Are You Wasting Your 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. Not utilizing small business marketing research.

2. Failing to target your best potential customers.

3. Failing to create a small business marketing plan to guide your business.

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.

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 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.

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.

In addition, target market research enables you to:

identify your target market,

learn as much as possible about these potential customers, and

plan at least seven marketing efforts that you will deliver each year to your target market.

By conducting target market research, you'll discover much about:

those who are your best potential customers,

the media to use to distribute your marketing messages,

their information needs and effective appeals to include in marketing messages,

how much spending power they have and what price they will pay.

By knowing and basing marketing decisions on target market research, you'll get more return on your marketing investments by eliminating much waste.

Small Business Marketing Mistake 3: Failing To Create A Small Business Marketing Plan To Guide Your Business.

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 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.

This results in failing to determine the marketing strategies and investments that produce the greatest positive return on investment (marketing ROI). Not planning what small business marketing strategies will best lead to marketing goals, leaves small business owners easily distracted by sales people.

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.

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.

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.

Article Source: http://www.search4allinfo.com

To learn to more about avoiding 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 "Marketing Your Small Business". Click here to get your own unique version of this article with free reprint rights.

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