small business

How can small businesses get blue-chip results without having to spend a fortune on marketing? That’s the problem Caroline Melberg set out to solve when she founded her home-based business, Small Business Mavericks, in late 2006.

“After years of working as a corporate marketing manager at AT&T,” she says, “I learned what’s important to customers when offering a product or service: how to maintain loyalty from existing customers, create attention-grabbing campaigns, and build brands that people trust.” 

But Caroline’s heart was always in small business. As a child, her parents operated a laundry and dry cleaning company, and “the rush of working with people you knew from your community and interacted with on a day-to-day basis made a big impression.” One of the things that struck her about today’s fast-growing world is the pressure it’s put on precisely the sort of small businesses that her parents used to run.   

“Part of founding Small Business Mavericks—besides the flexibility and autonomy it gave me, personally—was really an attempt to foster the growth of community business,” Caroline says. “I’m not sure many people recognize how vital small businesses are to our lives. Most strikingly, people tend to forget that all great businesses start out very, very small.”   

Caroline promotes Small Business Mavericks using the same techniques she teaches clients. It starts with creating a compelling site optimized for search engine pickup by effective design, keyword choice, and the addition of new content regularly. She runs online advertising campaigns and is always adding links to complementary sites. Caroline speaks regularly at events, writes for local business journals, writes E-books (downloadable PDFs), and sends out syndicated newsletters offering tips for business owners.

Caroline’s greatest success? “Being able to deliver the level of service that ‘traditional’ agencies can, at a fraction of the price,” she says. “In three years, we hope to be known not only regionally, but nationwide, as the authoritative place where small business owners can learn how to market their businesses affordably, both online and off.” HBM■