Online marketing strategies for small businesses

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Xavier has worked for international companies such as Google but decided to start his own business and join the “small” side. He shared with everyone an interesting reflection on the competition between large and small companies. He rightly explained that we small companies struggle and despair with the big competitors, in his case with Booking.com and regular hotels, but in reality the real competitor is ignorance .

Summary of the presentation at PRO Marketing DAY 2017 by Xavier Colomés
If you were unable to attend the event, here is a video summary of Xavier Colomés' presentation. The full video is only available to event attendees. If you were unable to attend, stay tuned as we will soon announce the date of the next edition of PRO Marketing DAY .


Who is small? Who works in an SME? Who has a startup? Who is a small service provider? This is how Xavier Colomés began his presentation, interacting with the audience and introducing himself as the marketing manager of a startup, ByHours.com, with a small marketing budget but a big mission: “Everyone can go to big hotels and only pay for what they need . ”

ByHours.com is one of the first and only online platforms, with over 30 employees, that offers users the possibility of making hourly reservations in hotels internationally.

xavier colomes 2

[Tweet «»The real competitor is ignorance» @xavier_colomes»]
Three mistakes small businesses can't make in their marketing strategy
Given that small businesses do not have a large budget, time or resources like loadrunner protocol email address large companies, Xavier Colomés spoke about the mistakes that SMEs should avoid in their marketing strategy.

Comics Storytelling1. Not defining a strategy
When we are young, we think that strategy is based on being big consultancies or multi-million dollar projects. To present it this way and understand it as a tactic is a mistake. A strategy is a plan adapted to each project , it is to understand that resources are limited and that not everything can be done. Xavier, during the event, emphasized the famous quotes from the book "The Art of War" by Sun Tzu, reinforcing that sometimes it is better not to be in every battle.

[Tweet «There are battles that are better not to fight @xavier_colomes»]

If you are small, it is not a good strategy to define what you will do next year, taking the startup Byhours.com as an example:

That two hundred thousand followers will be reached on Twitter
Fifty thousand followers on Instagram
Five posts a week on the blog
Have a cost per click in CPC of twenty cents
Position yourself as the first in Madrid hotels
Have a YouTube channel with two thousand subscribers
A highly segmented CRM
This is what suits large companies , since they choose the "battlefield." However, in the case of SMEs, it does not make much sense to fight against this type of competitors, or at least not with everything at once.

Xavier Colomes

Time is a valuable resource that you have at work. For example, a large company can buy time, since it can afford to hire more people, more human resources. However, for small companies, time is a limited resource, so it must be used to enhance strengths. Social Media will work for some, only Instagram will work for others, storytelling will work for others, and Google Adwords campaigns will work for others. Each case is different depending on the type of company and its needs.

[Tweet «Boost your strengths and accept that you can't do everything at once @xavier_colomes»]
01-122. Risk is another mistake that SMEs cannot make
Another mistake that SMEs should avoid is not understanding that you are not going to stop being small in your comfort zone . In other words, it is not about risking everything on a very radical redesign only to find that after three months it does not work. You have to find the balance, as Xavier says, where you explore the grey areas .

Xavier Colomes, pro marketing day

Another great virtue of small companies is that they can take on more risk than big companies. This is what is called Growth Hacking . It is not a series of techniques that everyone has to do. It is people taking the risk, trying to do something intentionally or not, and it works.

2-283. Falling in love with the product and ignoring customer development
When you are big, you obsess over product development , improving its quality and functions. When you are small, you have to focus on having a product that works and that people know about. Functionality and visibility. For example, aspirin is a product that everyone knows about, it doesn't need to open a market because everyone already knows about it, this is what is called product development.

However, SMEs have to be based on customer development . That is, growing in the market and adapting the product to the needs of the user. This means: "Don't sell what you can make, make what you can sell."

[Tweet «Don’t sell what you can make. Make what you can sell» @xavier_colomes «]

Finally, Xavier Colomés highlighted a very old but very useful tool, the SWOT. It is highly recommended to do a SWOT analysis since a digital strategist is a profile that does not yet exist. Analyzing your strengths, threats, weaknesses and opportunities is something that we must quickly identify in order to put them into a plan. When you do this, you will possibly realize that you are doing things that you do not need to.