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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. Failing to conduct small business marketing research.

2. Failing to target your best potential customers.

3. Failing to create and follow a small business marketing plan.

Small Business Marketing Mistake 1: Failing To Conduct Small Business Marketing Research.

You may be wasting your small business marketing resources if you are not researching your product, competition and market. The few resources that you’ll save by not doing this research, will cost you much more in wasted marketing and lost sales.

If you don’t have insights from research, you are more likely to build your business and marketing on bad information that decreases your chance of marketing effectively.

Furthermore, without research to guide small business marketing decisions, business owners are less likely to approach marketing strategically, are more likely to make individual disjointed marketing efforts, and are less likely to win new and loyal 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

If you don’t want to waste your marketing resources, you need to pick a target market and direct all your marketing to them. Otherwise, you market to everybody and don’t sell much to anybody.

Many small business owners believe that everybody will want to buy what they sell, but that is seldom the case. This mistake wastes resources marketing to people who will never buy. Not only that, but failing to target the people most likely to buy, may actually alienate those who would otherwise become loyal customers.

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.

Plus, target market research helps small business owners to:

determine best potential customers,

gather vital information about this target market, and

design small business marketing campaigns to reach potential customers at least seven times within a year.

By conducting target market research, you’ll discover much about:

those who are your best potential customers,

the best media to reach your target market members,

what they want to know, and how to deliver that information through your marketing messages.

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

Including this information in a small business marketing plan, will greatly improve return on marketing investments.

Small Business Marketing Mistake 3: Failing To Create And Follow A Small Business Marketing Plan.

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 don’t predetermine your marketing strategies and tactics, you may be tempted to buy into every marketing and advertising sales pitch. You, not external sales people, must be in charge of your small business marketing plan.

You need to have your marketing goals in place and make every marketing decision based on your goals. Otherwise you may fall victim to sales people who are more concerned with their sales goals than your marketing goals.

Some mass media sales people approach new business owners, convincing them to buy advertisements that primarily reach the wrong people, and sometimes reach few people because of the time or placement of the advertisement.

The same is true for sales people who offer marketing products and services. If you don’t have a marketing or business plan, you will fail to recognize when these are inappropriate for your target market. When you buy products and services that don’t advance your business toward your marketing goals, you waste resources and sacrifice the opportunity to use those resources on tactics that would reach your goals.

Tags: Business

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