Nearly every company on the planet sets out with the primary objective of earning money. This is usually done by producing some form of product, or offering a service, and then charging people money for it. This fundamental principle is fairly straight-forward, although it contains many specific details.
First of all, it is a very rare case where a company can offer a product or service that is genuinely unique and cannot be provided by anybody else. This means that your business will be competing with other businesses that sell a similar item and you will both be trying to earn money from the same customers, who only want to spend their money once.
Marketing is the primary tool used by modern organisations to draw prospective customers to do business with them and not with their rivals. It is a very extensive topic that is affected by a great deal of internal and external variables, but when done well it can be the one business practise that could make or break a company.
So where should you start when creating a marketing strategy for your own business? Well, every situation is different, and every company will have its own set of strengths and flaws that must be taken into consideration, but there is a marketing principle that can be applied to almost any corporation to be used as a marketing platform. It is called the “Marketing Mix”.
The Marketing Mix
The marketing mix was a term that was first coined during the 1950′s and is an expression that is used to describe the fundamental building blocks of any marketing strategy. It reflects the fact that marketing is not a simple, blunt-edged business technique, but rather a delicate balance of different aspects of business functions. It got its name since it is similar to the ingredients checklist for a recipe.
The term was later built upon to include the concept of “four P’s” that described the essential elements of the marketing mix. The formalisation of these P’s made it very easy for business managers and marketers to swiftly associate the elements of marketing to the strengths of their own organisations, and by doing so could very rapidly create a tailored and effective marketing plan. The four P’s are Product, Price, Place and Promotion.
This marketing style is not limited to tangible products, other services such as headache Ruddington therapies may benefit via fresh marketing ideas or a new point of view.
Product
Whilst every element 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 selling, and at the end of the day it is the reason that buyers are going to spend money with you. If this part is not adequately managed then your organisation will find it hard to make it through.
Many people do not think that marketing has any place to play when it comes to the actual product that your business is selling. In fact, the common train of thought very often bears the exact opposite sentiment. Surely it should be the other way around – your production department creates a product for sale and then it is the job of the marketing department to find ways to sell it, right? This is not necessarily the case.
Take the computer software market as an example. There are many well-known brands of both operating system as well as software application products in the marketplace already, and since the market is fairly well saturated it would be incredibly tough (and expensive) to “take on the big boys”. So how can the principles of the marketing mix assist in this circumstance?
Rather than developing an operating system and then attempting to craft a marketing strategy to rival the likes of Microsoft and Apple, it would be more effective to look at what sorts of product are desired in the current marketplace, and how viable it would be to manufacture and sell them. By being aware of the marketing mix early on in your product development cycle you can avoid business dead-ends at a later stage.
Once your goods have been fashioned and created it is still a critical 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’. The skill is called product differentiation and is one of the fundamental skills of the product part of the marketing mix cake.
Another form of this part of the marketing mix is known as product variation and is generally used to either prolong the lifecycle of a product already in the market, or to make your new product attractive to as many consumers as possible.
The car 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 goods in an extremely competitive marketplace. Although these companies may have substantial marketing budgets, the same concepts can be applied to all businesses.
To preserve a standard corporate image a business ought to update their own portal an example is gas electricity price comparison who echo colourings, text and also graphics associated with their branding.
Price
Another key factor in the marketing mix concerns the price of your products or services. This isn’t a simple case of performing market research to figure out the highest price that your customers would pay (although that can be a useful tool to use), but rather making use of the price of your products as a strategic tool designed to achieve any specific targets your business has.
Although it may seem obvious, it’s still worth pointing out that price has always been, and probably always will be, one of the crucial factors that customers take into account when they are making a purchase. It is also worth noting that customers don’t constantly consider the lowest price to be the best value.
There are many questions that you need to ask yourself when devising a good pricing strategy, 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 however, pricing can be covered by two main principals; price skimming and penetration pricing.
Price skimming
The main idea driving price skimming is to make as much cash as possible from the segment of the market which is price-insensitive and will be prepared to spend a large amount of money to get a product or service early on.
This pricing technique is very often used in the consumer electronics market where customers will often eagerly await the release of a new mobile phone or computer games console. Makers could set almost any price they wanted to and there would still be a loyal core 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 monetary benefits can be earned long into the future. It can be a risky strategy, but when used correctly it can create revenue streams for many years to come. When establishing a price for penetration it is still important to not give a bad impression of your product by aiming for too low a number.
Yet another thing to keep in mind is that “price” is the only part of the marketing mix that will generate earnings for a business. The other members of the four P’s will all cost money to produce or undertake. So it is even more vital to get your pricing strategy right.
Before our company began researching on-line promoting relating to fleece body warmers there did not seem an clear choice of keyword to use as our main target.
Place
Place is the portion of the marketing mix that is often disregarded by companies, but it’s still a significant part of selling your product effectively. In short, it describes the method in which you deliver your product to your customer, and consequently how you receive money from them. It can be a great marketing approach when applied appropriately.
The most typical ramifications of place-based marketing are the physical locations in which your goods are sold. For the majority of consumer products, this includes the distribution network between your manufacturing plants and retailers or other outlets around the world. Since distribution of a physical product costs money it is crucial to identify your own priorities and modify your distribution network accordingly.
With the increasing use of the Internet by your prospective customers, marketing strategies have had to consider how they use the Internet to help distribute their products. By using the Internet as a point of contact (or even as a whole distribution route in download-based markets such as MP3s) companies are now able to reach out to a huge pool of possible customers.
Promotion
When you say the word “marketing”, most people instantly 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 tool, and whilst it might be a costly undertaking it is often an important one.
Advertising is one of the most typical forms of promotion. Classically it would be done by posting on billboards, producing 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 witnessed a great increase in promotion via e-mail and the Internet, or simply as targeted advertising material posted through your front door. The potential for individualised advertising has never been so great.
Another significant part of promotion involves branding, which will 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 rivals.
Putting it into Practise
As previously mentioned every business is unique and will have different marketing needs. By using a mixture of the four P’s discussed above you can take a good view of your own marketing plan.
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