If you run a small business it might feel like a struggle keeping up with the big players in your industry, but these days you have an advantage. It could take a large company months to implement something, whereas you could do it within hours. You have so much opportunities when you don’t have to ask anyone for permission. You’ll want to maximize your chances of success, so let’s look at some of the specific things you should be trying out.

Write New Autoresponder Emails

A lot of big companies don’t want to take risks when they’re writing emails, which means they are potentially losing out on millions of dollars. You don’t have a huge mailing list, so does it really matter if you write an email your customers don’t appreciate? Hardly anyone is going to know about your mistake. If you increase your email conversion rate you’ll make more money as people sign up to your list.

Constant Website Tweaks

You could spend time making little SEO tweaks to your website to see if they worked. Maybe some of them would fail and you would lose money for a day, but it wouldn’t be a significant loss. It’s the only real way to maximize your returns and nobody will shout at you if it goes wrong.

When asked about website tweaking best practices, SEO specialists at Seologist, a Toronto-based SEO company, explained that they don’t even touch a website until they’ve performed an audit, because they’re looking for all the things they can test.

Play Around With Sign-Up Forms

We’ve already talked about more people signing up to your email list, so let’s focus on how you can speed up the process. The first way you can do it is by changing the position of the sign-up forms on your website. You will also be able to add as many as you want, including pop-ups if they’ll help. When a large organization spends a fortune on website design they’re a lot less likely to make lots of changes to it.

Neil Patel of Quick Sprout explained that you should be optimizing your sign-up forms’ conversion via A/B testing. He further said that you need to use the right software and setup to do it effectively.

Find Out What Customers Want

You are serving customers, so it’s only logical to know what their exact needs and want.  But how to do so?

Experts at Onecoremedia.com, the Toronto social media and digital marketing company, speak about content personalization. They’re talking about finding out exactly what your customers want and giving it to them. It’s harder to do when you’ve grown because you’ll already be known for something. Even if you have a small brand at the moment don’t be afraid to pivot if you feel like you can grow quicker by changing direction.

Let People Know Who You Are

Do you know anyone who works at a large company? It’s obvious you’ll know the billionaires who appear in the news all the time, but it’s unlikely you’ll know anyone else. This is where you can steal some of the market share because people like dealing with people. They’d rather give their money to you than a faceless corporation, so start doing everything you can on social media to let potential customers know your story.

In one of #AskGaryVee episodes, Gary Vaynerchuk explained that you need to actually put tons of effort to earn your personal brand. No secret sauce or something similar in doing personal branding: Work hard on it and build something that actually make you worthy.

Things Won’t Change For A While

There will always be ways for small businesses to compete with the big ones in the internet age. Once a company reaches a certain size it can’t do the same things as you. Keep in mind, you will only find a great deal of success if you take advantage of your size. If you keep doing what your large competitors are doing they’ll keep crushing you.