subject: What You Should Know Before You Market by:Colleen Davis [print this page] Marketing is one process that any business should undertake in order for it to be successful. Even small businesses should consider marketing as their tool to get recognized and remembered. Although it's very costly to advertise, the benefits that marketing provides for the business sure outweighs the resources that the business owner or marketer has invested to it.
Nevertheless, successful marketing just like the ones you have for your printed catalogs can often be wasted because they just don't work the way you want them to. Sadly, you waste tons of time, money and energy creating your collaterals and yet you still don't get the results you wanted. Why is this so? The problem lies on your spending too much time on running the business that you forget to think about growing it through marketing. Even cheap catalog printing can go a long way in generating the leads you need to boost your profits. And the sooner you realize the significance of having an effective marketing campaign such as printed catalogs, the better it will be for your business.
However, running any collateral or creating an e-newsletter, and even posting custom postcards to your target clients is not enough to get you recognized. What you need is to carefully think it out and plan your marketing campaign because people will not open their purses for you just like that. You have to make sure that your efforts are not wasted on a campaign that won't convince your target clients to consider your offer. What you need is a marketing campaign that can get them to spend and entrust their hard-earned money to you.
Know Your Target Market
If you plan to send out your printed catalogs for example to just about everybody and then hope that somebody would pick it up and order from you, then you're just wasting your efforts. Selling to everyone and anyone and praying for the best is an ineffective way to market your products and services.
Instead, you need to qualify your collaterals to complement that of the needs of your target market. And in order for you to do that, you have to know your target market first. Remember that you're not convincing your competition to try you out. Rather, it's your clients and prospects that you need to persuade to spend their money on you. If you can't do that in your collaterals then you better stop advertising altogether because it's a guarantee that your efforts will fail miserably.
If you want to get the results for your marketing even if it's cheap catalog printing, the very first step is to know your clients - who's your target market? What are their needs and wants? How do they spend their money? Knowing your target market will help you plan out and create an ad that would target their specific needs, which in turn can help you provide them with a targeted solution to their problems.
