A Guide To Marketing
Wednesday, August 25th, 2010Practically every business on the planet sets out with the main objective of making money. This is generally done by manufacturing 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 intricate details.
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 supplied by anyone else. This means that your enterprise will be contesting with other businesses that sell a similar item and you will both be trying to make money from the same customers, who only want to spend their money once. So how can you improve the chances of them spending money with you?
Marketing is the primary tool used by modern firms 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 factors, but when done well it can be the one business practice that could make or break a corporation. Any time spent on marketing will reap benefits, although spending this time correctly can yield incredible results.
So where should you begin when creating a marketing strategy for your own business? Well, each 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 principle that can be applied to almost any corporation to be used as a marketing platform.
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 system. It reflects the fact that marketing is not a straightforward, blunt-edged business tool, but rather a delicate balance of different elements of business functions.
The term was later built upon to include the idea of “four P’s” that described the critical elements of the marketing mix. The formalisation of these P’s made it very clear for company managers and marketers to swiftly relate the elements of marketing to the strengths of their own companies, and by doing so could very rapidly form a customised and effective marketing plan. The four P’s are Product, Price, Place and Promotion.
Our organisation excels in providing girls duvet cover services and while we all thought our marketing plan was adequate we have seen improvements since using marketing mix ideas.
Product
Whilst every aspect of the marketing mix is a requirement, the “product” element mentioned as one of the four P’s is perhaps the most crucial of all. It identifies the physical product or intangible service that your company will be selling, and at the end of the day it is the reason that customers are going to spend money with you. If this element is not correctly managed then your organisation will find it hard to make it through.
Many people do not think that marketing has any role 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 opposite way around – your manufacturing department creates a product for sale and then it is the task of the marketing department to discover ways to sell it, right?
Take the computer software market as an example. There are many established brands of both operating system as well as software application solutions in the market already, and since the market is relatively well saturated it would be very tough (and expensive) to “take on the big boys”. So how can the principles of the marketing mix help in this circumstance?
Rather than creating an operating system and then attempting to craft a marketing strategy to take on 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 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 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 would buy your product rather than a competitors’. The skill is called product differentiation and is one of the basic skills of the product part of the marketing mix pie.
A different form of this part of the marketing mix is called product variation and is typically used to either lengthen the lifecycle of a product already in the market, or to make your brand new product attractive to as many customers as possible. Once again, this method can be applied at all stages of product development.
The motor industry uses this technique very effectively by offering various 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 extremely competitive marketplace.
To maintain a standard corporate image a company should redesign their website an example we found was easy one pot recipes who reflect colourings, fonts and images associated with their branding.
Price
Another important factor in the marketing mix relates to the price of your products or services. This isn’t a simple case of carrying out market research to determine the top price that your customers would pay (although that can be a handy tool to use), but rather using 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 substantial!
Whilst it may seem obvious, it’s still worth noting that price has always been, and likely 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 always consider the cheapest price to be the best price.
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 boost your own profits. From a strategy point of view though, pricing can be covered by two primary principals; price skimming and also penetration pricing.
Price skimming
The principal idea behind price skimming is to make as much money as possible from the segment of the market which is price-insensitive and are going to be willing to spend a premium amount of money to get a product or service early on.
This pricing strategy is frequently used in the consumer electronics market 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 opposite end of the pricing spectrum, and is tailored towards gaining a large market share at a short-term cost so that financial benefits can be made long into the future. It can be a high risk strategy, but when used correctly it can create revenue streams for many years to come.
Another thing to keep in mind is that “price” is the only part of the marketing mix that will generate income for a business. The other members of the four P’s will all cost money to create or carry out. So it is even more vital to get your pricing strategy right.
To optimize our web site for google search marketing we chose buy childrens bean bags as a targeted key phrase because it relates to our business and what we offer.
Place
Place is the component of the marketing mix that’s often overlooked by companies, but it is still an important part of selling your product effectively. In a nutshell, it describes the way in which you provide your product to your customer, and consequently how you receive money from them.
The most common ramifications of place-based marketing are the physical venues in which your products are sold. For the vast 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 identify your own priorities and alter your distribution network appropriately. This is the main use of this part of the marketing mix.
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 place 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 large pool of possible customers. Effective positioning of your product or service can therefore yield impressive economic results.
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 merely 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 an expensive undertaking it is often an essential one.
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 witnessed a great increase in promotion via e-mail and the Internet, or just 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 sales directly, but goes back to one of the initial purposes of marketing; getting customers to choose your product over those of your rivals.
Putting it into Practice
As previously mentioned each company is different and will have different marketing requirements. By using a mixture of the four P’s discussed above you can take an effective view of your own marketing plan.
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