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Small business owners often believe that by being good at what they do, their businesses will naturally expand, because word-of-mouth is the most effective type of marketing. They are not wrong. What they might be missing in this assumption, is that everyone else knows the power of word-of-mouth, and is doing a better job of mobilizing it to their own benefit.

Now you need a good marketing consultant. Small businesses need the help of marketing professionals most of all, because advertising is so expensive and ineffective for most small businesses. A marketing consultant knows that word-of-mouth won't spread unless the message is catchy, concise, and easy to pass on and can help business owners create such messages.

In small business marketing, the basic introductory message is the most important. Business owners often have dreams bigger than they can pull off, and they tend to talk on and on at length about their work. A neutral third party can edit the owner's first draft into a concise, memorable message.

Another obstacle? Clarifying, simplifying and diversifying are things that little companies are rarely successful in. Take a professional speaker, for example. The speaker can offer motivational speaking seminars and have mild success, but a marketing consultant can take that seminar and refine it so it can be given to salespeople, managers and business owners. The message has more focus in smaller groups, which makes it spread by word of mouth much more easily.

Finally, it's important to know how to draw customers in. Where does a customer go from the intro message? A phone number? A website? What path must they follow to investigate your company further? Again, a marketing consultant can help here, by studying what competitors are doing, what companies outside the market are doing, and what the demographics of the customer might suggest. Whatever path the customer follows, they must be able to find it from the word-of-mouth introduction, so the consultant will evaluate the company's name, phone number and web address.

Finally, the small business is usually better served by smart, inexpensive marketing techniques than by advertising. Most business owners are not professional marketers, however, so it is important to recognize when the business should enlist the aid of a marketing consultant. This move can prevent them from wasting money on advertising. After a marketing message has been written, the advertising can wait a while, and will be fare more successful once it's used.