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. 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 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.

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: Not Identifying The People Most Inclined To Buy Your Products Or Services.

If you don't know your target market, you run the risk of making one of the greatest mistakes in small business marketing: marketing to everybody and not selling to anybody. What a waste of 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.

Thus, your investment in target market research will return you much more in sales, and save you from wasting your marketing money on tactics that don't work well.

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

determine best potential customers,

discover the best appeals for 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.

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 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 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.

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.

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.

Article Source: http://www.ezine-directory.info

To avoid these and similar major small business marketing mistakes go to strategicmarketsegmentation.com/blog/market-segmentation-for-small-business-marketing/. To improve you marketing you can get a free report: at strategicmarketsegmentation.com/blog/market-report/">"Marketing Your Small Business".

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