Are You Wasting Your Small Business Marketing Resources?
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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 targeting the people most likely to become customers.
3. Not creating and following a small business marketing plan.
Small Business Marketing Mistake 1: Not Investing In 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.
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.
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
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.
In addition, target market research enables you to:
focus on your best potential customers,
learn as much as possible about these potential customers, and
design small business marketing campaigns to reach potential customers at least seven times within a year.
Target market research provides small business owners with information about:
the people most likely to buy,
the media to use to distribute your marketing messages,
their information needs and effective appeals to include in marketing messages,
how much money they spend and how to price your product.
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: Not Creating And Following 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.
Some small business owners believe that the only reason to complete a business plan is because banks require them for business loans. They fail to recognize the value of a business plan to guide their business, much less a marketing plan to guide their marketing.
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.
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.
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.
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Tags: Marketing