content with your social media networks.
3. Identify and invest in influencers: Startup and expansion stage businesses may not have the marketing and advertising budgets of their larger competitors, but they can still make a splash if they have an influencer network that will act as a word-of-mouth engine for new product releases and company news. Odden recommends that founders, CEOs, or senior managers of the company make the initial contact with those influencers. That senior-level contact gives smaller businesses an advantage over larger companies that have lower level marketing coordinators try to form the same relationship.

In an article for Mashable, Shane Snow takes a look at two startups that used content and influence marketing to drive sales and thought leadership. Those companies? Mint.com and Hubspot. The former was sold to Intuit for $170 million in 2009. The latter has a reported value of $260 million and is eyeing a possible IPO next year.

Of course, those companies didn’t succeed simply because of their well-executed content marketing strategies. But it certainly didn’t hinder their growth from small startups competing against industry giants, to becoming one of the giants themselves.

In my next post in this series, I’ll focus on customer service and sales execution and how smaller companies can leverage them to compete against the big guys. Stay tuned!