but sometimes you don't know what you want so you can't search for it, and if it is specifically what you need it will very often not be suited to any of your close friends 

I ask mainly because I own a small niche business and our customers love us, but most of them report they didn't know our services existed at all

we do google ads, but aside from that it's really hard to know where to advertise or how to get our potential customers learn about us 

 can you equip your current happy customers with stories? can you write them up and share their stories about how your product/services help them? 

 no 

 what kind of business are you in? 

 I would prefer to not say

but I appreciate your point, I just think it doesn't work for less romantic, more mundane types of businesses, like toothbrushes...

this is not a defense of the ads model either since that also doesn't work in most cases for these types of businesses either