How Small Business Marketing Is Different

All marketing programs need to follow the same marketing process, but the similarities between big business and small business marketing stop there.

Budgets, staffing, creative approaches, and communication techniques vary hugely between an international mega-marketer like, say, Coca-Cola, and a

comparatively micro-budget marketer like, well, like you.

Some of the differences includes:

1. Budget differences

As a small business, you already know one difference between your marketing program and those of the corporate behemoths that loom over you in all

directions: The big guys have the big budgets. They talk about business worth millions of Naira while you out of a carefully considered budget talk about business

worth in hundreds of thousands or even less. That's why you need to understand advantages of small business marketing.

2. Staffing Differences

Look at the organization chart of any major corporation. Nearly always, you find a marketing vice president. Under that position you see a bunch of other

professionals, including advertising directors, sales managers, online marketing managers, research directors, customer service specialists, and so on. In

contrast, strong small businesses blend marketing with the leadership function. The small business organization chart puts responsibility for marketing

in the very top box, where the owner, in the essential role, oversees the process as a hands-on task.

3. Creative Differences

The top-name marketers routinely spend six figures to create ads with the sole purpose of building name recognition and market preference for their

brands often without a single word about a specific product or price. Small businesses take a dramatically different approach. They want to

develop name recognition just like the biggest advertisers, but their ads have to do double duty. You know firsthand that each and every small business marketing investment has to deliver immediate and measurable market action. Each effort has to stir enough purchasing activity to offset the cost involved in creating and running the ad in the first place. The balancing act is to create consistency in your marketing communications so that they build a clear brand identity while at the same time inspiring the necessary consumer action to deliver sales now.

4.Strategic differences

In big businesses, bound copies of business plans grace every bookshelf, whereas in many small businesses, the very term marketing plan provokes a guilt pang.

It provides an outline for putting your plan in writing without any mysterious jargon and with advice and examples scaled specifically to small businesses like yours.

Truth is, creating a marketing plan is pretty straightforward and reasonably manageable. Its one of those pay-a-little-now-or-pay-a-lot-more-later propositions.

If you invest a bit of time up front to plan your annual marketing program, then implementation of the plan becomes the easy part. But without a plan,

youll spend the year racing around in response to competitive actions, market conditions, and media opportunities that may or may not fit your business needs.

As a small business owner, you may envy huge ROI your business counterparts may be getting, but you have some advantages they envy as well.

The heads of Fortune 500 firms allocate budgets equal to the gross national products of small countries to fund research into getting to know and understand their customers. Meanwhile, you can talk with your customers face to face, day after day, at virtually no additional cost at all.

Because the whole point of marketing is to build and maintain customer relationships, it stands to reason that no business is better configured to excel at the marketing task than the very small business. Kindly watch this short video for more small business marketing advantageswww.youtube.com/watch?v=UwUI-zW-__M