While Impress works with a huge variety of businesses, many of our clients represent the bread and butter of the economy – the noble small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs). The more aspirational owners and marketers within these businesses (and these are our favourite clients!) are often to be heard musing on how they can be the Mercedes, Apple or Prada of their industry – and quite rightly too. These businesses have built their brands to such an extent that their very names conjure up instant perceptions, respectively, of reliability, innovation and style.

But while there IS plenty to be learned from these big hitters, there is also a great deal that larger organisations could learn from some smaller businesses. I have worked with and for a real variety of businesses – from a five person start-up to a multi-billion dollar corporation, and the following points consistently hold true.

Firstly, when it comes to marketing, the smaller the budget, the more ingenuity is needed to make it work. A marketing budget should be anything between three and ten percent of a company’s turnover – but when that turnover is in five or six figures, there is little room for error in marketing.  The best SMEs use their budgets only where they can see significant effects on the bottom line. They advertise to create footfall for specific sales, events and exhibitions. They use PR to deliver brand messages to a clearly defined audience. They put in place pay-per-click campaigns to drive closely targeted prospects to their websites. All this drives sales – and grows the business.

Secondly, with a limited budget, you need an agency or agencies who really deliver. SMEs do not want to pay hordes of agency personnel to sit around conceptualising, beard rubbing and, God forbid, blue sky thinking. They want an agency who instantly understand their business, and simply deliver great marketing. The question is, do bigger brands always make their agencies follow the same discipline?

Thirdly, for SMEs, knowledge of the business is not dispersed over departments, divisions and even continents – it is often held in the head of one individual. While large corporations struggle to implement effective Knowledge Management Systems to speed up labouring decision-making processes, smaller businesses can already have reacted to a change in the environment, effected a change, marketed it and be selling it to the corporation’s customers! And, while larger businesses sometimes need to pay consultants to answer the most fundamental of marketing questions: “who are my customers?”, smaller businesses know who their customers are – they have met them, they know what they want, and in Impress’ case, they are probably going for a drink with them later.

So finally to the most important aspect of a business – its people. While individual incompetence can be disguised in a poorly managed larger organisation, in SMEs there is nowhere to hide. While everyone has a crucial role to play in the success of the business, any individual failings can be disastrous for the business as a whole. Smaller companies can only succeed buy recruiting only the most excellent and driven people – and larger businesses should do the same – but this for any business is probably the biggest challenge of all.