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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 Investing In Small Business Marketing Research

The first mistake is not investing in small business marketing research. Small business owners are reluctant to invest resources up front to conduct product development research, competition analysis, and market segmentation.

If you don’t have insights from research, you are more likely to build your business and marketing on bad information that decreases your chance of marketing effectively.

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.

Although small business marketing research is a cost that many small business owners are reluctant to pay, it’s a smart investment that saves wasting resources on marketing to the wrong people. That leads to the second mistake.

Small Business Marketing Mistake 2: Not Identifying The People Most Inclined To Buy Your Products Or Services.

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.

No matter what you think, everybody will not want or need what you sell. Marketing to those who won’t ever buy from you just wastes your limited small business marketing resources. Instead you should spend all your marketing resources reaching the people who comprise your best potential market.

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:

determine best potential customers,

learn as much as possible about these potential customers, 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:

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 money they spend and how to price your product.

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 And Follow A Small Business Marketing Plan.

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.

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.

If you haven’t decided what marketing tactics and strategies are needed to reach your marketing goals, you are more likely to be persuaded by sales people to pursue tactics that are less effective and often just waste your marketing resources.

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.

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.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 7th, 2008 at 3:20 am and is filed under Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.