Marketing a small business is VERY different from marketing a large brand.

For one thing, big companies have a lot more money. They can be the biggest voice in the room, out-shouting everyone else. A small business’s marketing can be like a whisper in a storm. It won’t be heard.

There was a popular term “Guerilla Marketing”, coined in 1984 – and a big fad for some years. It made a point that remains valid to this day. If you can’t compete head-to-head with money, you have to do it by being clever.

Mostly what I want to talk about today is the other huge difference: brand recognition. Everyone knows who Samsung is. If you have a small business, chances are only a tiny fraction of your potential prospects have heard of you.

For you, every advertising contact is an introduction. Wal-Mart can remind people that they sell electronics cheap. You don’t have that luxury.

Samsung doesn’t need to tell people who they are and what they do.  They can get on with either, broader strokes branding like better establishing how superior Samsung is to, say, LG. Or they can market a specific product, leaning on the weight of recognition and reputation to do a lot of the heavy lifting.

A small business owner has none of that going for them. Maybe their industry has a reputation. And maybe it isn’t good. Maybe they never heard of your used car lot, but they know when they walk onto your lot to hold onto their wallet with both hands.

If they are going to have a brand it will be because they’ve established it, perhaps laboriously over years. Meanwhile, all their marketing efforts fly straight into the teeth of people’s suspicions, all the bad experiences they’ve had.

With huge amounts of spam and criminality working very hard to look legitimate, it is easy to understand why a lot of small businesses depend on referrals for all of their new business.  But some industries don’t work well on a referral model. Everyone needs a dentist. In your industry, your latest customer may not know anyone who is even vaguely a prospect for what you sell.

Referral at best offers limited growth opportunities to most businesses and it may not be enough to even maintain your existing revenues, especially in a down economy, or to achieve the kind of growth you are looking for.

There’s no magic answer for this and if you’ve never had marketing work for you, it can take a lot of trial and error to get it right. The good news is when you find something that works, it is going to continue to work for a long time to come.