If you’re running a small restaurant, a lot of the ways that the megaliths in the food service industry market themselves won’t apply to you. A multi-million dollar ad spend by McDonald’s to promote their new Mc-Whatever, Applebee’s complete sponsorship takeover the latest episode of The Walking Dead, or Papa John’s teaming up with Peyton Manning to give away millions of free pies are big-ticket marketing spends that will probably never be applicable to you due to their sheer size and scale.

What Small Businesses Can Learn from their Larger Counterparts in Terms of Marketing

But too often, small business owners will discount how their larger brethren market themselves completely because they feel that just about everything the Big Boys do is out of their wheelhouse, either because it’s too expensive, too large a campaign, too wide of a net that is cast, or a combination of all three. What smaller business owners should remember though, is that every single one of the large companies in their industry started out on a much smaller scale and were able to grow into giants due to being successful in all key components of running a business, including marketing. Some of the campaigns that big business implemented while still a relatively small outfit played a huge role in their growth. And there’s a surprising amount of scalability in many of the programs that Fortune 500 companies run – as long as the core concept is sound and applicable to your business and its services/goods offered, why not try them out for yourself on a smaller scale?

Starbucks

Let’s take a look at Starbucks, the unquestioned king of coffee shops. Their recent quarterly earnings report (Q2 2013) exceeded expectations and set the record for the highest second quarter results in company history. When you have an entity as large and omnipresent as Starbucks, there are undoubtedly going to be a huge variety of components that factor into the financial earnings, but Starbucks executives pointed to their loyalty program as the biggest driver for the particularly successful quarter. For those unfamiliar, Starbucks offers My Starbucks Reward cards to customers, who can load up their cards with dollars and then use those dollars for in-store purchases, with more purchases earning more rewards such as free drinks, refills and food. Recently, in both the U.S. and China, Starbucks added the ability for customers to purchase Starbucks items in grocery stores and earn rewards on those items as well (by entering in a specially-marked code on the item). This additional level of reward-eligible goods was one of the largest factors in Starbucks’ 26% rise in profit and an 11% increase in total revenue, to $3.6 billion.

Just because it won’t increase your profit by the billions, or just because you don’t have products in grocery stores all over the globe, doesn’t mean your small business wouldn’t benefit heavily from implementing some sort of loyalty program, regardless of the size of your establishment or the industry it’s in. Business experts and analysts agree that loyalty reward programs are a crucial component to success, noting that businesses “…with loyalty programs, on average, are 88% more profitable than competitors who do not” (Deloitte Research Survey). Even if you’re operating an incredibly small business with fewer than five employees, it should be near the top of your priority list to implement some sort of rewards program – not only will it help you retain your customers (which is 6-7 times cheaper than trying to acquire new ones), but it can serve as a way to thank your early adopters who are helping you get through your initial start-up phase.

Pepsi Co.

Or how about what Pepsi did a few years back with their “Refresh Project”? In 2010, Pepsi – one of the globe’s largest and most recognizable brands – decided to ditch their annual Super Bowl ad campaign (something they had executed the previous 23 years) and instead opted to funnel a third of its yearly marketing budget into its new Refresh Project. This project pledged to donate over $20 million in grant money to several different philanthropic endeavors in categories, voted upon by the general public. It was one of the first crowd-sourced charitable projects of note by a major corporation, and the media and PR value Pepsi received from its undertaking was gigantic. It also opened up philanthropy to the general public and removed the barrier of grant writing expertise from the equation. The Refresh Project was a huge hit, and in the first month of opening (January 2010), it received its maximum 1,000 submissions for the month in less than a week.

Although the Refresh Project lasted less than a year due to a variety of setbacks, there are lessons to be learned by small business owners. Philanthropic marketing is always a popular means to earn positive PR and media value – while it’s unlikely any charitable undertaking will have the scope or reach of Refresh, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t involve your business with civic-minded activities, especially on the local level. Potential customers will associate your brand with giving back to the community, and depending on your revenue, you may even see a financial benefit due to charitable tax write-offs. Also, Pepsi’s choice to let the at-large public decide which projects received the grant money was a wise move. Once a basic framework of rules and regulations were set up, most of the logistics and approval processes were taken out of Pepsi’s hands, saving time and money. Even if you have a mere fraction of followers or people that are aware of your brand, it’s never a bad idea to let them get more involved with the business. They will not only feel a sense of ownership of the good deeds that will come, but it also alleviates some of the burden from you and your employees.

DirecTV

DirecTV recently found both viral and mainstream success with its series of “Get Rid of Cable” video advertisements. Each installment in the series starts off with something frustrating happening to a customer interacting with their cable company – either waiting on the installation person to arrive, being placed on hold, paying too much on your bill, etc. Afterward, a series of unfortunate events unfold that would give Lemony Snicket the chills, and the customer ends up in a horrible situation, all because he or she didn’t switch from cable to DirecTV. The ad spots were humorous and well-received, and caught fire virally – one of the personas from a commercial who had to fake his own death because he witnessed a mafia hit squad removing a dead body from his apartment building while waiting for his cable to be fixed (…stay with us here…) popped up on Facebook organically. DirecTV even offered up a prize for anyone who could determine the whereabouts of the fictitious “Phil Shifley”.

You probably don’t have the capital to hire a creative agency to come up with a campaign like the Get Rid of Cable spots, and you probably couldn’t afford to saturate the airwaves with them even if you did. But there are still takeaways to be gleaned from these spots and others of their ilk. First, never underestimate the power of humor in your advertisements. While there is a fine line between something that is generally viewed as hilarious and something that falls flat on its face, many small business owners are afraid to even attempt to walk down that line. It helps to bounce ideas off of your friends, family members and employees to come up with some general consensus on what would be a good idea for a humorous marketing spot for your business – something you think might be too brash may be seen as right on the nose to nearly all those around you.

Also, never underestimate the power of storytelling in your marketing, especially with social media. As Corey Eridon said in an article on HubSpot, “Marketing is about telling good stories. Social media marketing is about getting your customers to tell them for you. The value and freshness of your content and how well you tap the connections that tie users and businesses together via social networks directly impacts the effectiveness of your social marketing campaigns.” If your marketing content tells a good story about your brand, what it’s all about and why it’s relevant to your consumers, that story will be echoed across social channels by your loyal customers, who morph into evangelists for your brand.

Be on the lookout for good ideas to implement

Don’t be so quick to dismiss what the largest businesses and brands are doing in terms of marketing – always look to see if there’s anything you can take away and implement into your own marketing campaigns and strategies. While the scale and reach will inevitably be reduced, the core tenets of a good idea are translatable into any businesses of any type and size. While Fortune 500 companies may not be your direct competition as a small business owner, that doesn’t mean you can’t learn from their marketing efforts, be they successes or failures.