Business Marketing
Nearly every business on the planet sets out with the primary objective of making money. This is generally done by producing 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 company can offer a product or service that is truly unique and cannot be supplied by anybody 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 shoppers, who only want to spend their money once. So how can you boost the chances of them spending money with you?
Marketing is the primary tool used by modern organisations to draw prospective 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 factors, but when done well it can be the single business practice that can make or break a corporation.
So where should you start when constructing a marketing strategy for your own company? 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.
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 express the fundamental building blocks of any marketing strategy. It demonstrates the fact that marketing is not a straightforward, blunt-edged business technique, but rather a delicate balance of different aspects 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 critical elements of the marketing mix. The formalisation of these P’s made it very clear for business managers and marketers to quickly associate the elements of marketing to the strengths of their own companies, and by doing so could very quickly create a tailored and effective marketing strategy. The four P’s are Product, Price, Place and Promotion.
Our company has risen to become a leader in Egyptian cotton bedding after using tailored marketing concepts across our entire range of offerings.
Product
Although every aspect 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 business 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 place to play when it comes to the actual product that your company is selling. In fact, the common 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 find ways to sell it, right?
Take the computer software market as an example. There are many established brands of both operating system as well as software application solutions on the market already, and because the market is relatively well saturated it would be incredibly tough (and expensive) to “take on the big boys”.
Rather than developing an operating system and then attempting to craft a marketing strategy to take on the likes of Microsoft or Apple, it would be far more effective to look at what types of product are sought after 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 cycle you can avoid 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 why a customer would 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 brand new product attractive to as many customers as possible.
The motor industry uses this technique very effectively by offering various 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 extremely competitive marketplace. Whilst these companies may have huge marketing budgets, the same principles can be applied to all businesses.
We do not have a distinct promotion team within our new how to make icing operation though several of our own administrators have been able to adopt marketing as part of their work role.
Price
Another key 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 figure out the top 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 weapon designed to achieve any particular targets your business has. The potential benefits of an effective pricing plan are surprisingly substantial!
Although it may seem obvious, it is still worth pointing out that price has always been, and probably 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 lowest 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 while devising a good pricing strategy, 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 though, pricing can be covered by two main principals; price skimming and also penetration pricing. These are outlined below.
Price skimming
The principal 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 willing to spend a large amount of money to get a product or service early on. Not only can this technique deliver excellent financial advantages, but it can also promote an exclusive and high quality image of your product.
This pricing technique is frequently used in the consumer electronics industry where customers will often eagerly await the launch of a new mobile phone or computer games console. Manufacturers 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 opposite end of the pricing spectrum, and is tailored towards gaining a large market share at a short-term cost so that financial rewards 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.
Yet another thing to bear in mind is that “price” is the one 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 create or carry out.
To optimise our website for google search marketing we chose large 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 is often disregarded by companies, but it’s still an important part of selling your product successfully. In short, it describes the way in which you deliver your product to your customer, and subsequently how you collect money from them.
The most common implications of place-based marketing are the physical locations in which your products are sold. For the vast majority of consumer products, this involves the distribution network between your production centres and retailers and other outlets around the world. Since distribution of a physical product costs money it is crucial to determine your own priorities and adjust your distribution network appropriately. 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 consider 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 possible customers. Effective positioning of your product or service can therefore deliver impressive financial results.
Promotion
When you say the word “marketing”, most people instantly 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 tool, and whilst it may be a costly undertaking it is often an essential one. The key concern of promotion is to deliver a certain message that will increase 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 customers. With the coming of the information age we have witnessed 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 good.
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.
Putting it into Practice
As previously mentioned every company is different and will have different marketing needs. By using a mixture of the four P’s discussed above you can take an effective view of your own marketing strategy.
What do you think?