Small Business Marketing Resources: Don't Waste Yours

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. 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: Not Investing In 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.

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 Targeting The People Most Likely To Become Customers

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.

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:

identify your target market,

learn as much as possible about these potential customers, 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:

the members of your target market,

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.

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

The third mistake is a result of the first two mistakes. Until you have done research on your product, competition and target market, you can't plan the best way to spend your small business marketing resources. When you haven't planned how to best spend your marketing resources, you can be persuaded to spend ineffectively.

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 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.

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.

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.

About the Author

To avoid these and similar major small business marketing mistakes go to http://strategicmarketsegmentation.com/blog/market-segmentation-for-small-business-marketing/. To improve you marketing you can get a free report: at "Marketing Your Small Business". Grab a totally unique version of this article from the Uber Article Directory

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