Giant-Killing Content: How To Compete Against Goliath
By Bill King
Like every other commercial industry, the water and wastewater market has seen its fair share of mergers and acquisitions over time. M&A activity is an important growth mechanism used to extend the product portfolio, move up or down the value chain by providing a different level of service and to compete head-to-head with rivals. In the past twenty years, we’ve seen some giant multi-national companies evolve through the acquisition and assimilation to varying success of smaller companies. But many an independent player survives and thrives.
When it comes to marketing, small companies often struggle to identify ways to win with decidedly smaller budgets than the 800-pound gorilla of a competitor they face. Historically, the options were limited.
Exhibit floors at tradeshows clearly delineate between those that have and those that don’t. Booth space square footage and one’s proximity to the show floor entrance are all too telling. Traffic patterns in the back corners of a tradeshow floor where the 10x10s hang out remains light to non-existent while big-spenders soak up the attendees like a well-maintained filter bed.
Display advertising in trade magazines works the same way. Smaller companies have raided the back of the proverbial couch to insert their quarter-page ad in the back of a publication, only to see the giants of the industry run their two-page spreads up front.
But the Information Age and the rise of content marketing has leveled the playing field. Publishing an article online costs nothing but time (if you have the skill to do it yourself). You could argue that the marketing departments within large companies are an investment in and of themselves. The truth is however that the type of content that will elevate your company online is seldom dependent on marketers alone. It’s your product-experts, sales engineers, service technicians and senior managers that often have the knowledge and longevity in the market that your audience wants to tap into. As many marketers will tell you, it’s not that they don’t have the expertise in-house to inform an article. It’s that their experts’ priorities are established in ways that minimize the time they can spend on informing prospects and customers.
And that’s the shame of it. For as David knew, it only took one stone to fell Goliath. One cleverly composed and promoted article to capture the attention of your desired audience and pull them in your direction and away from your giant competitor. And then one more. And another.
Image credit: "David," Bradley Weber © 2017, used under an Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/