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Are You Wasting Your Small Business Marketing Resources? |
By:
Linda P. Morton |
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Are You Wasting Your Small Business Marketing Resources?
Linda P. Morton
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. Not utilizing small business marketing research.
2. Not targeting the people most likely to become 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.
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.
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
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.
Spending a small amount of resources on target market research can save small business owners much more in wasted marketing efforts and expenses than the research costs.
In addition, target market research enables you to:
determine 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:
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.
If you know this information and plan marketing campaigns with it, you'll improve return on investment and avoid wasting your small business marketing resources.
Small Business Marketing Mistake 3: Failing To Create And Follow 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 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.
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.
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.
The same is true for sales people who offer marketing products and services. If you don't have a marketing or business plan, you will fail to recognize when these are inappropriate for your target market. When you buy products and services that don't advance your business toward your marketing goals, you waste resources and sacrifice the opportunity to use those resources on tactics that would reach your goals.
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Article Source: http://www.statssheet.com/articles/article79675.html |
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