Your small business marketing strategy doesn’t have to be “small”. In fact, the smartest small businesses borrow strategies from much larger organizations; they just execute them leaner, faster, and with more flexibility.
This article explores how small businesses can apply the ‘build, borrow, or buy’ framework to market more effectively; without acting like a big business.
Small business owners often feel torn between doing everything themselves or spending money they don’t have on the latest tools or consultants. The truth? You don’t need a massive team or budget to market effectively. You need a smart approach.
I’ll also introduce you to the “build, borrow, or buy” framework, borrowed from a phenomenal book on instructional design, and adapted to help small business owners make better, faster marketing decisions.
The Reality of Being a Small Business
I recognize that not every small business is the same. That said, I’m making some assumptions about the attributes of small businesses that impact how they should spend their time and money on marketing.
Small business marketing strategy is often limited by the following:
Limited Time to Dedicate to Marketing
Small business owners often juggle multiple roles. Marketing is one of many hats founders wear which means that marketing is not a full-time job. When you dig into marketing strategy you find that other parts of your business are now waiting for your input or action.
Modest Marketing Budgets
Unlike large enterprises, there’s no million-dollar marketing department. When you have larger budgets there is always more room for error and experimentation. In a small business, every dollar needs to show ROI.
Lean (or Solo) Team
Many founders continue to go it alone and haven’t yet figured out how to scale a small business. This means that everything is done by one person with one skillset. The founder may be great at writing copy and bad at technology or vice versa.
High Opportunity Cost
Spending time on the wrong tool, tactic, or channel doesn’t just delay growth; it can derail operations. Yes, this goes back to time. If a small business owner spends their time working on long-term marketing projects and doesn’t spend time making phone calls to follow up with prospects, there may be a very real loss for the company.
Need for Flexibility
Market conditions, customer needs, and even product offerings can shift quickly. Your marketing tools and strategies must adapt just as fast. Bigger businesses can stick with an approach longer because there is often more money and planning behind them.
Physical Proximity to Customers
This doesn’t apply to companies in the knowledge economy that serve customers around the US and the world. For example, Endurance Learning is a leading instructional design consultancy that may never meet customers in person. But for many small businesses, relationships with customers are direct and in person.
No (or limited) In-house Tech Support
You may know the tools out there (thank you podcast ads), but you don’t always have in-house experts to implement them. Every tool you have to learn takes time and effort and can lead to feeling demoralized.
Strategic Advantages Small Businesses Have Over Big Businesses
I admit that the previous list feels pretty limiting. If I believed that owning a small business was all about limited resources, I wouldn’t be over a decade into my own small business journey.
Check out this podcast episode from The Brainy Business about optimism bias. It can hurt you, but it is also essential to being an entrepreneur.
Your small business marketing strategy should be supercharged by your distinct advantages over larger businesses.
Speed of Execution
Your small business doesn’t face the same red tape and multi-level approvals. You can test and launch a campaign in the time it takes a big company to schedule a meeting.
I have always liked to take this to the extreme. If we have an idea for a marketing campaign, why can’t we get it set up in 24 hours? When we started focusing on YouTube Shorts as our social media effort we pushed out 20 new Shorts in a week! That was from the point we decided to start focusing on Shorts. We started publishing them before we even had a banner on our YouTube page!
Direct Customer Access
You don’t need research departments. You can talk directly to your customers to get real-time feedback. And because you know your customers you know who to ask to get honest feedback.
When we use this well we become the best versions of ourselves. Most of our customers will be brutally honest when asked for feedback.
Authentic Voice
You are the brand. Your marketing can be human, honest, and personal in a way big businesses often struggle to match. This is becoming an even bigger struggle for businesses as AI proliferates. I predict that big businesses will be working very hard to sound authentic.
Room to Experiment
You can afford to try something new on a small scale. If it flops, you learn. If it succeeds, you double down. Think about how much time it would take you to build a lead magnet and post a form on your website? It doesn’t take much effort and you can get quick feedback on its value.
Less Risk in Pivoting
Unlike large corporations with sunk costs in legacy systems or brand positioning, you can pivot your message, your offer, or even your niche quickly. Big companies often struggle because their products aren’t successful enough to merit more investment but they have legacy costumers to support!
Local or Niche Advantage
You’re often closer to a specific audience or region and can connect with them more personally and meaningfully. It may just be that as a small business you can focus on something and not worry about doing everything. As businesses grow they often feel like they need to have more products and services to be successful. The economics of a small business mean that you can focus on marketing a single product or service.
Lower Customer Acquisition Costs (if done right)
Big brands pay to overcome noise. You can cut through it by being targeted, specific, and relevant.
