Everything Is Marketing: How Growth Hackers Redefine The Game

For those of you small business owners out there struggling without a lofty ad budget, review this piece in Fast Company that discusses the new ways of marketing.

• At the core, marketing is lead generation. Ads drive awareness…to drive sales. PR and publicity drive attention…to drive sales. Social media drives communication…to drive sales. Marketing, too many people forget, is not an end unto itself. It is simply getting customers. And by the transitive property, anything that gets customers is marketing.
• innovations were possible because they came from startups, businesses typically averse to traditional marketing for two reasons: 1) they don't have the money and 2) they don't have the experience. Because they didn't have access to the "luxuries" of an ad budget or the burden of proper training, they were able to be creative enough to broaden the definition of marketing to immense advantage. Meanwhile, companies with the ability to spend millions a year (or month), chug along with poorer results and poorer ROI.

Although the article may be light on specifics, if may give you a spark to think of something different that you can do as far as getting the word out about your own product or business.