Nearly 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 people money for it. This fundamental theory is fairly straight-forward, although it contains many specific details.

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

Marketing is the main tool used by modern firms to draw potential customers to do business with them and not with their rivals. It is a very broad topic that is influenced by a great deal of internal and external variables, but when done right it can be the single business practise that could make or break a company. Any time spent on marketing will reap rewards, although spending this time correctly can yield incredible results.

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

The Marketing Mix

The marketing mix was a phrase that was first coined during the 1950′s and is a phrase 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 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 company managers and marketers to swiftly relate the elements of marketing to the strengths of their own companies, and by doing so could very quickly form a customised and effective marketing strategy. The four P’s are Product, Price, Place and Promotion.

The “product” aspect of the four P’s can refer to a product, such as chiropractors Ruddington, or any kind of non-physical service being provided for sale by a business.

Product

Although 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 buyers are going to spend money with you.

Several 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 precise opposite sentiment. Surely it should be the opposite way around – your production 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 established brands of both operating system and software application products on the market already, and because the market is relatively well saturated it would be very 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 more effective to look at what types of product are desired in the current marketplace, and how feasible it would be to manufacture 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 products have been designed and created it is still a critical skill to be able to objectively evaluate your own products to recognise the reasons that a customer would buy your product rather than a competitors’. The skill is called product differentiation and forms one of the basic skills of the product part of the marketing mix pie.

A different form of this part of the marketing mix is called product variation and is typically used to either extend the lifecycle of a product currently in the market, or to make your new product attractive to as many customers as possible. Once again, this method can be applied at all stages of product development.

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 great effect to sell their own products in an incredibly competitive marketplace.

As part of our own promotion system, our shooting socks enterprise very carefully researched what made our products stand out from the masses.

Price

Another key factor in the marketing mix relates to the price of your products or services. This is not a simple case of carrying out market research to figure out the top 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 tool designed to achieve any particular objectives your business has. The potential advantages of an effective pricing plan are surprisingly substantial!

Although it may seem obvious, it is 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 cheapest price to be the best price. In fact 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 plan, key among which are the price sensitivity of your clients, 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 principal idea behind 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 receive a product or service early on. Not only can this technique deliver excellent financial benefits, but it can also advertise an exclusive and high quality image of your product.

This pricing technique 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 nearly 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 company can help to smooth its own cash flow.

Penetration pricing

Penetration pricing is at the opposite end of the pricing spectrum, and is tailored 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 employed correctly it can setup 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 undertake. So it is even more essential to get your pricing technique right.

We were able to use our past marketplace research regarding lamb cooking to kick off the online key word optimisation we were undertaking.

Place

Place is the part of the marketing mix that’s often disregarded by companies, but it is still a significant part of selling your product effectively. In a nutshell, it describes the way in which you provide your product to your consumer, and consequently how you receive money from them. It can be a fantastic marketing approach when used correctly.

The most common ramifications of place-based marketing are the physical locations in which your goods are sold. For the vast majority of consumer products, this includes the distribution infrastructure between your production plants 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 modify your distribution network appropriately.

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 distribute their products. By using the Internet as a point of contact (or even as a whole distribution channel in download-based markets such as MP3s) companies are now able to reach out to a large pool of possible customers.

Promotion

When you say the word “marketing”, most 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 can be a costly undertaking it is often an important one.

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 customers. With the coming of the information age we have seen a great increase in promotion via e-mail and the Internet, or just as targeted advertising materials posted through your front door.

Another significant part of promotion involves branding, which will not necessarily yield more sales directly, but goes back to one of the preliminary purposes of marketing; getting customers to pick your product over those of your competitors.

Putting it into Practise

As previously mentioned each business is different and will have different marketing needs. By using a mixture of the four P’s reviewed above you can take a good view of your own marketing strategy.