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. Not identifying the people most inclined to buy your products or services.

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

Small Business Marketing Mistake 1: Failing To Conduct 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.

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.

Business owners who don’t do research often don’t know the best target market for their products and services. Because they don’t determine who is most likely to buy their products, they market to everybody, and often don’t sell much to anybody. This type of small business marketing wastes 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.

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,

learn as much as possible about these potential customers, and

design small business marketing campaigns to reach potential customers at least seven times within a year.

Target market research provides small business owners with information about:

the people most likely to buy,

the kinds of media that reach them,

what they want to know, and how to deliver that information through your marketing messages.

how much money they spend and how to price your product.

Including this information in a small business marketing plan, will greatly improve return on marketing investments.

Small Business Marketing Mistake 3: Failing To Create A Small Business Marketing Plan To Guide Your Business.

This third mistake results from the first two. Without the proper research, you can’t have a good marketing plan. And without a good marketing plan, you will more easily fall for sales pitches.

Some small business owners believe that the only reason to complete a business plan is because banks require them for business loans. They fail to recognize the value of a business plan to guide their business, much less a marketing plan to guide their 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.

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.