Are You Wasting Your Small Business Marketing Resources?

Are you wasting your precious small business marketing resources and robbing your business of it’s best chance for survival and prosperity? Are you guilty of the following small business marketing mistakes?

1. Failing to conduct small business marketing research.

2. Not identifying the people most inclined to buy your products or services.

3. Failing to create a small business marketing plan to guide your business.

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

The first mistake is not investing in small business marketing research. Small business owners are reluctant to invest resources up front to conduct product development research, competition analysis, and market segmentation.

Failing to gather the information that this research provides, forces you to base marketing on inaccurate or incomplete data and increases the odds that you will waste your marketing efforts.

If you fail to do this research, your marketing plan will lack focus because you won’t have a clear marketing goal, won’t know how to select the best marketing objectives to reach that goal, and won’t know the best appeals for your target market.

Every penny that you spend on good research is money well spent. This is particularly true for research to determine your best potential customers, and the best way to market to them. Failing to acquire this information is the second major way that you, as a small business owner, may be wasting marketing resources.

Small Business Marketing Mistake 2: Failing To Target Your Best Potential 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.

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

assure that your marketing plan includes at least seven tactics to reach your target market annually.

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,

the best emotional and rational appeals to include in your marketing messages.

how much money they spend and how to price your product.

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.

This third mistake results from the first two. Without the proper research, you can’t have a good marketing plan. And without a good marketing plan, you will more easily fall for sales pitches.

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.

In order to keep your marketing efforts on track, you must have a marketing destination. You must know what it will take to get to your marketing goal, or you risk contributing to sales people’s sales goals more than your own business and marketing 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.

Other sales people often convince small business owners to spend on various marketing products and services that scatter marketing resources to the point that the marketing wouldn’t be effective even if it was targeted to the best potential customers, which usually they’re not.