Practically 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.
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 anyone else. This means that your business will be contesting with other businesses that sell a similar product and you will both be trying to make money from the same customers, who only want to spend their cash once. So how can you boost the chances of them spending money with you?
Marketing is the primary tool used by modern firms to draw potential 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 single business practice that could make or break a company. Any time spent on marketing will reap benefits, although spending this time efficiently can yield extraordinary results.
So where should you begin when constructing a marketing strategy for your own company? Well, every situation is different, and every business will have its own set of advantages 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 in the 1950’s and is a phrase 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 tool, but rather a delicate balance of different elements of business functions. It got its name since it is similar to the ingredients checklist for a recipe.
The term was later developed to include the idea 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 swiftly relate the elements of marketing to the strengths of their own companies, and by doing so could very quickly create a personalised and effective marketing system.
There are several sales avenues for floor prep and coatings so our organisation applied marketing ideas to open new routes to our buyers.
Product
Although every aspect of the marketing mix is a requirement, the “product” element mentioned as one of the four P’s is possibly the most critical 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 customers are going to spend money with you.
Several people do not think that marketing has any role to play when it comes to the physical product that your company is selling. In fact, the typical train of thought very often bears the exact opposite sentiment. Surely it should be the opposite way around – your production department creates a product for sale and then it is the job of the marketing department to discover ways to sell it, right?
Take the computer software market as an example. There are many well-known brands of both operating system and software application products in the marketplace already, and since the market is fairly 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 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 sorts of product are sought after in the current marketplace, and how feasible it would be to produce 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 stage.
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 would buy your product rather than a competitors’. The technique is called product differentiation and is one of the fundamental skills of the product part of the marketing mix pie.
Another 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 brand new product attractive to as many customers 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 good effect to sell their own goods in an extremely competitive marketplace.
It is incredibly difficult to discover a significant number of novelty aprons suppliers who budget for manufacturing and sales as well as adequately for marketing.
Price
Another key factor in the marketing mix relates to the price of your products or services. This is not a simple case of carrying out market research to figure out the highest 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 weapon designed to achieve any specific objectives your business has.
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 shoppers 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. Actually a price that is too low can sometimes turn customers away.
There are many questions that you need to ask yourself when devising a good pricing plan, key among 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 primary principals; price skimming and 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 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 deliver excellent economic benefits, but it can also advertise an exclusive and high quality image of your product.
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. Makers 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 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 financial 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.
Another thing to bear in mind is that “price” is the only 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 essential to get your pricing strategy right.
To optimise our web site for google marketing we selected rice and peas as an aimed 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 short, it describes the method in which you provide your product to your customer, and consequently how you receive money from them. It can be a great marketing technique when used appropriately.
The most common ramifications of place-based marketing are the physical venues in which your goods are sold. For the vast majority of consumer products, this includes 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 adjust your distribution network appropriately. This is the principal use of this part of the marketing mix.
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 point of contact (or even as a complete distribution channel in download-based markets such as MP3s) firms are now able to reach out to a large pool of possible customers.
Promotion
When you say the word “marketing”, many people instantly think of the promotional side 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 instrument, and whilst it may 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 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.
Another important 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 competitors.
Putting it into Practice
As previously mentioned every company is unique 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 strategy.
Sphere: Related Content