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 Utilizing 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.

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 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.

Spending a small amount of resources on target market research can save small business owners much more in wasted marketing efforts and expenses than the research costs.

Plus, target market research helps small business owners to:

focus on your best potential customers,

gather vital information about this target market, and

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

Target market research will help you to better understand:

the members of your target market,

the media to use to distribute your marketing messages,

their information needs and effective appeals to include in marketing messages,

how much spending power they have and what price they will pay.

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.

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.

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.

If you don’t predetermine your marketing strategies and tactics, you may be tempted to buy into every marketing and advertising sales pitch. You, not external sales people, must be in charge of your small business marketing plan.

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.

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.

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.