Elements Of A Successful Marketing Campaign

Nearly every company on the planet sets out with the main objective of earning money. This is generally 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 provided by anybody else. This means that your company will be contesting with other businesses that sell a similar product and you will both be trying to earn money from the same customers, who only want to spend their cash once.

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 broad topic that is influenced by a great deal of internal and external variables, but when done well it can be the one business practice that can make or break a corporation. Any time spent on marketing will reap rewards, although spending this time efficiently can yield incredible outcomes.

So where should you begin when creating a marketing strategy for your own business? Well, every situation is different, and each business will have its own set of strengths and flaws 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. It is called the “Marketing Mix”.

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 system. It demonstrates the fact that marketing is not a straightforward, blunt-edged business tool, but rather a subtle balance of different aspects of business operations. 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 essential elements of the marketing mix. The formalisation of these P’s made it very easy for company managers and marketers to quickly associate the elements of marketing to the strengths of their own companies, and by doing so could very rapidly form a customised and efficient marketing plan. The four P’s are; Product, Price, Place and Promotion.

Almost every segment in the modern marketplace is reasonably competitive, especially in store sashes, in which proper marketing choices can mean the success or failing of the company.

Product

Although every aspect 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 describes the physical product or intangible service that your company will be selling, 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 correctly managed then your organisation will find it hard to make it through.

Many people don’t think that marketing has any role to play when it comes to the actual product that your business is selling. In fact, the common 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 job of the marketing department to discover ways to sell it, right? This is not necessarily the case.

Consider 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 attempting 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 sought after in the current marketplace, and how feasible it would be to manufacture and sell them. By being mindful of the marketing mix early on in your product development cycle you can prevent 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 review your own products to identify the reasons that a customer would buy your product rather than a competitors’. The skill is called product differentiation and is one of the basic 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 lengthen the lifecycle of a product already 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 various engines, trim packages and interior options with the cars that they sell. They use the marketing mix to good effect to sell their own goods in an extremely competitive marketplace.

It is very common to find a significant amount of companies that budget for production and sales but not properly for marketing.

Price

Another key factor in the marketing mix relates to 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 useful tool to use), but rather making use of the price of your products as a strategic weapon designed to achieve any specific objectives your business has.

Whilst 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 don’t constantly consider the cheapest price to be the best value. In fact 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 plan, key amongst 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. These are outlined below.

Price skimming

The principal idea behind 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 premium amount of money to receive a product or service early on. Not only can this approach deliver excellent economic benefits, 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 launch of a new mobile phone or computer games console. Manufacturers could set nearly any price they wanted to and there would still be a loyal base of customers that would pay it.

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 monetary rewards can be made long into the future. It can be a high risk 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. So it is even more essential to get your pricing technique right.

Before our company began studying on-line marketing hand wavers didn’t appear an clear choice of keyword to use as our primary focus.

Place

Place is the part of the marketing mix that is often overlooked by companies, but it’s still a significant part of selling your product successfully. In a nutshell, it describes the way in which you deliver your product to your customer, and consequently how you collect money from them. It can be a great marketing technique when used correctly.

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 infrastructure between your manufacturing centres and retailers and other outlets around the world. Since distribution of a physical product costs money it is crucial to identify your own priorities and adapt your distribution network appropriately. This is the primary use of this element of the marketing mix.

With the growing use of the Internet by your potential customers, marketing methods have had to consider how they use the Internet to help distribute their products. By using the Internet as a place 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 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 comprehensive system. Promotion can be used 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 primary concern of promotion is to deliver a specific message that will boost sales.

Advertising is one of the most typical forms of promotion. Typically it would be done by posting on billboards, creating short clips for TV and radio or by physically distributing flyers or leaflets to potential buyers. With the arrival of the information age we have witnessed a great increase in promotion via e-mail and the Internet, or just as targeted advertising materials posted through your front 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 goes back to one of the preliminary functions of marketing; getting customers to pick your product over those of your rivals. When all other parts of the marketing mix are equal it can be branding that swings a customer’s decision.

Putting it into Practice

As previously mentioned each business 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.