From Startups to Giants: How Digital Marketing Strategies Compare with Business Size

No matter how big your business is, in this day and age, you’ll inevitably need to explore the best ways to market digitally. It was this thought that made me wonder what digital marketing strategies are used by companies at different scales. What exactly does a small business’s digital marketing strategy look like, and how does that compare to a medium-sized business? Then, how do both of these compare to that of an enormous, billion-dollar behemoth?

Well, I wanted to find out, and if you’ve clicked on this article, you probably do as well. So, without any further ado, let’s find out.

Small Businesses

Small businesses have their work cut out for them. They’re starting from square zero, and likely have little else aside from some good word of mouth to help kickstart their marketing. Small companies naturally have small budgets and small teams, which means they need to be efficient. 

Their digital marketing strategies depend upon experimentation, clear messaging, and focusing on what gets direct results. Because of this, they pool a significant proportion of their digital marketing bandwidth on getting a website off the ground, along with a social media presence, perhaps using influencers to help gain traction. If there’s any money left over, then they might put some effort into SEO.

Gymshark, in its early years, is a good example to point to, as it relied heavily on social media marketing and influencer partnerships to get off the ground, following the results organically. In the end, the business took off without having a traditional marketing budget.

Medium-Sized Businesses

When businesses grow, reactive experimentation evolves into a more structured strategy. These companies have bigger budgets and specialised internal marketing teams, so they’re often more data and target-driven, and rely more heavily on paid media, like pay-per-click advertising and social media ads, to get the word out, as well as being more consistent across other channels, like SEO. 

Brand identity in medium-sized businesses also tends to be more polished and refined than in smaller businesses, which are usually less consistent. The aesthetics, tone of voice, and content all line up in a more uniform manner across different channels.

After its early growth, BrewDog developed a less chaotic, more structured approach to its digital marketing that doubled down on brand storytelling and campaigns that were rolled out across organic social, paid social, and email marketing channels. This paid off in the end, as the brand built its own strong, dependable community while trying to expand internationally.

Large Businesses

Ask yourself: If you had an unlimited budget in a massive business that stretches across time zones and industries, what would your digital marketing strategy be?

Well, at this level, organisations invest far more in technology stacks, like customer data platforms and artificial intelligence, that mean customers on opposite ends of the Earth will have personalised ads at scale.

On top of that, content marketing is much more sophisticated and varied at this level. It’s more tailored to each channel, like having webinars on LinkedIn and celebratory stories on Facebook. 

A good example for digital marketing at this level is Xylem. The billion-dollar water infrastructure giant utilises every possible channel at its disposal to inform and educate potential customers about their complex systems, like ultrapure water and demineralised water. These include PPC, paid social ads, organic social, content marketing, email marketing and SEO.

Conclusion

As budgets get bigger, the digital marketing strategy itself will no doubt become more complicated, as focus is stretched over different channels and shifts from getting immediate results to long-term growth targets. If businesses can wrap their heads around how digital marketing can scale with them, they will be better prepared to line up their digital marketing strategies with their growth stage.