Owner-led Marketing
When the person behind the business tells the story, it builds trust. No agency-crafted voice required. Some businesses turn that unique owner knowledge into courses they can sell to add to their revenue and reputation.
Built-in Constraints = Creative Thinking
Limited resources force you to get scrappy, which often leads to smarter, more effective marketing. When you save money for your business, you make more money! The same cannot be said for the marketing manager in a large business. They are governed by budgets, rule, norms, and expectations, but rarely by such a direct incentive.
Build, Borrow, or Buy Framework
My business partner, Brian Washburn, wrote a very smart book that was a couple years ahead of its time. His book, Instructional Design on a Shoestring, talks to learning & development (L&D) professionals about how to be more efficient in their work by learning that build is not always the right answer. To address all the learning needs that organizations have, you can also choose to borrow or buy.
I’m going to apply that same way of thinking to small business marketing strategy. This includes what I see in my own experience running Endurance Learning and small other small businesses and nonprofits that I work with.
Build
First, what do we mean by build? When it comes to marketing this could include everything from doing the layout on your own brochure or building your own website to recording videos to launch on YouTube. It also includes building all of the tools that you need to manage marketing or client acquisition. This could be as simple as a spreadsheet or as complicated as a database with automated connections to other systems.
We try to do it all ourselves. We think we can’t spend money because the products we look at are expensive. So, we do it in a spreadsheet or we just do the work manually.
This is where I run the most risk as a founder. I have enough technical skill and ChatGPT has made it even easier. If I tell my team I’ve built a new system to manage something in our business, they’ll be right most of the time to guess that I’m using AirTable and Zapier.
The danger is that we spend our time digging deep into getting technology to work and keeping it working. Today’s tools make it much easier than ever before but it is still a risk for some of us.
Borrow
We hear a model for growth on Shark Tank or on an entrepreneurial podcast that won’t work for our small business but it sounds so good! We borrow their techniques because we see them being successful.
This is very common today in social media. We see TikTok dances go viral and we say “why can’t we do that?” You might be able to. But it won’t happen if you only have time to post every couple of weeks.
Larger companies invest heavily in research, customer journeys, and campaign testing. You can benefit from that without paying for it. Watch what they do:
- What types of content are they producing?
- What topics or trends do they focus on?
- How do they package their lead magnets, landing pages, or case studies?
- Use this as your creative starting point—then simplify and adapt for your audience.
Buy
As small business owners we have a habit of buying the tools the big companies buy. Or we get taken in by the consultant who will charge us thousands of dollars and deliver us clients just like they did for a similar business.
Why are these so tempting? In part, I believe it is because we struggle to be experts at everything required to run a small business and are eager to find something that will work. When we buy it may also be because we believe that someone else knows more than we do. It could also be because tools and services are heavily advertised and discussed. We’ve all heard about HubSpot because they sponsor tons of podcasts and have lots of ads. That doesn’t mean they’re best for us as small business owners.
Years ago I was working in an organization that had roughly thirty employees. We were growing and were trying to implement systems that would help us sell more into our target market. Over several years a salesperson or internal staff pitched Salesforce on an almost ongoing basis. It always seemed like a great tool for us but when we tried to implement it was a disaster? There were many reasons but I believe the chief among them was that we were enamored by functionality and never accounted for the work that was involved in configuring and entering information into Salesforce.
In my experience, small business owners should buy:
- To secure a skillset we don’t have and don’t have time to gain
- When you can measure the results
- When the investment will lead to long-term results without compounding cost
- Tools that make it easy for us to do work that looks more professional
I’ve also published a free tool that helps small businesses evaluate software they’re planning to buy and am regularly sharing details about how I’ve implemented a variety of software products.
Be Authentically Small (And Proud of It)
When building your small business marketing strategy you should lean into the advantages of being small. While big businesses can inspire you, don’t try to pretend you are one. Authenticity is a superpower. Your tone, your story, your quirks—these are what make people trust and connect with you.
Authenticity has other advantages too. Without going too deep into the details, the way that search engines are changing with the influence of AI, the playing field is changing. If you want to be discovered, tell a real story that will connect with other human beings. Those real stories of success and failure are what will help you with other human beings (your customers) and, believe it or not, with search engines and AI.
- Be transparent about your size and your journey
- Use your personal experience as part of your value proposition
- Speak directly and conversationally—like a person, not a brand committee
- Be valuable by being part of the field—share lessons, not just pitches. Show that you do the work, too.
Many customers choose small businesses because of that personal, authentic approach. So let your small size work for you, not against you.
Final Thought: Think Big. Operate Small.
You don’t need the size of a big company to think like one. By borrowing what works for your small business marketing strategy, focusing on long-term content value, and building repeatable systems, you can market smarter, not louder.
Build a small business marketing strategy that works for you.
