Three Mistakes That Waste 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. Failing to target your best potential customers.
3. Not creating and following a small business marketing plan.
Small Business Marketing Mistake 1: Not Utilizing 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: 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.
No matter what you think, everybody will not want or need what you sell. Marketing to those who won’t ever buy from you just wastes your limited small business marketing resources. Instead you should spend all your marketing resources reaching the people who comprise your best potential market.
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:
focus on your best potential customers,
discover the best appeals for 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:
those who are your best potential customers,
the best media to reach your target market members,
their information needs and effective appeals to include in marketing messages,
their spending power and the best price-point for your product or service.
Including this information in a small business marketing plan, will greatly improve return on marketing investments.
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 that the only reason to have a marketing plan is because lenders want to see one in your business plan, then you are missing a valuable guide for your business and marketing.
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.
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.
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.