You're a small business owner with limited resources. How can you keep up with the competition?

Apply the Blue Ocean Strategy framework to identify uncontested market spaces where competition is irrelevant or non-existent. By focusing on innovation and value creation, small businesses can create new demand and escape the confines of existing market competition. For instance, Dollar Shave Club disrupted the shaving industry by offering a subscription-based model, targeting customers dissatisfied with traditional razor brands.

Identify one product or service you can use to generate many customers. Such a product or service should be easy to sell and scale. It should be something the target market finds easy to buy or engage. Once someone has become your customer, offer them other services or products that you have. It is much easier to sell to existing customers.

Your competition is probably winning your market on price. You can craft a niche that's more interested in value. You should. It leads to a much better business and much more sustainable cash flow. You're also MUCH better positioned for it than your competition. They might need X% of the market to meet their goals, you can probably build a great livelihood and business on much less than that. Focus on them. Let your competition fight over the quantity while your capturing the quality. Less is more in most small businesses.

Doing in-depth market research, having your user persona, and knowing your niche will help you to serve your customers satisfactorily. This will enable you to do design thinking, do market surveys with them to meet their needs and keep your business afloat.

As a small business owner with limited resources, finding your niche is essential for staying competitive. Identify your unique strengths, passions, and target audience to carve out a distinct market position. Focus on delivering exceptional value and tailored solutions to your niche market, allowing you to stand out and thrive despite resource constraints. With Neoli Hemp Store, we are scaling on the back of our niche products and their performance. As a result, almost 80-90% of our orders are from repeat customers- which is a hallmark of steady and sustainable growth in the long run

Digital transformation doesn’t have to be expensive. As a small business owner, sometimes the thought to employing digital technology to improve processes or products or services can be daunting. There are different tools, some are free, cost-effective and expensive. Leverage the free to cost-effective ones. Do a thorough research to only use what you require at the level you are, because too much of anything can be bad. You should use the technology tools to enhance your business not let the technology use you. Examples would include leveraging chat bots to respond to customers in absentia, leverage mass email marketing tools, moving some of your processes to cloud for easy team collaboration etc.

Harness the Power of Micro-Influencers: Instead of solely relying on traditional digital marketing channels, consider partnering with micro-influencers who have a highly engaged and niche audience. These influencers can help amplify your brand's message to a targeted audience, increasing brand awareness and customer engagement. For example, small skincare brand Glossier leveraged micro-influencers to build a loyal following and compete with larger beauty brands. Same goes with Myntra in Clothes segment.

An area that businesses often missed out is the mindset transformation in addition to the digital tools and processes. Without a digital mindset, we often lapsed to the way we are used to do things. For a small business, going digital is important because it can free your most precious resource, time. You want to use more time to do what you need to do most for your business which is to find customers for your business.

É preciso estar atento a transformação digital. Isso é um fato. Mas, é sabido por todos que isso não envolve apenas acesso a internet e aplicações básicas. Existem ferramentas poderosas que podem impulsionar negócios ou trazer eficiência para as operações de trabalho de pequenos empreendedores. Nesse sentido, especificamente no Brasil, ainda é preciso avançar muito!

One of the top techniques a small business can use to edge the competition is automation. Automation (in this case) is the delegation of repetitive tasks to software and platforms. Automation increases efficiency and productivity without increasing HR bills. Automate your lead generation process. Automate your communication with leads, current customers and other stakeholders.

Necessity is the mother of invention. When you’re a small business - or even have lesser budgets than competition, a lack of funds can actually be a blessing in disguise. It forces you to strip down your business to the important basics - and be creative about finding solutions to problems. If this is part of the team DNA, then you’ll figure a way out of every constraint.

One way I find it easy to become innovative is to follow the customers. What do customers expect from your industry that is not available? To be innovative is to ready to try new ways of doing things. To reduce failure and losses in innovations, follow what customers need and start innovations as experiments to validate them.

Look for inspiration from emerging markets or non-traditional sources to develop innovative solutions with limited resources. Reverse innovation involves adapting ideas or products from developing countries for use in developed markets. By embracing this approach, small businesses can leverage cost-effective solutions and challenge larger competitors. An example is Tata Nano, designed as an affordable car for Indian consumers but with potential global applications.

