Practically 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. This fundamental theory is fairly straight-forward, although it contains many specific details.
Firstly, it is a very rare case that a business can offer a product or service that is truly unique and cannot be supplied by anyone else. This means that your company will be contesting with other businesses that sell a similar product and you will both be trying to make money from the same shoppers, who only want to spend their cash once.
Marketing is the main tool used by modern organisations to draw potential customers to do business with them and not with their competitors. It is a very extensive topic that is influenced by a great number of internal and external variables, but when done well it can be the single business practice that could make or break a corporation.
So where should you start when constructing a marketing strategy for your own company? Well, each situation is different, and each industry will have its own set of strengths 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 framework.
The Marketing Mix
The marketing mix was a term that was first coined in 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 simple, blunt-edged business technique, but rather a delicate balance of different elements of business operations. 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 personalised and efficient marketing system.
There are multiple income channels for balloon helium kit products so our organisation used marketing ideas to open new routes to our customers.
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 business will be selling, 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 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 manufacturing department creates a product 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.
Consider the computer software market as an example. There are many established brands of both operating system as well as software application products on the market already, and because the market is relatively well saturated it would be very tough (and expensive) to “take on the big boys”. So how could the principles of the marketing mix help in this circumstance?
Rather than developing an operating system and then trying 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 feasible it would be to manufacture and sell them. By being aware of the marketing mix early on in your product development period you can prevent business dead-ends at a later stage.
Once your products have been fashioned and created it is still a vital 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 forms one of the fundamental skills of the product part of the marketing mix pie.
A different 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 currently in the market, or to make your brand new product attractive to as many customers 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.
One of the most recent forms of public marketing is by means of websites which offer versatile and accessible means to target potential consumers.
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 top price that your customers would pay (although that can be a useful tool to use), but rather using the price of your products as a strategic tool designed to achieve any specific targets your business has. The potential advantages of an effective pricing plan are surprisingly large!
Although it may seem obvious, it’s still worth pointing out that price has always been, and likely always will be, one of the crucial factors that shoppers 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. In fact a price that is too low can sometimes turn buyers away.
There are many questions that you need to ask yourself while devising a good pricing plan, key amongst which are the price sensitivity of your customers, what your rivals 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 also penetration pricing. These are outlined below.
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. By using this method as part of a pre-ordering strategy, a company can help to smooth its own cash 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 rewards can be earned long into the future. It can be a high risk strategy, but when employed correctly it can create revenue streams for many years to come. When setting a price for penetration it is still essential 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 one 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 produce or carry out.
Before our company began researching online promoting hand wavers did not appear an clear choice of key phrase to use as our primary target.
Place
Place is the part of the marketing mix that is often not addressed by companies, but it’s still a significant part of selling your product effectively. In a nutshell, it describes the method in which you provide your product to your consumer, and consequently how you collect money from them.
The most typical implications of place-based marketing are the physical locations in which your goods are sold. For the majority of consumer products, this involves the distribution network between your production plants and retailers and other outlets around the country. Since distribution of a physical product costs money it is important to identify your own priorities and modify your distribution network appropriately.
With the growing use of the Internet by your prospective customers, marketing strategies have had to take into account how they use the Internet to help distribute their products. By using the Internet as a place 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 huge pool of potential customers.
Promotion
When you say the word “marketing”, many people immediately think of the promotional side 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 can be an expensive undertaking it is often an important 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 customers. With the coming 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 door. The potential for individualised advertising has never been so great.
Another important part of promotion involves branding, which may not necessarily yield more product sales directly, but goes back to one of the initial purposes of marketing; getting customers to choose your product over those of your competitors.
Putting it into Practice
As previously mentioned every business is unique and will have different marketing requirements. 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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