Article Marketing Edge

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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. 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 Utilizing 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

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.

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.

Plus, target market research helps small business owners to:

identify your target market,

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 will help you to better understand:

the people most likely to buy,

the media to use to distribute your marketing messages,

what they want to know, and how to deliver that information through 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: Failing To Create And Follow 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.

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.

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.

Many sales people play on the small business owner’s lack of marketing planning in order to sell marketing and advertising that do not move the business closer to its goals. A well-developed small business marketing plan is the best defense against sales people who will waste the business owners marketing resources in order to meet their own sales 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.

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.