Explore opportunities for collaboration with competitors, known as co-opetition. While competing in some areas, businesses can collaborate in others to achieve mutual benefits. By pooling resources and expertise, small businesses can access larger markets, share costs, and mitigate risks. For instance, in the aviation industry, airlines like American and British Airways partner through code-sharing agreements, expanding their reach and improving customer convenience. Implement rapid prototyping techniques to quickly iterate and improve products or services based on customer feedback. An example is Airbnb, which rapidly iterated its platform based on user feedback to become a dominant player in the hospitality industry.

Building a network is a cost effective way to beat your competition. Being a thought leader means being top of mind, regardless of your competitors’ ad budget. As someone who didn’t get the opportunity to attend university/college, using social media was extremely important for my personal brand. It supports the work my company is doing by putting a face to the name.

Focus on innovation Continuously look for ways to innovate and differentiate your products or services. This could involve introducing new features, improving existing processes, or finding creative solutions to customer needs.

Small business needs to be agile to respond quickly and effectively to changes impacting the business, in response to competitors they need to continuously analyze their strengths and weaknesses, and quickly adjust strategies to respond to their pressure and cultivate new opportunities in the industry and explore new niches.

Knowledge is power & in this digital and Ai age, Knowledge is equally available to all. It is about what you decide to learn and how you use it. For example, many will come across a reel with a good content of their domain, they will even save it, but only a handful will act on it and these handful are the ones that makes it big. It is not only about learning, it more about implementing it. After the implementation stage comes the improvement stage. Do you take feedback? If not, you defenitely should. And the best ones are the one when you have taken the initiative to ask for it. So, first learn, than implement it, take feedback and again you learn and implement and the cycle goes on. When you start this cycle, you will move much faster.

Many pre-built tools offer white-labeling options, allowing businesses to add their branding to existing products. This approach can significantly reduce development costs and time to market. The challenge, and your primary task, is to pinpoint aspects of your business that can be efficiently "packaged" and offered through these platforms and channels. Identify services or products unique to your business that can be standardized and scaled. Whether it's a digital tool, a content series, or a streamlined service model, the aim is to adapt and repurpose what you already do well into a format that's accessible to a broader audience via these third-party tools.

If you are a small business owner with limited resources and are concerned about keeping up with the competition, STOP IT! You know your niche. You've embraced digital transformation as best you can. You build strong relationships, and you are skilled at learning and adapting. Let's go on the offensive. Business innovation begins with a disruptive mindset. Most industry disruptions come from outside the industry. That's where you'll find innovative ideas and solutions to incorporate into your business. Apply these insights to your business and become the disruptor, not the disrupted. Be the one your competitors must learn from and adapt to. The one the market longs for with fresh ideas, solutions, and services.

Explore disruptive pricing strategies to challenge larger competitors. By offering innovative pricing models such as freemium, pay-as-you-go, or subscription-based services, small businesses can attract price-sensitive customers and differentiate themselves in the market. For example, Netflix disrupted the video rental industry by offering a subscription-based streaming service at a fraction of the cost of traditional cable subscriptions, eventually surpassing industry giants like Blockbuster.

There's some great ideas/advice included here... all relevant strategies and tactics for building a strong business! I would offer, based on on my experience as an entrepreneur, that the #1 thing you should consider is not having "keeping up with" anyone as a core focus. Of course we need to keep a pulse on what is happening in our markets and who is doing what, but the mindset that part of our work is to keep up can severely distract us from the work we need to be doing to best deliver value to our customers that we are uniquely able to deliver. It may be a slight play on words, but it is an imperative culture shift you need to make to ensure growth in your company.

Of course, there is no one size fits all answer to this problem. What type of business? what industry? what business model? what type of customers? what internal capabilities? what geographical region? etc….. All these variables will affect, and/or determine, the strategies you can employ to stay competitive. Start with clarity on your core capabilities and how they are being leveraged to create and capture value effectively. Identify your unique capabilities and organise the business around using them to differentiate yourself from the competition. If you don’t have unique capabilities, then that’s your next step, develop some organically by hiring talent or through partnerships. You need the right skills and capabilities to keep up.