Good Going 24

Nearly every business on the planet sets out with the main 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.

First of all, it is a very rare case where a business can offer a product or service that is genuinely unique and cannot be supplied by anybody else. This means that your company 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 boost the chances of them spending money with you?

Marketing is the main tool used by modern organisations 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 deal of internal and external factors, but when done right it can be the single business practice that could make or break a company.

So where should you start when constructing a marketing strategy for your own business? Well, every situation is different, and every industry 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 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 an expression that is used to describe the fundamental building blocks of any marketing system. It reflects the fact that marketing is not a straightforward, blunt-edged business tool, but rather a subtle balance of different aspects of business functions. It got its name because 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 critical elements of the marketing mix. The formalisation of these P’s made it very easy for business managers and marketers to swiftly relate the elements of marketing to the strengths of their own organisations, and by doing so could very rapidly create a personalised and effective marketing strategy. The four P’s are Product, Price, Place and Promotion.

There are multiple sales avenues available to musical wooden jewellery box products and our own business used marketing ideas to open new paths to our buyers.

While we were preparing the launch of some of our wooden jewellery boxes we employed ideas in the marketing mix to create a plan.

Our business already sells a successful range of childerens bed linen products however we have used fresh marketing ideas to improve our sales figures.

Product

Although every element of the marketing mix is a requirement, the “product” element mentioned as one of the four P’s is possibly the most crucial 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. If this element is not adequately managed then your company will find it hard to make it through.

Several people don’t 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 other way around – your manufacturing department creates a product for sale and then it is the task 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 as well as software application solutions on the market already, and since 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 situation?

Rather than creating an operating system and then trying to craft a marketing strategy to rival the likes of Microsoft or 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.

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’.

A different 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 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 offer. They use the marketing mix to good effect to sell their own products in an incredibly competitive marketplace. Although these companies may have substantial marketing budgets, the same principles can be applied to all businesses.

An example of one of the most recent forms of promotional marketing is our own red dragon toys website that offers flexible and accessible means to target potential customers.

Price

Another key factor in the marketing mix concerns 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 spend (although that can be a handy tool to use), but rather using the price of your products as a strategic tool designed to achieve any particular goals your company has.

Although it may seem obvious, it is still worth noting that price has always been, and likely 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 do not always consider the cheapest price to be the best value. In fact 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 among which are the price sensitivity of your clients, what your competitors are doing and how can pricing boost your own profits. From a strategy point of view however, pricing can be covered by two primary principals; price skimming and 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 will be willing to spend a premium amount of money to receive 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 launch 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.

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 financial benefits can be made long into the future. It can be a risky strategy, but when used correctly it can setup revenue streams for many years to come.

Yet another thing to bear in mind is that “price” is the only 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.

SEO firms are more common nowadays and our organisation employed them to have presents women a dominant phrase on our web site to attract more customers.

Place

Place is the part of the marketing mix that’s often disregarded by companies, but it’s still a significant part of selling your product effectively. In a nutshell, it describes the method in which you deliver your product to your customer, and consequently how you receive money from them.

The most typical ramifications of place-based marketing are the physical venues in which your goods are sold. For the majority of consumer products, this involves the distribution infrastructure between your manufacturing centres and retailers and other outlets around the country. Since distribution of a physical product costs money it is crucial to identify your own priorities and modify your distribution network accordingly. This is the principal application of this element 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 an entire distribution route 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 aspect of the marketing mix, although as we have seen, this is only one branch of a more complete system. Promotion can be used on a very individual basis or as a mass communication instrument, and whilst it can be a costly undertaking it is often an important one. The key concern of promotion is to deliver a specific message that will boost sales.

Advertising is one of the most typical 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 customers. With the coming of the information age we have seen 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 good.

Another significant 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 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 reviewed above you can take an effective view of your own marketing plan.

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