The First Steps Of Marketing
Nearly every business on the planet sets out with the main 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.
First of all, it is a very rare case that a company 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 make money from the same customers, who only want to spend their money once. So how can you boost the chances of them spending money with you?
Marketing is the main tool used by modern firms to draw prospective customers to do business with them and not with their competitors. It is a very broad topic that is influenced by a great number of internal and external variables, but when done well it can be the single business practice that can make or break a company. Any time spent on marketing will reap rewards, although spending this time correctly can yield incredible outcomes.
So where should you begin when creating a marketing strategy for your own company? Well, each situation is different, and each company will have its own set of strengths and weak points 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 framework.
The Marketing Mix
The marketing mix was a term that was first coined during 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 simple, blunt-edged business technique, but rather a subtle balance of different elements of business functions. It got its name because it is similar to the ingredients list for a recipe.
The term was later developed to include the concept 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 organisations, and by doing so could very rapidly create a customised and effective marketing strategy. The four P’s are Product, Price, Place and Promotion.
Marketing is a worldwide business idea which may be carried out on conferences or any amount of other products and services. See our website here.
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 critical 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 customers are going to spend money with you. If this element is not adequately managed then your company will find it hard to survive.
Many people don’t think that marketing has any place 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 precise opposite sentiment. Surely it should be the opposite 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?
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 because the market is fairly well saturated it would be incredibly tough (and expensive) to “take on the big boys”. So how could the principles of the marketing mix help in this circumstance?
Rather than developing 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 sorts of product are sought after in the current marketplace, and how feasible it would be to produce and sell them.
Once your products have been fashioned and created it is still a vital skill to be able to objectively evaluate your own products to recognise the reasons that a customer should buy your product rather than a competitors’. The skill is called product differentiation and forms one of the fundamental skills of the product part of the marketing mix cake.
A different form of this part of the marketing mix is known as product variation and is generally used to either extend the lifecycle of a product currently 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 products in an incredibly competitive marketplace. Whilst these companies may have huge marketing budgets, the same principles can be applied to all companies.
As part of our individual marketing method, our business thoroughly researched what exactly made our goods stand out from the crowd.
We do not have a specific promotion team in our conference production firm though many of our own managers have been able to take up marketing as part of their job role.
Price
Another important factor in the marketing mix concerns the price of your products or services. This is not a simple case of performing market research to determine 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 goals your business has.
Whilst it may seem obvious, it’s still worth pointing out 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 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 when devising a good pricing strategy, key amongst which are the price sensitivity of your customers, what your rivals 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 also penetration pricing. These are outlined below.
Price skimming
The main idea driving 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 willing to spend a large amount of money to receive a product or service early on.
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. Makers could set almost any price they wanted to and there would still be a loyal base of customers that would pay it. By making use of this method as part of a pre-ordering strategy, a firm can help to smooth its own money flow.
Penetration pricing
Penetration pricing is at the other end of the pricing spectrum, and is geared towards gaining a large market share at a short-term cost so that financial rewards can be made long into the future. It can be a risky strategy, but when employed correctly it can create revenue streams for many years to come.
Another thing to bear 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 create or carry out. So it is even more essential to get your pricing technique right.
We were able to use our past marketplace research about play the blues to start all on-line key phrase optimisation we were undertaking.
Place
Place is the portion of the marketing mix that is often overlooked by companies, but it is still an important part of selling your product effectively. In a nutshell, it describes the way in which you provide your product to your customer, and consequently how you collect money from them.
The most typical implications of place-based marketing are the physical venues in which your products are sold. For the vast majority of consumer products, this involves the distribution network between your manufacturing plants and retailers or 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 accordingly.
With the growing use of the Internet by your prospective customers, marketing strategies have had to take into account how they use the Internet to help deliver their products. By using the Internet as a point of contact (or even as a whole distribution route in download-based markets such as MP3s) firms are now able to reach out to a large pool of possible customers.
Promotion
When you mention the word “marketing”, many 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 employed on a very individual basis or as a mass communication tool, and whilst it may be a costly undertaking it is often an important one. The primary concern of promotion is to deliver a certain message that will increase sales.
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 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 front 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 functions of marketing; getting customers to choose your product over those of your competitors.
Putting it into Practice
As previously mentioned every company is different 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.
