As we've frequently covered in Mine Your Own Business, small businesses by their very nature face a number of challenges. Some we've covered are finding and keeping good employees, customer service issues, increasing sales, effective pricing, getting new customers.....the list goes on and on. A large corporation has different departments and a larger budget to cover all these areas, whereas a small business owner usually has to handle all or most of them himself.
The Wall Street Journal had a recent article on a survey of 734 entrepreneurs that described one especially pressing dilemma. Nearly half of the business owners were having problems effectively marketing their companies in the current economic situation. The business owners were facing a Catch-22 in that when business is slow they need to increase spending for advertising and marketing but they have trouble finding the funds to do so.
The article goes on to describe several tactics that some small business owners have used to address this problem with a great deal of success. You can read the entire article for their very clever solutions and they may give you some ideas as well. One of the least expensive solutions used by many of the owners was something we've posted about as well, online resources and social media. Here's a link to one of our postings from earlier this year.