All small business owners know that marketing can be expensive and can quickly get out of control. This doesn't have to happen. Effective marketing can be targeted, very successful and cost a small fraction of what you spent before. Let's take a look at effective marketing, but first let's look at what it is not. No one can market to everyone. This is too costly and doesn't generate enough sales to pay for itself. Effective marketing is not general and does not include drop-in traffic. Drop-in traffic includes the potential customers who happen to find a site or store and purchase something.
After spending time on what effective marketing is not, let's spend time on what it is and how the small business owner can succeed.
Define Your Target Customer Focus
Where do your customers live and work? How old are they? Where do they shop? How much do they make? Do they have children, and what ages are they? Are they individuals or a company? To what size of company would you sell? Is the company local or national? Once these questions have been answered, small business owners have more understanding of who their customers really are and where they might be.
Determine Customer Psychographics
What are the values of your customers? Do they have certain lifestyles or interests that require your product or service? What do your customers think about issues? Add the answers of these questions to the ones above, and the small business owner is starting on the path to creating effective marketing and knowing the customers and who they really are.
Do Research to Find Out Who Your Customers Are
Where might the small business owner get some of these answers? If you have lived a long time in a particular area, you might already have some answers. But to most, the answers may not be so easy. Below is a list of sites the owner might visit along with other suggestions on accumulating the information for effective marketing.
- Put a questionnaire together and politely ask customers in a shopping mall that frequent a type of store similar to yours. Always check with the mall manager before doing this.
- Put a list of questions on doors with pre-paid return postage in areas you think some of your customers live.
- Look at your competition to see what customers they are targeting and how.
- Go to census.gov.
- Look at BEA.gov.
- Call your local chamber of commerce for information on local businesses and people.
- Shop in an area or store like yours to see how the store is laid out and who frequents it.
- Call a shop or business like yours in a different area that will not compete with you and ask your questions.
After collecting all of this information and defining where your customer shops, lives and works, the small business owner can now target his marketing specifically to his customer. Put effective, targeted ads in places that your customers shop and in magazines/newspapers your customers read. By doing so, you can improve the odds of reaching your distinct customers and increasing your business.
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