Three Mistakes That Waste Small Business Marketing Resources
May 7, 2008
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.
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.
Although small business marketing research is a cost that many small business owners are reluctant to pay, it’s a smart investment that saves wasting resources on marketing to the wrong people. That leads to the second mistake.
Small Business Marketing Mistake 2: Not Identifying The People Most Inclined To Buy Your Products Or Services.
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.
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:
focus on your best potential customers,
discover the best appeals for this target market, 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 kinds of media that reach them,
the best emotional and rational appeals to include in 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: 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.
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 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.
Don’t waste your small business marketing resources just because a sales person has a “great” promotion on media advertisements. If the advertisements don’t reach your target market, the promotion is not great for your business.
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.
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