Are You Wasting Your Small Business Marketing Resources?

If you don’t want to waste your small business marketing resources, avoid three major causes of such waste and improve your odds of business success. The three major causes are:

1. Not utilizing small business marketing research.

2. Failing to target your best potential customers.

3. Not creating and following a small business marketing plan.

Small Business Marketing Mistake 1: Not Investing In Small Business Marketing Research

Some small business owners think they can’t afford to research their target market, competition and product development. But if you desire to be successful, you can’t afford not to.

Without the information acquired from research, small business marketing is built on incomplete and inaccurate information. This dooms marketing efforts from the beginning.

Without this research, you will be more inclined to build a marketing program that lacks focus. Research provides the groundwork to build a strategic marketing plan, to assure that every marketing tactic contributes to your marketing and business goals, and to attract your best potential customers.

A little money spent on research upfront can assure that your marketing to the right people and in the right way to be most successful. In fact, your target market is so important that it is covered as the second of the three major ways that small business owners waste their marketing resources.

Small Business Marketing Mistake 2: Not Targeting The People Most Likely To Become Customers

Business owners who don’t do research often don’t know the best target market for their products and services. Because they don’t determine who is most likely to buy their products, they market to everybody, and often don’t sell much to anybody. This type of small business marketing wastes marketing resources.

If you think everybody will want to buy your products or services, you are just plain wrong, and you’re wasting marketing resources. If you instead take time to identify the people who really need and want what you sell, your marketing efforts will be far more effective.

What you spend upfront to gather information on your target market, will more than return your investment in increased sales. Plus, it will save you from wasting your marketing resources on strategies and tactics that don’t work effectively with your target market members.

With target market research, you’ll also be able to:

determine best potential customers,

gather vital information about this target market, and

plan at least seven marketing efforts that you will deliver each year to your target market.

Target market research provides small business owners with information about:

the members of your target market,

the best media to reach your target market members,

their information needs and effective appeals to include in marketing messages,

how much spending power they have and what price they will pay.

If you know this information and plan marketing campaigns with it, you’ll improve return on investment and avoid wasting your small business marketing resources.

Small Business Marketing Mistake 3: Failing To Create A Small Business Marketing Plan To Guide Your Business.

The third mistake grows out of the lack of small business marketing research. When small business owners don’t do the research necessary to thoroughly understand what and how marketing strategies should be implemented, they lack focus and easily fall prey to sales people.

If you think the only value of a marketing and business plan is to complement a business loan application, you’re wrong. Both guide your decisions and actions to keep you on target and focused.

If you haven’t decided what marketing tactics and strategies are needed to reach your marketing goals, you are more likely to be persuaded by sales people to pursue tactics that are less effective and often just waste your marketing resources.

Many sales people play on the small business owner’s lack of marketing planning in order to sell marketing and advertising that do not move the business closer to its goals. A well-developed small business marketing plan is the best defense against sales people who will waste the business owners marketing resources in order to meet their own sales goals.

You don’t want to buy advertisements that don’t reach your target market just because media sales people are pushing their latest “greatest” promotions.

Likewise, without a marketing plan, you may be persuaded to buy marketing services and products that aren’t right for your target market. Every penny that you spend on effective marketing is a penny that you no longer have to spend on effective marketing.