Poor small business marketing is one of the major causes of early small business failure. Poor small business marketing not only fails to get new and loyal customers, it also wastes small business marketing resources. Three major reasons account for this waste.
1. Failing to conduct 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: Not Utilizing 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.
Furthermore, without research to guide small business marketing decisions, business owners are less likely to approach marketing strategically, are more likely to make individual disjointed marketing efforts, and are less likely to win new and loyal customers.
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 want to waste your marketing resources, you need to pick a target market and direct all your marketing to them. Otherwise, you market to everybody and don’t sell much to anybody.
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.
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.
Plus, target market research helps small business owners to:
focus on your best potential customers,
discover the best appeals for this target market, and
assure that your marketing plan includes at least seven tactics to reach your target market annually.
Target market research provides small business owners with information about:
the members of your target market,
the best media to reach your target market members,
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
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 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.
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.
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.
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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