Practically every business 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. This fundamental principle is fairly straight-forward, although it contains many specific details.
First of all, it is a very rare case that a business can offer a product or service that is genuinely unique and cannot be supplied by anyone else. This means that your enterprise 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 cash once. So how can you improve the chances of them spending money with you?
Marketing is the primary tool used by modern businesses to draw prospective customers to do business with them and not with their rivals. It is a very extensive topic that is affected by a great number of internal and external variables, but when done well it can be the one business practise that can make or break a corporation.
So where should you begin when constructing a marketing strategy for your own company? Well, every situation is different, and each business will have its own set of advantages and weak points 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 phrase that was first coined in the 1950’s and is a phrase that is used to express the fundamental building blocks of any marketing strategy. It reflects the fact that marketing is not a straightforward, blunt-edged business tool, but rather a delicate balance of different elements of business operations.
The term was later built upon 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 easy for business managers and marketers to quickly 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 plan. The four P’s are Product, Price, Place and Promotion.
There are multiple income avenues available to Ruddington chiropractor so our own company used marketing ideas to open new routes to our customers.
Product
Although every aspect 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 selling, and at the end of the day it is the reason that buyers are going to spend money with you. If this element is not adequately managed then your organisation will find it hard to survive.
Several 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 typical train of thought very often bears the exact 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 find ways to sell it, right? This is not necessarily the case.
Take the computer software market as an example. There are many established brands of both operating system and software application products 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”. So how can the principles of the marketing mix assist in this circumstance?
Rather than creating an operating system and then attempting to craft a marketing strategy to rival the likes of Microsoft or Apple, it would be far more effective to look at what sorts of product are desired in the current marketplace, and how viable it would be to manufacture and sell them. By being mindful of the marketing mix early on in your product development period you can prevent business dead-ends at a later stage.
Once your goods have been fashioned and created it is still a critical skill to be able to objectively review your own products to recognise the reasons that 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.
A different form of this part of the marketing mix is known as product variation and is typically 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 motor 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 great effect to sell their own products in an incredibly competitive marketplace.
To preserve a standard corporate image a business ought to update their own website an example we found was Maytag refrigerators which reflect colours, fonts and images associated with their own branding.
Price
Another important factor in the marketing mix concerns 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 useful tool to use), but rather using the price of your products as a strategic tool designed to achieve any particular objectives your business has.
Whilst it may seem obvious, it is still worth noting that price has always been, and probably always will be, one of the key factors that shoppers take into account when they are making a purchase. It is also worth noting that customers don’t always consider the cheapest 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 when devising a good pricing plan, key amongst which are the price sensitivity of your customers, what your competitors 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 also penetration pricing.
Price skimming
The main idea behind price skimming is to make as much cash 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 financial advantages, but it can also promote 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 launch 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 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 tailored towards gaining a large market share at a short-term cost so that monetary benefits 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 figure.
Another thing to bear in mind is that “price” is the only part of the marketing mix that will generate earnings 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 technique right.
Our business wanted to appeal to a broader marketplace and concentrating on become a singer helped increase our visibility in the international business community.
Place
Place is the portion of the marketing mix that’s often not addressed by companies, but it’s still a significant part of selling your product successfully. In a nutshell, it describes the way in which you deliver your product to your customer, and subsequently how you receive money from them. It can be a great marketing approach when applied correctly.
The most common implications of place-based marketing are the physical locations in which your products are sold. For the majority of consumer products, this includes the distribution infrastructure between your production plants and shops and other outlets around the world. Since distribution of a physical product costs money it is important to determine your own priorities and adjust your distribution network appropriately.
With the increasing use of the Internet by your prospective customers, marketing methods have had to take into account how they use the Internet to help distribute their products. By using the Internet as a point of contact (or even as an entire distribution route in download-based markets such as MP3s) companies are now able to reach out to a large pool of potential customers.
Promotion
When you mention 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 complete system. Promotion can be employed on a very individual basis or as a mass communication tool, and whilst it may 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, producing short clips for TV and radio or by physically distributing flyers or leaflets to potential customers. With the coming of the information age we have seen a great increase in promotion via e-mail and the Internet, or simply as targeted advertising material posted through your front 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 preliminary functions of marketing; getting customers to pick your product over those of your competitors. When all other pieces of the marketing mix are equal it can be branding that sways a customer’s decision.
Putting it into Practise
As previously mentioned each business is unique and will have different marketing requirements. By using a balance of the four P’s discussed above you can take an effective view of your own marketing strategy.