Can Digital Marketing Help You Compete With Bigger Companies?
The internet was once described as the great equaliser, in the sense that no matter how big your company is or where you are located, you can draw attention and find customers from anywhere in the world.
Rather than simply spending a lot of money to raise awareness through traditional advertising media platforms such as billboards, magazines, radio and television, digital marketing is far more about working smarter rather than harder, and choosing the right agency will help you get the right audience that is most likely to convert into sales.
Because of this, it is far more important to spend wisely rather than extravagantly, and to explain why, here are two examples of when smaller Davids beat much larger Goliaths in their respective sectors.
The Weakness Of Incumbents
In the late 1990s, a small digital-first video and DVD rental company saw the future of entertainment ahead of almost anyone else, and the result was one of the biggest underdog victories in the history of business.
Whilst Netflix’s biggest successes were due to its pivot into online streaming services and content production, its initial success was due to exceptionally savvy marketing that took advantage of the weaknesses of the biggest company in the space: Blockbuster Video.
From the 1980s up until the mid-2000s, Blockbuster was the biggest video rental company in the world, but a bad reputation caused by allegedly predatory late fees, and a failure to adapt effectively to online rentals gave Netflix a perfect opportunity to market against them.
They could boast a better service that eschewed the issues that Blockbuster had, and because of this, ultimately win in the marketplace, becoming one of the biggest companies in the world in the process.
Whilst an extreme example, it proves that an understanding of the market leaders helps you to design effective marketing campaigns.
The Value Of Knowledge
Expertise and knowledge are priceless, and customers will often be drawn to this even at the expense of other factors such as price and economies of scale.
Ethan Evans, former vice-president of Prime Gaming at Amazon, highlighted how one of the biggest companies in the world failed on multiple occasions to leverage their financial clout against the computer games platform Steam.
Steam was in the unusual position of being a market leader whilst being significantly smaller than many of its competitors, including Epic, Amazon and Google.
However, alongside being the incumbent and thus having the advantage of people already holding accounts, libraries of games and familiarity with the system, they also had a strong understanding of the key appeals of their core audience.
Steam rarely advertises itself, which is a problem when it tries to sell its own products such as controllers, consoles and virtual reality headsets, but its identity is so strong that almost any company selling games on PC will advertise for them.
Any successful alternative was going to need to be significantly better, and Amazon’s multiple attempts to do so, from creating its own store using the popular Twitch branding to the streaming service Luna, all failed to appeal to the core audience they were seeking out.
The weakness of large companies is that they are often inflexible and either unwilling or unable to adapt their branding, marketing and development approach, and smaller specialist firms can take full advantage to compete and even win.