A complaint I often hear from owners of small businesses is that they never seem to have enough money to market effectively because they compare their marketing campaign against that of their large competitors with huge marketing budgets. To use a sports cliché they are thinking about hitting home runs when they should be thinking of bunts.

In baseball, some teams counter powerful home run hitters with speed and strategy. They hit singles, advance their runners with bunts and stolen bases and eventually score runs. It may not be as exciting as a long ball driven out of the park but it gets the job done just the same.

Taking the concept to marketing, we experiment with a large number of small expenditures (think bunts) to see what the buying public will respond to than expand the concept using the winners.

One company I am familiar with spent a year with an "experimental marketing budget” of just $50 per week. They used their creativity to create new promotions and events of very limited scope every week and compared the projects against one another until they discovered some that scored big suc

cesses (big considering the limited costs). Using the three or four most successful marketing efforts, they expanded the scope, the geographical reach and the investment and grew their business on a constant barrage of "singles, stolen bases, and bunts”.

If you don't have the money to invest in "long ball hitters” then rely on speed, creativity, and stealth. You'll get the job done just the same.

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