Effective Small Business Marketing

There is popular belief that the average small business just can’t compete with the large advertising budgets of larger businesses. While this is difficult to argue against, the extend of the financial disadvantage is usually overestimated. There are many marketing techniques that small businesses can employ to develop a highly efficient advertising campaign on a small budget. While larger businesses have certain inherit advantages such as economies of scale, small businesses possess similar benefits that large organisations can never match.

Small businesses tend to have a much smaller customer catchment area providing the means for a highly targeted marketing campaign. Additionally, every sale a small business makes is proportionately more valuable than that of a larger organisation.

Many small business managers identify the need to market their product or service, but often struggle when inventing an effective marketing campaign. Some common misconceptions are:

• Thinking too big
• Not keeping it local
• Lack of market research

When designing a marketing campaign it is critical that one puts themselves in their customers shoes. The aim is to identify a balance between product exposure while not annoying the customer and cost. Some forms of advertising such as door to door selling will cause a nuisance to potential customers, and which can create a negative interpretation of your brand/business. A good example of this can be seen in spam mail/e-mail or door to door selling. This does not mean that these methods should be avoided, in fact they are very effective low cost advertising methods however they must be well planned and used conservatively.


Other sources of low cost advertising may include:

• Local radio station commercials
• Partnerships with local businesses (discounts when shopping with partnering business / Exchanging advertising)
• Sponsoring community events
• Affiliate programs (referring/referred friends get a discount)
• Customer loyalty rewards
• Freebies to targeted market

The list is only limited to ones imagination. Anything that can catch people attention will be a beneficial piece of advertising. One should first identify the different advertising possibilities and then identify which of those are the most cost effective. These will be the ones that posses the lowest implementation costs while obtaining exposure to the highest number of potential customers that fit ones target market.