Practically every company on the planet sets out with the main objective of making money. This is generally 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 intricate details.
Firstly, it is a very rare case that a company can offer a product or service that is genuinely unique and cannot be provided by anybody else. This means that your enterprise will be contesting 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 cash once.
Marketing is the primary tool used by modern organisations to draw potential customers to do business with them and not with their competitors. It is a very broad topic that is affected by a great deal of internal and external variables, but when done well it can be the single business practice that could make or break a company. Any time spent on marketing will reap benefits, although spending this time correctly can yield extraordinary outcomes.
So where should you start when creating a marketing strategy for your own business? Well, each situation is different, and every company 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 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 an expression that is used to describe the fundamental building blocks of any marketing system. It demonstrates the fact that marketing is not a simple, blunt-edged business technique, but rather a subtle balance of different elements of business operations.
The term was later developed 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 company managers and marketers to quickly associate the elements of marketing to the strengths of their own organisations, and by doing so could very rapidly form a customised and efficient marketing plan.
There are multiple sales avenues available to epoxy coatings and our own organisation applied 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 crucial of all. It describes the physical product or intangible service that your business will be offering, and at the end of the day it is the reason that customers are going to spend money with you.
Several 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 precise opposite sentiment. Surely it should be the other way around - your production department creates a product for sale and then it is the task of the marketing department to discover ways to sell it, right?
Consider the computer software market as an example. There are many well-known brands of both operating system and software application products on the market already, and because the market is fairly well saturated it would be incredibly tough (and expensive) to "take on the big boys". So how could 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 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 aware of the marketing mix early on in your product development cycle you can prevent business dead-ends at a later stage.
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 should buy your product rather than a competitors'. The technique is called product differentiation and forms 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 generally used to either extend the lifecycle of a product already in the market, or to make your new product attractive to as many consumers as possible. Again, this technique can be applied at all stages of product development.
The car industry uses this approach 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 extremely competitive marketplace. Although these companies may have huge marketing budgets, the same concepts can be applied to all businesses.
With the rise of the Internet and ecommerce companies see their own sites such as lace tablecloths could be used as 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 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 weapon designed to achieve any particular goals your company has.
Whilst it may seem obvious, it's still worth noting that price has always been, and likely always will be, one of the key factors that customers 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 price. Actually a price that is too low can often turn customers away.
There are many questions that you need to ask yourself when devising a good pricing strategy, key amongst which are the price sensitivity of your clients, 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.
Price skimming
The main idea driving price skimming is to make as much money as possible from the sector of the market which is price-insensitive and are going to be prepared to spend a premium amount of money to receive a product or service early on. Not only can this approach yield great economic benefits, but it can also advertise an exclusive and high quality image of your item.
This pricing strategy is frequently 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 core of customers that would pay it. By making use of this method as part of a pre-ordering strategy, a firm can help to smooth its own money flow.
Penetration pricing
Penetration pricing is at the other end of the pricing spectrum, and is tailored 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 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 poor impression of your product by aiming for too low a figure.
Another thing to bear 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 create or carry out. So it is even more vital to get your pricing technique right.
Before our company started looking into online promoting relating to plumbing apprenticeships there didn't appear the clear choice of keyword to use as our primary focus.
Place
Place is the component of the marketing mix that is often overlooked by companies, but it is still a significant part of selling your product successfully. In a nutshell, it describes the way in which you provide your product to your customer, and subsequently how you collect money from them. It can be a great marketing technique when applied correctly.
The most common 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 network between your production centres and shops and 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 appropriately. This is the main application of this part of the marketing mix.
With the growing use of the Internet by your potential 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 channel in download-based markets such as MP3s) firms are now able to reach out to a huge pool of possible customers.
Promotion
When you mention the word "marketing", most people instantly 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 used on a very individual basis or as a mass communication instrument, and whilst it might be a costly undertaking it is often an essential one.
Advertising is one of the most common forms of promotion. Typically it would be done by posting on billboards, creating short clips for TV and radio or by physically distributing flyers or leaflets to potential customers. With the arrival of the information age we have seen a great increase in promotion via e-mail and the Internet, or just as targeted advertising materials posted through your front 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 preliminary functions of marketing; getting customers to pick 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 reviewed above you can take an effective view of your own marketing plan.
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