Many creative strategies and tactics are designed for larger companies. However, the Internet is a great force in opening up a new world of resources for smaller companies. Here are just a few examples:

Naming a product or a service

A big company will run probably bring in an advertising agency and run focus groups and maybe even surveys and spend an amount of money that no small company could invest.

We’ve seen small companies have some great success with Name This which makes the otherwise time-consuming process of finding a market-ready name quick and painless. For just 99 dollars you can post a product or service in need of a name and after just 48 hours and hundreds if not thousands of votes, the system does some fancy math and crowns the winners. Sure, this is not “scientific” as all the big company studies – but for 99 bucks it is better than a small business owner just asking 20 friends!

Once you have a name, you’ll want a logo

That’s a service we’re happy to work with our customers on – but we also understand when our customers want to get multiple options and the wisdom of crowds involved. Take Crowdspring where you post a project, dozens if not hundreds of artists and designers submit their ideas and you pick a winner. Right up front you name your price, you name your deadline and you get an amazing selection to choose from. Crowdspring even guarantees a minimum of 25 submissions. You can see how it works here as well as see some sample projects.

With a name and a logo you we can assist customers in building the website and getting the all important placement in search engines. As we work on developing your site we use tools like Color Scheme Designer and ColorSchemer Studio. These tools allow us to use the color coordination of experts on your website – matching it with your logo and existing collateral materials. Just a mere 5 years ago any one of these services would have been tens of thousands of dollars and small businesses can now begin to access these resources for just hundreds of dollars.

Today a small business can truly begin to think big if they tap into the power of the Internet.

—D. Silversmith