Back to Page 1: Small Business Marketing — Breaking the Rules and Thriving
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Thinking Outside the Small Business Marketing Box and Thriving

You may first consider the fun factor when creating your small business marketing plan. It’s something you almost never hear about.

Again, what textbook on how to create an effective small business marketing plan talks about how much fun it can be to run your own successful business?

Perhaps more importantly, who said small business needs to be boring?!

Chainsaw Juggling and Bowling Ball Juggling are part of the festivities of New Brunswick Brewing Company’s traveling vaudeville show, where visitors get to watch the fun and sip their regional beer

New Belgium Brewing Company in Fort Collins, Colorado, gives employees free bicycles, stock options and even free trips to Belgium. Employees skateboard between offices and slide downstairs on a metal children’s slide to get to the ground floor offices.

Does your small business marketing plan include stuff like this?

And guess what? All this fun crosses over to the marketing side. Retention of happy employees has translated to retention of happy customer for this now 385, two-decade old craft brewery.  

By the way, companies like these didn’t start having fun once they became successful. They became successful in part because they were having fun.

So, in your own small business marketing plan, do you address the link between fun and profits?

Of course, success isn’t just about having fun. It’s about thinking outside the box, and seeing things your competitors miss.

Any copy store could have stayed open 24-hours a day, but only Kinkos turned that into a key element of their business strategy.

This was a crucial part of their small business marketing plan… something almost no competitor considered crucial. Yet, it was an important element in Kinkos going on to dominate the copy industry.

Small Business Marketing Plan – Spending Nothing on Advertising

Marketing books and professors advocate the need for spending money on advertising if you want to be successful in business.

Yet, Amazon.com achieved massive success by ignoring this rule. Their small business marketing plan did not include an advertising budget. Instead, it relied on a somewhat unremarkable strategy to turn their garage business into one of the Internet’s dominant retailers.

Rather than spending a fortune on advertising, the company’s founder, Jeff Bezos offered to pay millions of website owners a commission for Amazon products sold through a link on their sites. By going counter to traditional wisdom, Bezos’ company thrived when most others struggled or disappeared into obscurity.

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Page 3: A Simple Twist to the Small Business Marketing Plan