Marketing Goals & Budgets

While technology has made precision marketing easier, for many SMEs it’s still a grey area - Cameron Bayley asks experts how they use research and strategy to target customers and make a marketing budget work to the max.

Are your marketing dollars hitting the mark? Sharon Williams, founder of marketing communications company Taurus Marketing, says industry professionals equate a marketing strategy with a shooting range. The machine gun v rifle theory sums it up: if you’re using a rifle you’re aiming for one beer bottle and can take it out with one shot, whereas if you’re using a machine gun you’ll be using a lot of bullets and hoping that one makes contact.

"And that’s silly," says Williams, "because you’ve wasted a whole lot of energy."

According to Roger James, chairman of the Australian Marketing Institute, one of the biggest mistakes SMEs make is not defining the target of their marketing strategy and budget. "People don’t try to think through in a logical and analytical way," he says. "They’ve no idea what they’ve done, they have no idea whether it did them any good. They’ve spent the money and it’s disappeared down a black hole. So it’s maybe the best investment they have ever made or it’s the worst. They don’t know."

It all comes down to defining your customer—the person who walks into your store, logs onto your website, or needs your product or service to be shown to them. "I think it’s tempting for small business to accept any work that comes through the door and think that any business that crawls in is good business," says Williams. She admits that when a business is in the start-up phase, this is fine. However, once you’re up and running it’s important to move on from this. "You have to go back to the basics," says James. "You say ‘what are people buying from me?’."

Steve Bohan, from communications agency Oxygene, says for most businesses it comes down to two factors when determining what your business does, and how it differs to others. You either offer a unique function or product, or you have an emotional approach that separates you from the rest (the ‘we try harder’ or ‘we offer better service’ tack) or it could be a bit of both. Once you know your message and who it’s aimed at, from there you can go about finding out how your customer hunts you down, which in turn will help you know how to get your brand to them.

Of course, one of the most basic ways to target your customer is by geographical area, which means using channels such as local newspapers, bus shelters, and other communal outdoor sites. However, if this is not suitable for your business, or you want to take it a step further, there are ways of finding customers who fit the profile you’ve decided you want to aim for.

The best option, Williams advises, is to come up with a database that you can tackle through a variety of methods such as direct mail, phone calls, emails, etc.

Bohn says it’s not difficult to obtain a list of potential clients. "There’s a whole range of companies out there that sell lists," he says. Entering "marketing lists" or similar into an internet search engine will bring up a range of places who trade lists of data. Acquiring a list, says Bohan, allows you to pinpoint the person who is potentially going to be interested in your product or service. "So you can talk directly to a specific target, instead of trying to speak to the whole world," he says. "If you can drill down and identify your target market then you can actually speak to them in a more meaningful way."