Making your marketing dollar go further

Nobody wants to waste their money in a business because owning a business is all about earning money and making a profit. What this means for your business is that you want to do everything that you can to make the money you do have to spend on expenses go further, including the money you have set aside for your marketing budget.

Here are the steps you will need to follow to ensure that you can make your marketing dollar go further.

Step one:

You will need to determine who your target group is for customers. To do this you are going to want to sit down with a few other members of management and brainstorm ideas about what you think the perfect customer would be. You want to include all of the details like age and race, but you also want to include things like social class and political views. The more information you have the better because you will be able to narrow down your target group to the smallest detail. When coming up with this information you want to think about whom you designed the product for and who would benefit from using your product.

Step two:

Once you have come up with some basic facts about your ideal customer you will need to purchase some direct mailing lists. These lists will provide you with the name and addresses of the people who are in your target market. In order to get specific people you will need to provide the company with some basic criteria that you are looking for, such as age and race or even social class. You can find the lists at numerous places online, how much you pay for the list will depend on the company you choose.

Step three:

If you do not want to pay for a direct mailing list, you can create your own mailing list by having questionnaires for people to fill out. You can place these questionnaires on your website and offer your customers something in return for registering with your website. You can also go out to malls or other busy locations to ask people to fill out the questionnaires in person. The questionnaires will provide you with specific information on who would use your product, as long as you ask the right type of questions.

Step four:

You want to make sure that when you are putting your marketing tactics into action that you are only directing them towards your target group. This will help you stretch your marketing dollar because you will not be advertising to everybody. By limiting whom you are sending advertisements and other marketing materials to, you will have more money set aside in your marketing budget. You also will be saving time and energy because you won't be wasting it on people who are not interested in what you have to sell. Target marketing focuses on a group of people that is interested in your product or a group that has a use for your product.

Step five:

You will need to go back and evaluate your marketing tactics to ensure that they are performing to certain standards. Before you can go back and evaluate your marketing tactics, you will need to set up some testing standards so you can test the tactics to ensure that they are meeting the goals. If your marketing tactics are not working you, need to make any adjustments necessary, so that you are not wasting money on tactics that are not providing you with results.

To get your marketing dollar to go further you will need to constantly evaluate your marketing tactics, if they are not performing as expected you will need to make any major or minor changes to get them up to standards.