How Some Small Retail Businesses Are Outsmarting Their Competitors

Part I

Leaky Bucket | Imagine you’re trying to fill a bucket with water, but you notice it never completely fills up. You look closer and examine small holes from the bottom. For some, the quick solution may be adding more water to maintain the level. Now imagine these small holes enlarged over the course of time due to the force and elements in the environment. The problem with this analogy is that when it comes to your business, you don’t always know where other leaks are or how large the holes can cost you.

The Brochure Website | For small businesses who focus on sales and marketing to generate revenue, they may likely undermine the amount of loss from online leaks. Certain websites are treated as a brochure or business cards. The initial thought for this brochure website is that business owners may only want to show they exist for the moment. The return on handing out brochures or business cards isn’t very high and you wouldn’t get very far for long.

The thought process is simply getting a website, placing your contact information and a few pictures as you seek to “build it and they will come”. In the meantime, you rely on word of mouth. Your competitor on the other hand is trying to be savvy by investing in online marketing efforts and ranking for keywords to dominate your location of business. As mentioned earlier in our analogy, these marketing efforts are equivalent to just adding more water as well.

A Leaky Bucket Website | The small holes of the leaky bucket relates to the areas of your website that are unknown to you as a business owner. While your competitor has a website using stock-images, nice designs, and content that mentions how great the company is, they rarely address their customers’ direct needs. You might be thinking lead generation, but this is just another marketing method of your time and cost to stop those leaks.

Your competitors know they have to get this fixed, but as long as they keep pouring into the leaky bucket, they think they’ll be fine as long as they keep threading against you. That outlook is rarely ever close to being halfway done. Perhaps they’re investing thousands of dollars and time to attract more customers in their marketing strategy to make up. Don’t be discouraged; little do they know the holes in their website are expanding larger over time like that leaky bucket.

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