Starting your Small Business in a World of Heavy Competition: the 4 ‘P’s of Marketing

Starting out a new business endeavour can be extremely intimidating, particularly in today’s tech-heavy, globalised environment where the sharing of information moves at the speed of light.

Thousands of businesses compete for the limelight on a daily basis and entering this landscape is anything but easy.

But with enough passion, enthusiasm and dedication, anything is possible – provided you are willing to embrace the challenges along the way.

Mastering the art of competition

The first most important step when starting out any business endeavour is to identify and develop your sustainable competitive advantage. The process is often a challenging and time-consuming one, particularly if you are operating in an industry that is rife with competition.

However it’s essential, particularly in this environment, that you possess an understanding of the process and are able to recognise the importance of developing a sustainable competitive advantage for your business venture. You also need to secure a market position where your business has the opportunity to possess a reasonable chance of success. Without any of this, your business will struggle to compete with bigger competitors.

The 4 ‘P’s’ of the marketing mix:

Product:

Small businesses should leverage the marketing mix by offering products that are unavailable through competitors. To achieve this, they could offer a wider variety of products or speciality brands at substantial savings. They could also develop a focused merchandising tactic that focuses on narrow product categories with a wide range of goods.

Another way to achieve product differentiation is to provide a unique service that larger businesses do not offer – or do but less effectively. This could include product delivery, installation, servicing, repair and warranty work.

Pricing:

The entrepreneur can control pricing and although there are a number of value propositions, small businesses will find the greatest likelihood for business success when they compete with high price, by offering customers the highest value. This could be made available through an increase and improvement in customer service, exceptional product knowledge as well as the development of key locations (e.g. going to the customer).

Promotion:

Another way to differentiate yourself from the crowd is to offer a number of promotional programmes (e.g. social media contests), however these promotions must be perfectly executed, well-timed and linked to other marketing activities such are PR, advertising, direct marketing and so on.

Place:

Small businesses can capitalise on the place component by focusing on superior distribution. There are three easy ways to achieve this:

Develop solid long-term relationships with customers
Provide an exceptional, meaningful service
Leverage technology

Closing thoughts

By perfectly timing your business activities and developing a culture of innovation within the workplace, your business can without doubt move towards developing its competitive edge. Are you ready to take on the challenge of a new business?