Brad Sugars explains that one of the biggest mistakes made in marketing today is putting all of the company’s resources behind bringing new customers into your market and not spending enough time and energy trying to leverage your current customer base.

It is a lot more expensive to try to bring in new customers who are unaware of your brand, than to try and increase your margins on an existing customer base. He believes that as often as 9 times out of 10 the first strategy to employ when evaluating a business model is to raise prices by 10% across the board with the exception of the top one or two product lines.

Brad Sugars research has proven that most businesses do not charge enough for the value of the services they provide. In fact, most of the time the customers would not even notice a 10% price increase.

Brad Sugars thinks that some business owners get awed by the creativity side of marketing and tend to overlook the actual dollars that are driven to the bottom line. At the end of the day, if the marketing program did not increase your profits, it was bad marketing.

Your company needs to test and retest everything to make sure you are maximizing your investment dollars. It is important to take risks and to try different approaches, because you need to determine if a new campaign or promotional idea could get substantially better results than your more traditional methods.

As long as you subject all of your approaches to a consistent methodology - did it make the most money? Then you are doing marketing correctly.

Brad Sugars says that one of the most underutilized marketing tools is that of the customer referral.

There are natural synergies that can occur when two businesses in different industries are going after the same target market.

If you are in an apparel industry targeting women in the age range of 25 to 35, then there are other accessory, automobile, or even service industries that are going after the very same consumer. Brad Sugars believes that more businesses should get together to share customer database information. By working together, both businesses can increase their sales base by leveraging each other’s unique relationship with their customer base.

Brad Sugars believes that even the marketing team is still accountable to deliver a plan that understands the financial impact on the business of its campaigns.

Too often, marketing plans rely too heavily on hype and creativity and do not think through the amount of revenue and profit that needs to flow to the bottom line to justify the initiative.   If you are going to invest $10,000 in a marketing program, then you need to understand exactly how that translates into incremental sales, and how the program will be evaluated to determine if it delivered the necessary bump.

If it exceeds the incremental target, then the program succeeded, if not, then it failed.