WHEN Rick Stainton decided to start Smyle, his events company, he wanted to make sure it got noticed by the right people. So he drew up a list of the 500 richest people in the country and sent each a personal letter with a £20 note attached to it, thanking them for the 30 seconds it would take to read the letter.

“I knew I needed to get the letter past the personal assistants who screen all the mail,” said Stainton, “and that once my letter got in front of the right person I would need to get their attention in a matter of seconds.”

It was a brave tactic. At a cost of £10,000, the marketing ploy ate up all the money Stainton had to start up Smyle. Before posting the letters, printed on top-quality paper and with handwritten envelopes, he had spent nine months researching his potential clients.

Happily the idea worked. About 70% of the people he wrote to responded, and more than half of them returned the £20 to donate to Inspire, the spinal-injuries charity that Stainton has supported since breaking his neck 10 years ago.

Thanks to his innovative mailshot, Smyle was asked to organise three events, giving him £250,000 of business. The company had a turnover of £1m in its first year and last year one of the events Stainton organised was the wedding of Jodie Kidd, the model.

He said about his opening gambit: “It was a huge risk. If it hadn’t worked we would have been in trouble. But if you really want to make a big splash it doesn’t have to cost a lot of money, it just has to be something that will really tickle the right audience.”

It is easy for small businesses to think that marketing is something that only big companies do. But clever tactics can reap enormous rewards for your company, no matter what its size — and it need not cost a fortune.

Marketing consultant Graham Green said: “Marketing is not about spending lots of money. It is about thinking and creativity, and even the smallest business can do that. When Rutherford was splitting the atom he said, we have no money therefore we shall have to think, and for small businesses it comes down to the same thing.”

Green said that even for the tiniest firm, marketing should not be seen as an optional extra: “Marketing is not only something that small businesses can do, it is something they have to do. There is absolutely no point in having the best product in the world unless you go out and sell it to people.”

He said that while some marketing tactics were more effective than others, the secret was to keep trying. “The one thing that doesn’t work is sitting round talking about what won’t work because then you never actually do anything.”

The online law firm Lawyers Direct decided to draw attention to the fact that it can provide high-quality lawyers at a fraction of the usual cost because of its lower overheads. It did this by filling the goody bags at a Department of Trade and Industry awards ceremony with 1,000 bags of peanuts with the Lawyers Direct logo and the slogan: “These days you have to be nuts to pay for overhead.” At a cost of £1 a bag, the exercise cost a mere £1,000.

James Knight, managing director of Lawyers Direct, said: “For us it is all about saving overheads, so it was important to get that message across in a very clear, memorable way.”

The ploy worked well. In the weeks after the ceremony, Lawyers Direct gained seven new clients who had been at the event and liked the firm’s unconventional approach.

Indeed, small businesses that have managed to carve out a niche may not need to spend any money at all on marketing their product.

Gü Puds, for example, which makes gooey chocolate puddings, recently carried on its packaging a tear-off cardboard strip that offered customers a free Johnny Depp DVD. At first glance it looked like an expensive marketing idea, but the cost of the strip and the DVDs were borne by Screen Select, an internet DVD business that wanted to boost its profile. Gü Puds paid nothing.

The two companies were brought together by Packaging Media, a company that has patented the tear-off strip, called More Inside.

Keran Turakhia, managing director of Packaging Media, said: “Traditionally, if Gü Puds wanted to offer its customers a free Johnny Depp DVD it would have had to pay for it itself and it would hope that by increasing the sales of its chocolate puddings it would recover that cost. But this technology means that a small business like Gü Puds can do things that would traditionally be only for big companies — and it doesn’t cost anything.”

Turakhia has set up a similar arrangement for another small business, cake maker Fabulous Bakin’ Boys, which will offer its customers half-price holidays under a tear-off strip.

He said little firms in particular had the potential to make the most of ingenious marketing. “The reason they can do this, even though they are small businesses, is because they have a niche market. They may think they cannot afford to do an on-pack promotion but they have more value than they think.”