{"id":345,"date":"2008-05-07T03:17:24","date_gmt":"2008-05-07T08:17:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/magic1host.com\/blog\/2008\/05\/07\/small-business-marketing-resources-dont-waste-yours\/"},"modified":"2008-05-07T03:17:24","modified_gmt":"2008-05-07T08:17:24","slug":"small-business-marketing-resources-dont-waste-yours","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/magic1host.com\/blog\/?p=345","title":{"rendered":"Small Business Marketing Resources: Don’t Waste Yours"},"content":{"rendered":"
by Linda P. Morton<\/div>\n

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:<\/p>\n

1. Failing to conduct small business marketing research.<\/p>\n

2. Not targeting the people most likely to become customers.<\/p>\n

3. Failing to create a small business marketing plan to guide your business.<\/p>\n

Small Business Marketing Mistake 1: Not Investing In Small Business Marketing Research<\/p>\n

Some small business owners<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Small Business Marketing Mistake 2: Failing To Target Your Best Potential Customers.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

With target market research, you’ll also be able to:<\/p>\n

identify your target market,<\/p>\n

gather vital information about this target market, and<\/p>\n

design small business marketing campaigns to reach potential customers at least seven times within a year.<\/p>\n

Target market research will help you to better understand:<\/p>\n

the people most likely to buy,<\/p>\n

the media to use to distribute your marketing messages,<\/p>\n

the best emotional and rational appeals to include in your marketing messages.<\/p>\n

how much spending power they have and what price they will pay.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Small Business Marketing Mistake 3: Not Creating And Following A Small Business Marketing Plan<\/p>\n

The third mistake grows out of the lack of small business marketing research. When small business owners don’t do the research necessary to thoroughly understand what and how marketing strategies should be implemented, they lack focus and easily fall prey to sales people.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Some mass media sales people approach new business owners, convincing them to buy advertisements that primarily reach the wrong people, and sometimes reach few people because of the time or placement of the advertisement.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\n
About the Author:<\/div>\n
To avoid these and similar major small business marketing mistakes go to http:\/\/strategicmarketsegmentation.com\/blog<\/a>\/market-segmentation-for-small-business-marketing\/. To improve you marketing you can get a free report: at “Marketing Your Small Business”. Get a totally unique version of this article from our article submission service<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":125,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[94],"class_list":["post-345","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-small-business","tag-small-business"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/magic1host.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/345","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/magic1host.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/magic1host.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/magic1host.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/125"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/magic1host.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=345"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/magic1host.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/345\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/magic1host.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=345"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/magic1host.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=345"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/magic1host.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=345"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}