The First Steps Of Marketing

Nearly every company on the planet sets out with the primary objective of making money. This is usually done by producing some form of product, or offering a service, and then charging people money for it. This fundamental principle is fairly straight-forward, although it contains many intricate details.

First of all, it is a very rare case that a business can offer a product or service that is truly unique and cannot be supplied by anybody else. This means that your enterprise will be competing with other businesses that sell a similar item and you will both be trying to earn money from the same customers, who only want to spend their cash once.

Marketing is the main tool used by modern organisations to draw potential customers to do business with them and not with their competitors. It is a very broad topic that is affected by a great deal of internal and external variables, but when done right it can be the one business practice that can make or break a corporation. Any time spent on marketing will reap benefits, although spending this time efficiently can yield incredible outcomes.

So where should you begin when constructing a marketing strategy for your own business? Well, each situation is different, and each industry 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 phrase that was first coined during 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 simple, blunt-edged business technique, but rather a delicate balance of different elements of business operations.

The term was later built upon 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 quickly create a tailored and efficient marketing strategy. The four P’s are Product, Price, Place and Promotion.

Our company has risen to be a forerunner for floor painting since using tailored marketing and advertising ideas across our entire range of products.

Product

Whilst every aspect of the marketing mix is a necessity, the “product” element mentioned as one of the four P’s is possibly the most crucial of all. It identifies the physical product or intangible service that your business 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 part is not adequately managed then your organisation will find it hard to survive.

Several people do not 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 precise opposite sentiment. Surely it should be the other way around – your manufacturing department creates an item for sale and then it is the job 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 products in the marketplace already, and since the market is relatively well saturated it would be incredibly tough (and expensive) to “take on the big boys”. So how can the principles of the marketing mix help in this situation?

Rather than creating an operating system and then attempting to craft a marketing strategy to take on the likes of Microsoft and Apple, it would be far more effective to look at what types of product are desired in the current marketplace, and how feasible it would be to produce and sell them. By being mindful 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 designed and created it is still a vital skill to be able to objectively evaluate your own products to identify the reasons why 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 pie.

Another 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 already in the market, or to make your brand new product attractive to as many consumers as possible.

The motor 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 substantial marketing budgets, the same principles can be applied to all companies.

An example of one of the newest forms of promotional marketing is the new horse games for girls site that offers versatile and accessible means to target potential customers.

Price

Another important 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 determine the top price that your customers would spend (although that can be a handy tool to use), but rather making use of the price of your products as a strategic tool designed to achieve any specific targets your company has. The potential advantages of an effective pricing strategy are surprisingly large!

Whilst it may seem obvious, it is still worth pointing out that price has always been, and probably 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 lowest price to be the best price.

There are many questions that you need to ask yourself while devising a good pricing plan, key among 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 however, pricing can be covered by two primary principals; price skimming and penetration pricing.

Price skimming

The main idea driving price skimming is to make as much money as possible from the segment of the market which is price-insensitive and are going to be prepared to spend a large amount of money to receive a product or service early on. Not only can this approach yield great economic advantages, but it can also promote an exclusive and high quality image of your item.

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. Makers could set almost 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 opposite end of the pricing spectrum, and is geared towards gaining a large market share at a short-term cost so that financial benefits can be made long into the future. It can be a risky strategy, but when used correctly it can create revenue streams for many years to come. When establishing a price for penetration it is still important to not give a bad impression of your product by aiming for too low a number.

Yet another thing to keep in mind is that “price” is the only 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 produce or carry out.

When our company was doing market research before a new product release I identified that get a boyfriend was the key word that promoted the most “value for money” image.

Place

Place is the component 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 customer, and subsequently how you collect money from them.

The most common implications of place-based marketing are the physical venues in which your products are sold. For the majority of consumer products, this includes the distribution network between your production plants and retailers or other outlets around the country. Since distribution of a physical product costs money it is crucial to determine your own priorities and modify your distribution network accordingly.

With the increasing use of the Internet by your prospective customers, marketing techniques have had to take into account how they use the Internet to help deliver their products. By using the Internet as a place of contact (or even as a whole distribution channel in download-based markets such as MP3s) firms are now able to reach out to a huge pool of possible customers.

Promotion

When you mention the word “marketing”, many people immediately think of the promotional side 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 may be an expensive undertaking it is often an important one. The key concern of promotion is to deliver a certain message that will increase sales.

Advertising is one of the most typical forms of promotion. Classically 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 seen 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 great.

Another significant part of promotion involves branding, which will 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. When all other parts of the marketing mix are equal it can be branding that swings a customer’s choice.

Putting it into Practice

As previously mentioned each business 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 strategy.