Almost every company on the planet sets out with the primary objective of earning money. This is usually 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, though it contains many specific details.
Firstly, it is a very rare case where 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 contesting with other businesses that sell a similar product 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 firms 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 deal of internal and external variables, 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 rewards, although spending this time efficiently can yield extraordinary outcomes.
So where should you start when constructing a marketing strategy for your own business? Well, each situation is different, and each industry will have its own set of strengths and flaws 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 platform. It is called the “Marketing Mix”.
The Marketing Mix
The marketing mix was a phrase that was first coined in the 1950′s and is an expression that is used to express the fundamental building blocks of any marketing system. It reflects the fact that marketing is not a straightforward, blunt-edged business technique, but rather a delicate balance of different elements of business functions.
The term was later developed 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 form a personalised and effective marketing plan.
There are multiple income avenues for Nottingham turny seat products so our business used marketing ideas to open new paths to our customers.
Product
Whilst every element 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 offering, and at the end of the day it is the reason that buyers are going to spend money with you.
Many people do not think that marketing has any role to play when it comes to the actual 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 other way around – your manufacturing department creates an item for sale and then it is the task of the marketing department to discover ways to sell it, right? This is not necessarily the case.
Consider the computer software market as an example. There are many well-known brands of both operating system as well as 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”.
Rather than creating an operating system and then trying 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 cycle 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 recognise the reasons why a customer should 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 cake.
Another form of this part of the marketing mix is called product variation and is typically used to either lengthen the lifecycle of a product currently in the market, or to make your brand 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 good effect to sell their own products in an extremely competitive marketplace.
Marketing plays a crucial role within our own xbox 360 steering wheels company strategy and it shouldn’t get treated like an afterthought.
Price
Another key 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 figure out the top price that your customers would pay (although that can be a useful tool to use), but rather making use of the price of your products as a strategic tool designed to achieve any specific targets your company has. The potential benefits of an effective pricing plan are surprisingly large!
Whilst it may seem obvious, it is 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 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 when devising a good pricing plan, key amongst which are the price sensitivity of your clients, what your competitors are doing and how can pricing maximise your own profits. From a strategy point of view though, pricing can be covered by two primary principals; price skimming and penetration pricing.
Price skimming
The main idea behind price skimming is to make as much cash as possible from the segment of the market which is price-insensitive and will be willing to spend a premium amount of money to receive a product or service early on. Not only can this technique yield excellent financial advantages, but it can also promote an exclusive and high quality image of your product.
This pricing strategy is very often used in the consumer electronics industry 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 base of customers that would pay it.
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 rewards 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 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 undertake.
To optimise our website for google search marketing we selected buy childrens bean bags as a targeted phrase since it relates to our company and what we offer.
Place
Place is the component of the marketing mix that’s often not addressed by companies, but it is still a significant part of selling your product successfully. In a nutshell, it describes the method in which you deliver your product to your customer, and subsequently how you collect money from them.
The most typical implications 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 network between your manufacturing plants and retailers and other outlets around the world. Since distribution of a physical product costs money it is crucial to identify your own priorities and adapt your distribution network accordingly. This is the primary use of this part of the marketing mix.
With the growing use of the Internet by your prospective customers, marketing methods have had to take into account how they use the Internet to help deliver their products. By using the Internet as a place of contact (or even as a complete 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 deliver impressive economic results.
Promotion
When you mention the word “marketing”, most 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 used on a very individual basis or as a mass communication instrument, and whilst it may be an expensive undertaking it is often an important one. The primary concern of promotion is to deliver a particular message that will boost sales.
Advertising is one of the most common forms of promotion. Classically it would be done by posting on billboards, producing 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 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 significant part of promotion involves branding, which will not necessarily yield more product sales directly, but goes back to one of the initial purposes of marketing; getting customers to pick your product over those of your rivals. When all other pieces of the marketing mix are equal it could be branding that sways a customer’s decision.
Putting it into Practice
As previously mentioned each business is unique and will have different marketing requirements. By using a mixture of the four P’s reviewed above you can take a good view of your own marketing plan.
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