London, UK -- (SBWIRE) -- 05/19/2009 -- Despite the rhetoric about understanding their unique customer needs, many small businesses waste time and resource sending a generic message out to an ill-defined target market. But simply by investing time and energy in understanding their customers, they could achieve much better results. Marketing Donut, a new small business website backed by Google and Royal Mail, explains how.

Successful marketing is about getting the right message to enough of the right people. Every time the wrong message goes to the wrong person it’s a wasted effort. So of course, the better you are able to target your marketing, the better your return on investment. That’s why marketing segmentation or target audience analysis is an important step in developing any kind of marketing strategy.

So where does the small business person start? The good news is that many small business people already have a huge amount of information about their customers, both in their business records and inside their heads. It’s simply a matter of assessing the evidence to ask questions like:

• Who is a customer?
• Who was a customer?
• Who might be a customer?
• What else might a customer need?

These kind of questions help you to develop customer profiles, a clear picture of who you are selling to, what they are looking for and what will motivate them to say ‘yes’. In other words, the essential ingredients of a marketing strategy.

Understanding your customers and the different buyer personas associated with your business is something that requires an investment not of money but time. In the current economic climate, where every penny counts, it’s an investment well worth making.

The Marketing Donut is at http://www.marketingdonut.co.uk

Further information:
Visit http://marketingdonutblog.co.uk
Contact Mick Dickinson, BHP Information Solutions, tel: 0117 904 2224 or info@marketingdonut.co.uk