Nearly every company on the planet sets out with the primary objective of making money. This is usually done by producing some form of product, or offering a service, and then charging customers money for it.
First of all, it is a very rare case where a company can offer a product or service that is truly unique and cannot be provided by anybody else. This means that your business will be competing with other businesses that sell a similar product and you will both be trying to earn money from the same customers, who only want to spend their money once. So how can you boost the chances of them spending money with you?
Marketing is the main tool used by modern businesses to draw potential customers to do business with them and not with their rivals. It is a very extensive topic that is influenced by a great deal of internal and external factors, but when done right it can be the one business practice that could make or break a corporation. Any time spent on marketing will reap rewards, although spending this time efficiently can yield extraordinary outcomes.
So where should you start when constructing a marketing strategy for your own company? Well, every situation is different, and every industry will have its own set of advantages and weak points that must be taken into consideration, but there is a marketing principle that can be applied to almost any company to be used as a marketing platform. It is called the “Marketing Mix”.
The Marketing Mix
The marketing mix was a phrase that was first coined during the 1950′s and is a phrase that is used to express the fundamental building blocks of any marketing system. It reflects the fact that marketing is not a straightforward, blunt-edged business technique, but rather a subtle balance of different elements of business functions.
The term was later developed to include the idea of “four P’s” that described the essential elements of the marketing mix. The formalisation of these P’s made it very easy for company managers and marketers to quickly associate the elements of marketing to the strengths of their own companies, and by doing so could very rapidly form a customised and efficient marketing strategy.
Our company created a promotional strategy for our event management services by making use of the advertising and marketing mix to identify our marketing advantages.
Product
Whilst every aspect of the marketing mix is a requirement, the “product” element mentioned as one of the four P’s is possibly the most crucial of all. It describes the physical product or intangible service that your company will be offering, and at the end of the day it is the reason that buyers are going to spend money with you.
Several people do not think that marketing has any role to play when it comes to the actual product that your company is selling. In fact, the typical train of thought very often bears the exact opposite sentiment. Surely it should be the opposite way around – your production department creates an item for sale and then it is the job of the marketing department to find ways to sell it, right?
Take the computer software market as an example. There are many well-known brands of both operating system and software application solutions in the marketplace already, and because the market is fairly well saturated it would be very tough (and expensive) to “take on the big boys”. So how can the principles of the marketing mix assist in this situation?
Rather than developing an operating system and then attempting to craft a marketing strategy to take on the likes of Microsoft and Apple, it would be far more effective to look at what types of product are desired in the current marketplace, and how feasible it would be to manufacture and sell them. By being mindful of the marketing mix early on in your product development period you can avoid business dead-ends at a later time.
Once your goods have been fashioned and created it is still a vital skill to be able to objectively evaluate your own products to identify the reasons that a customer should buy your product rather than a competitors’.
Another form of this part of the marketing mix is called product variation and is generally used to either prolong the lifecycle of a product currently in the market, or to make your new product attractive to as many customers as possible.
The motor industry uses this approach very effectively by offering different engines, trim packages and interior options with the cars that they sell. They use the marketing mix to great effect to sell their own products in an incredibly competitive marketplace.
As part of our own promotion plan, our business very carefully studied what made our goods stand out from the masses.
It is incredibly common to come across a significant amount of conference production companies that plan for production and sales but not adequately for marketing.
Price
Another important factor in the marketing mix concerns the price of your products or services. This isn’t a simple case of carrying out market research to figure out the top price that your customers would pay (although that can be a handy tool to use), but rather making use of the price of your products as a strategic tool designed to achieve any particular targets your company has. The potential advantages of an effective pricing strategy are surprisingly large!
Although it may seem obvious, it is still worth pointing out that price has always been, and probably always will be, one of the key factors that shoppers take into account when they are making a purchase. It is also worth noting that customers do not constantly consider the lowest price to be the best value.
There are many questions that you need to ask yourself while devising a good pricing plan, key among which are the price sensitivity of your customers, what your competitors are doing and how can pricing maximise your own profits. From a strategy point of view though, pricing can be covered by two main principals; price skimming and also penetration pricing. These are outlined below.
Price skimming
The main idea behind price skimming is to make as much cash as possible from the sector of the market which is price-insensitive and will be prepared to spend a premium amount of money to get a product or service early on. Not only can this technique yield excellent financial benefits, but it can also advertise an exclusive and high quality image of your product.
This pricing strategy is frequently used in the consumer electronics industry where customers will often eagerly await the launch of a new mobile phone or computer games console. Manufacturers could set almost any price they wanted to and there would still be a loyal base of customers that would pay it.
Penetration pricing
Penetration pricing is at the other end of the pricing spectrum, and is geared towards gaining a large market share at a short-term cost so that financial benefits can be earned long into the future. It can be a risky strategy, but when employed correctly it can create revenue streams for many years to come.
Yet another thing to bear in mind is that “price” is the only part of the marketing mix that will generate revenue for a business. The other members of the four P’s will all cost money to create or carry out.
Marketing plays a crucial function within our xbox 360 steering wheels reseller plan and shouldn’t be treated as an afterthought.
Place
Place is the portion of the marketing mix that is often disregarded by companies, but it’s still an important part of selling your product successfully. In short, it describes the method in which you deliver your product to your customer, and subsequently how you receive money from them.
The most common implications of place-based marketing are the physical venues in which your products are sold. For the majority of consumer products, this includes the distribution infrastructure between your manufacturing centres and retailers or other outlets around the world. Since distribution of a physical product costs money it is important to identify your own priorities and adapt your distribution network accordingly.
With the growing use of the Internet by your prospective customers, marketing methods have had to take into account how they use the Internet to help deliver their products. By using the Internet as a point of contact (or even as an entire distribution channel in download-based markets such as MP3s) firms are now able to reach out to a large pool of potential customers.
Promotion
When you mention the word “marketing”, most people immediately think of the promotional aspect of the marketing mix, although as we have seen, this is only one branch of a more comprehensive system. Promotion can be employed on a very individual basis or as a mass communication instrument, and whilst it can be an expensive undertaking it is often an essential one. The key concern of promotion is to deliver a certain message that will improve sales.
Advertising is one of the most typical forms of promotion. Classically it would be done by posting on billboards, creating short clips for TV and radio or by physically distributing flyers or leaflets to potential buyers. With the arrival of the information age we have seen a great increase in promotion via e-mail and the Internet, or simply as targeted advertising material posted through your door.
Another significant part of promotion involves branding, which may not necessarily yield more product sales directly, but goes back to one of the preliminary purposes of marketing; getting customers to choose your product over those of your competitors.
Putting it into Practice
As previously mentioned each business is different and will have different marketing needs. By using a mixture of the four P’s reviewed above you can take a good view of your own marketing plan.
