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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 investing in small business marketing research.

2. Failing to target your best potential customers.

3. Not creating and following a small business marketing plan.

Small Business Marketing Mistake 1: Not Investing In 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.

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.

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.

In addition, target market research enables you to:

focus on your best potential customers,

gather vital information about this target market, and

assure that your marketing plan includes at least seven tactics to reach your target market annually.

Target market research will help you to better understand:

the people most likely to buy,

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 A Small Business Marketing Plan To Guide Your Business.

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.

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.

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.