Nearly every business on the planet sets out with the main objective of earning money. This is generally done by manufacturing some form of product, or offering a service, and then charging customers 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 that a company can offer a product or service that is genuinely unique and cannot be provided by anyone 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 shoppers, who only want to spend their money once.

Marketing is the main tool used by modern businesses to draw prospective customers to do business with them and not with their competitors. It is a very extensive topic that is affected by a great deal of internal and external variables, but when done right it can be the one business practice that can make or break a corporation. Any time spent on marketing will reap rewards, although spending this time correctly can yield extraordinary results.

So where should you begin when constructing a marketing strategy for your own company? Well, every situation is different, and each industry will have its own set of strengths and weaknesses that must be taken into consideration, but there is a marketing rule that can be applied to almost any corporation to be used as a marketing framework. It is known as 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 express the fundamental building blocks of any marketing strategy. It demonstrates the fact that marketing is not a straightforward, blunt-edged business technique, but rather a delicate balance of different aspects of business operations.

The term was later developed to include the concept of “four P’s” that described the critical elements of the marketing mix. The formalisation of these P’s made it very clear for business managers and marketers to swiftly associate the elements of marketing to the strengths of their own companies, and by doing so could very quickly create a personalised and effective marketing strategy.

Our organisation created a marketing approach for our own cotton mattress protector products by applying the marketing and advertising mix to identify our marketing strengths.

Product

Whilst every element of the marketing mix is a necessity, the “product” element mentioned as one of the four P’s is possibly the most critical of all. It identifies 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.

Many people don’t 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 precise opposite sentiment. Surely it should be the other way around – your production department creates an item for sale and then it is the job of the marketing department to discover ways to sell it, right? This is not always 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 solutions in the marketplace already, and since the market is relatively well saturated it would be incredibly tough (and expensive) to “take on the big boys”.

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 sought after 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 cycle you can prevent business dead-ends at a later time.

Once your products have been designed and created it is still a critical skill to be able to objectively review your own products to identify the reasons why a customer should buy your product rather than a competitors’. The technique is called product differentiation and is one of the basic skills of the product part of the marketing mix pie.

Another form of this part of the marketing mix is known as product variation and is generally used to either lengthen the lifecycle of a product currently in the market, or to make your new product attractive to as many consumers as possible.

The car industry uses this technique very effectively by offering different engines, trim packages and interior options with the cars that they offer. They use the marketing mix to great effect to sell their own goods in an incredibly competitive marketplace.

With the rise of the Internet and ecommerce companies find their own sitesincluding lace tablecloths may be used for a direct sales channel and distribution system.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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 determine the highest 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 goals your company 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 do not constantly consider the cheapest price to be the best price. In fact a price that is too low can often turn buyers away.

There are many questions that you need to ask yourself while devising a good pricing strategy, key amongst which are the price sensitivity of your clients, what your competitors are doing and how can pricing boost your own profits. From a strategy point of view though, pricing can be covered by two main principals; price skimming and penetration pricing.

Price skimming

The principal idea driving price skimming is to make as much cash as possible from the segment of the market which is price-insensitive and are going to be prepared to spend a large amount of money to receive a product or service early on. Not only can this technique yield great economic advantages, but it can also advertise an exclusive and high quality image of your product.

This pricing strategy 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. Manufacturers could set nearly any price they wanted to and there would still be a loyal base of customers that would pay it. By making use of this method as part of a pre-ordering strategy, a company can help to smooth its own money flow.

Penetration pricing

Penetration pricing is at the opposite 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 made long into the future. It can be a high risk strategy, but when used correctly it can setup revenue streams for many years to come. When setting a price for penetration it is still essential to not give a poor impression of your product by aiming for too low a number.

Another thing to bear in mind is that “price” is the one 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 produce or undertake. So it is even more vital to get your pricing strategy right.

Grabbing any of the on-line search market is very beneficial, so choose a phrase, just like helium ballons then assess if the phrase has an ample search market for your purposes.

Place

Place is the part of the marketing mix that’s often overlooked by companies, but it is still a significant part of selling your product successfully. In a nutshell, it describes the method in which you provide your product to your customer, and subsequently how you receive money from them.

The most typical ramifications of place-based marketing are the physical locations in which your products are sold. For the majority of consumer products, this involves the distribution infrastructure between your production centres and retailers and other outlets around the world. Since distribution of a physical product costs money it is important to determine your own priorities and adapt your distribution network accordingly.

With the growing use of the Internet by your prospective customers, marketing strategies have had to consider how they use the Internet to help deliver their products. By using the Internet as a place of contact (or even as a complete distribution channel in download-based markets such as MP3s) companies are now able to reach out to a large pool of potential customers. Effective positioning of your product or service can therefore yield impressive financial results.

Promotion

When you say the word “marketing”, most people immediately think of the promotional aspect of the marketing mix, although as we have seen, this is merely one branch of a more complete system. Promotion can be used on a very individual basis or as a mass communication instrument, and whilst it can be a costly undertaking it is often an essential one.

Advertising is one of the most typical forms of promotion. Typically it would be done by posting on billboards, creating short clips for TV and radio or by physically handing out flyers or leaflets to potential buyers. With the coming 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 door. The potential for individualised advertising has never been so good.

Another important part of promotion involves branding, which may not necessarily yield more sales directly, but relates back to one of the initial purposes of marketing; getting customers to pick 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 balance of the four P’s discussed above you can take an effective view of your own marketing plan.

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