Last updated on March 31st, 2016 at 12:46 pm

As a business you can very easily spend a lot of money on marketing, that includes everything from advertising through to exhibitions and websites and sometimes it’s very easy to forget the basic rules of good marketing and throw money at it without thinking.

The primary aim of marketing is to (usually but not always) to get a new customer to use your service or product.  Of course you don’t expect that will happen the first time someone reads a page on your website or sees your advert in the local paper (although that would be nice) but you should treat every advert or page on your website as a step towards the customer making the decision to buy from you.

The other reason for marketing (why we said the aim on marketing is not always to get new customers)

is to reassure existing customers or clients that they made the right decision to buy from you in the first place.  How many of you send out newsletters to existing clients to keep them up to date with your news and new products or services for example or to let existing customers know about other uses that your product has been put to.  One example that I get is from a firm of safety equipment suppliers, they regularly send out newsletters that are topical (talking about grit bins for example when the bad weather is forecast).  This can keep your business in the forefront of the mind of your customer meaning that they may buy from you again or may even tell others about your products or services and encourage them to try them.

But, and it’s a bit but, you also run the risk of reminding customers that are upset with you that the product or service is no good (at least in their eyes) – this means that they are unlikely to buy from you again.  With luck this is all that will happen but it’s possible that they will tell their friends or business colleagues about the bad product or service and in the modern Internet enable society that means that an unhappy customer can tell an awful lot of people in a very short time via email or some sort of social networking site such as twitter, plurk, facebook or linkedin, even if it is done light-heartedly like this tweet I saw recently “Dear USPS, Wales is not in England”

One thing that you must do is to make sure that the service or product that you are selling is not “over-hyped” in your marketing – keep to the facts and reflect what you are selling.  Is your SEO service really guaranteed to get the client to the top of the search engines?  Does your washing powder really get clothes whiter than your competitors?  Are you really serving the best food in Wales (as one of my local restaurants claims)?

And finally…

Remember that to really have effective marketing as a small business (or any size business) you need to be able to monitor the results – we recently booked a pet sitter to look after our animals while we are away later in the year and they got it right with a very simple question “how did you hear of us?”.  Do you ask that simple question of every new customer?