Practically every company on the planet sets out with the main objective of making money. This is usually done by producing some form of product, or offering a service, and then charging customers 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 company can offer a product or service that is genuinely unique and cannot be supplied by anybody else. This means that your business 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.
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 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 could make or break a corporation. Any time spent on marketing will reap benefits, although spending this time efficiently can yield extraordinary outcomes.
So where should you begin when creating a marketing strategy for your own business? Well, every situation is different, and each company will have its own set of advantages 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 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 strategy. It demonstrates the fact that marketing is not a simple, blunt-edged business tool, but rather a delicate balance of different aspects of business functions.
The term was later built upon 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 business managers and marketers to swiftly associate the elements of marketing to the strengths of their own companies, and by doing so could very quickly create a customised and effective marketing plan. The four P’s are Product, Price, Place and Promotion.
Marketing is a global business idea which can be applied to conferences as well as almost any amount of different products and services.
Product
Although every element of the marketing mix is a necessity, the “product” element mentioned as one of the four P’s is perhaps the most critical of all. It describes 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.
Several people don’t think that marketing has any place 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 production 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 established brands of both operating system as well as software application solutions in the market already, and since the market is fairly 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 rival the likes of Microsoft and 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 produce and sell them. By being aware of the marketing mix early on in your product development period you can avoid business dead-ends at a later stage.
Once your goods have been fashioned and created it is still a vital skill to be able to objectively evaluate 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 prolong the lifecycle of a product already in the market, or to make your new product attractive to as many consumers as possible. Again, this method can be applied at all stages of product development.
The car industry uses this technique very effectively by offering various engines, trim packages and interior options with the cars that they offer. They use the marketing mix to great effect to sell their own goods in an incredibly competitive marketplace. Whilst these companies may have huge marketing budgets, the same principles can be applied to all businesses.
As part of our own marketing system, our business carefully studied what exactly made our products stand out from the masses.
It is very common to come across a significant amount of conference production companies who plan for production and product sales but not properly for marketing.
Price
Another important factor in the marketing mix relates to 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 handy tool to use), but rather using the price of your products as a strategic weapon designed to achieve any specific objectives your company has.
Whilst 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 don’t always consider the lowest price to be the best value. Actually a price that is too low can sometimes turn buyers 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 boost your own profits. From a strategy point of view though, pricing can be covered by two main principals; price skimming and also penetration pricing.
Price skimming
The principal 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 prepared to spend a large amount of money to get a product or service early on. Not only can this technique deliver great financial benefits, but it can also promote an exclusive and high quality image of your item.
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. Makers could set almost 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 firm can help to smooth its own cash flow.
Penetration pricing
Penetration pricing is at the opposite end of the pricing spectrum, and is geared towards gaining a large market share at a short-term cost so that monetary rewards can be earned 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 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 create or carry out. So it is even more essential to get your pricing strategy right.
It is very difficult to discover a significant amount of Mens novelty aprons suppliers who plan for manufacturing and sales as well as properly for marketing.
Place
Place is the portion of the marketing mix that is often overlooked by companies, but it’s still an important part of selling your product effectively. In a nutshell, it describes the way in which you deliver your product to your consumer, and subsequently how you receive money from them.
The most typical ramifications of place-based marketing are the physical locations in which your products are sold. For the vast majority of consumer products, this includes 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 crucial to identify your own priorities and modify your distribution network accordingly.
With the increasing use of the Internet by your prospective customers, marketing strategies 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 channel in download-based markets such as MP3s) companies are now able to reach out to a large pool of potential customers.
Promotion
When you say the word “marketing”, many people instantly think of the promotional aspect of the marketing mix, although as we have seen, this is merely one branch of a more comprehensive system. Promotion can be employed on a very individual basis or as a mass communication tool, and whilst it might be a costly undertaking it is often an essential one.
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 materials posted through your door. The potential for individualised advertising has never been so good.
Another important part of promotion involves branding, which may not necessarily yield more sales directly, but relates back to one of the preliminary purposes of marketing; getting customers to choose your product over those of your competitors.
Putting it into Practice
As previously mentioned each company is different and will have different marketing requirements. By using a mixture of the four P’s discussed above you can take an effective view of your own marketing plan.
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