Four Marketing Differences between Small and Big Businesses

By: Yan Susanto     Topics: Blog

Every marketing plan has to adopt the same marketing procedure, but the similarities between small business and large business marketing stop right there.

Budgets constraints, staffing, creative methods, and strategy vary enormously between a multinational mega-marketer like, say, Pepsi Co., and a relatively micro-budget marketer and business owner like, well, you and me.

1. Differences on Budget Constraints

In a small business, you already know one substantial difference between your marketing plan and those of the corporate titans that hover over you in every direction. These big guys have astronomical budgets. They talk about a few hundred thousand dollars as a routine issue. You talk about 200 dollars as an amount worthy of cautious consideration.

2. Differences on Staffing

Study the organization chart of any big corporation. Nearly always, you see a marketing vice president. Under that position you see a crowd of other professional careers, including advertising managers, sales directors, online marketing directors, research managers, customer service manager, and so forth. In contrast, small businesses combine marketing with the leadership role. The organization chart of a small business puts responsibility for marketing in the top box, where the business owner, in the essential role, manages the process of marketing as a hands-on task.

3. Differences on Creativity

The top notch marketers routinely require six figures to produce ads with the single purpose of establishing brand awareness and market orientation toward their brands – frequently without a single hint about a specific price or product.

Small businesses adopt a significantly different method. They need to establish brand awareness just like the big advertisers, but their advertisements have to fulfill two tasks. Small business marketing expenditure has to provide direct and measurable marketing action. Each action has to stir adequate buying activity to compensate the expenditure involved in producing and running the advertisement in the first place.

The balancing act is to produce consistency in your marketing communications process so that they establish distinct brand awareness while simultaneously inspiring the required consumer behavior to deliver sales – right now!

4. Differences on Strategy

In larger businesses, documents of business plans grace the bookshelves, whereas in many smaller businesses, the very term of marketing plan may give you a guilt pang.

The truth is making a marketing work plan is pretty simple and fairly manageable. If you spend a bit your time up front to design your annual marketing plan, then implementation of this plan becomes quite easy.

But without a proper marketing plan, you will spend this year racing around to deal with competitive actions, media opportunities and market conditions that may or may not match your present business expectations.

So what’s left for small businesses?

As the owner of a small business, you may envy the budget, organizations and people of the big business competitors, but being small has its own unique advantage too.

The executives of Fortune 500 companies allocate budgets equal to the GNP of small countries to conduct research to understand and know their buyers. Meanwhile, you are able to meet with your customers personally, every day, at virtually no extra cost at all.

Since the significant point of marketing process is to establish and sustain customer loyalty, it stands to reason that nothing is more adaptable, more resilient and more flexible than the small business.