Almost every company 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 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 truly unique and cannot be supplied by anyone else. This means that your enterprise will be contesting 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.

Marketing is the main tool used by modern businesses 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 factors, but when done well it can be the one business practice that can make or break a corporation.

So where should you start when creating a marketing strategy for your own business? Well, every 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 corporation to be used as a marketing platform.

The Marketing Mix

The marketing mix was a phrase that was first coined during the 1950′s and is an expression that is used to describe 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 delicate balance of different elements of business functions. It got its name since 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 critical elements of the marketing mix. The formalisation of these P’s made it very easy for company managers and marketers to swiftly associate the elements of marketing to the strengths of their own organisations, and by doing so could very quickly form a personalised and efficient marketing plan.

Our company excels in offeringconference production facilities and while we all believed our marketing strategy was adequate we have seen improvements since using marketing mix concepts.

Product

Whilst every aspect 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 describes 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. If this element is not correctly managed then your organisation will find it hard to survive.

Many people do not think that marketing has any place to play when it comes to the actual product that your business is selling. In fact, the typical train of thought very often bears the exact opposite sentiment. Surely it should be the opposite 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? This is not necessarily the case.

Consider the computer software market as an example. There are many well-known brands of both operating system and software application solutions in the marketplace already, and since the market is relatively well saturated it would be very tough (and expensive) to “take on the big boys”. So how can 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 take on the likes of Microsoft and Apple, it would be far more effective to look at what sorts of product are sought after in the current marketplace, and how feasible it would be to manufacture and sell them.

Once your goods have been fashioned and created it is still a critical skill to be able to objectively evaluate your own products to identify the reasons that a customer should buy your product rather than a competitors’.

Another form of this part of the marketing mix is called product variation and is generally used to either lengthen the lifecycle of a product currently in the market, or to make your new product attractive to as many consumers 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 great effect to sell their own goods in an extremely competitive marketplace.

As part of our individual promotion strategy, our business carefully studied what exactly made our products stand out from the masses.

To maintain a standard corporate image a company should update their website to reflect colors, fonts and graphics associated with their own branding.Our conference production company website is being redesigned at the moment.

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 spend (although that can be a useful tool to use), but rather using the price of your products as a strategic tool designed to achieve any specific targets your company has.

Whilst it may seem obvious, it’s still worth noting that price has always been, and likely always will be, one of the key factors that customers 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 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 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 main principals; price skimming and 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 will be prepared to spend a large amount of money to get a product or service early on. Not only can this approach yield excellent economic advantages, but it can also promote an exclusive and high quality image of your product.

This pricing strategy is frequently 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 almost any price they wanted to and there would still be a loyal base of customers that would pay it. By using this method as part of a pre-ordering strategy, a company can help to smooth its own money 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 financial rewards can be earned long into the future. It can be a risky strategy, but when used correctly it can create 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 earnings for a business. The other members of the four P’s will all cost money to create or undertake.

Following using on-line tools to compare keyword search frequency we identified chicken cooking to lead the campaign for online promotion as well as off-line advertising materials.

Place

Place is the component of the marketing mix that’s often not addressed by companies, but it is 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 receive money from them.

The most common implications of place-based marketing are the physical locations in which your goods are sold. For the vast majority of consumer products, this involves the distribution network between your manufacturing centres and shops and other outlets around the world. Since distribution of a physical product costs money it is important to determine your own priorities and adapt your distribution network appropriately. This is the primary application of this part of the marketing mix.

With the increasing use of the Internet by your potential customers, marketing techniques have had to consider how they use the Internet to help deliver 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 huge pool of potential customers.

Promotion

When you mention 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 employed on a very individual basis or as a mass communication tool, and whilst it may be an expensive undertaking it is often an essential one. The key 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, creating short clips for TV and radio or by physically handing out flyers or leaflets to potential buyers. With the arrival 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 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 goes back to one of the preliminary purposes of marketing; getting customers to choose your product over those of your rivals.

Putting it into Practice

As previously mentioned every company 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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