If you want to improve your marketing results...

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By Rich Dusky

Whether you're a small business owner or a marketing manager for a larger company, we've all made the same mistakes. You know the scenario all too well. A sales representative meets with you to discuss advertising in their newspaper, magazine, the yellow pages, or TV and radio, or maybe you were looking into a new web site or a direct mail program. Either way, you end up investing your marketing dollars, hoping it will make a difference in your business. The truth is that many times, this money ends up being wasted, when it could have been more effectively spent. Why? Because, the decision was probably made on your gut feeling, or based on information the sales person did or did not tell you. Many times I see clients who invest in marketing initiatives that are not clearly in line with their core audience, or the initiative does indeed reach their market, but they overspend because they are also paying for an excess audience that does not fit their market.

Remove the guesswork
The good news is that you don't have to guess when spending money on marketing and advertising. Effective marketing is much like a recipe. It takes more than one ingredient, such as an advertisement, to make the cake. Unfortunately, there are too many marketing options/ingredients to choose from such as web sites, search engine optimization, ads in publications, e-mail marketing, radio, TV, brochures, direct mail, referral programs, loyalty programs, yellow pages, the list goes on and on.

Know before spending
A marketing plan will make the choices very simple, because from the first phase of the planning process you will have clearly defined how your business is positioned in the market, who your core audience is in your target market, along with the key characteristics that make up your core customer. You will also know what your budget will be for your marketing efforts.

Now, armed with this new info from your marketing plan, your marketing decisions become simple since you know exactly what you are looking to achieve, and you can ask the advertising rep for specific details to determine if what the rep is selling meets all the requirements of your desired target market. If their answers are not in line with your target, then there is no reason to spend your marketing dollars with them. It is that simple.

Easy and essential
A marketing plan is important, because it will help you spend your marketing dollars correctly and avoid being misled into wasting money on the wrong marketing efforts. Too often, I meet with clients who don't realize how easy and essential market planning is.

While our company develops marketing plans for clients who do not have the time to do it themselves, most of you can save money by creating your own plan. The end result of your plan strategies should be to create a marketing mix made up of the tools that have the greatest impact on your target audience. Once each of those tools are defined, the next step is to integrate them into your marketing in a way that has a continuous impact on your targeted audience.

Marketing mix in action
For instance, your targeted prospects may have been impacted by an article about your product in the women's journal (great example of target focus). Since the article is what we call permission based, it has more equity with the reader. A few weeks later, they may have been searching the internet on a topic relative to your product and found you because you invested money into search engine optimization, which aligned your site with the search key words the prospect used. Also, your web site might have been redesigned in a format that leads the prospects further, maybe to request info or sign up for a newsletter. You may have even invested in an e-mail marketing tool that sent a personal response to the prospect for having recently visited your site. Later on, the prospects may see a billboard ad.

At any of these points in time, they may not yet have a need for your products or services. However, because you have a clearly defined target market from your plan, and you communicated through mediums that are consistent with the behaviors of your target market, a synergy is created from the combination of tools that touched this prospect. From that point on, it's all a piece of cake. The need for your product arises, and you are positioned properly in their mind as the solution.