Nearly every business on the planet sets out with the primary objective of earning money. This is generally done by producing some form of product, or offering a service, and then charging people money for it.

Firstly, it is a very rare case that a business can offer a product or service that is truly unique and cannot be provided by anyone else. This means that your enterprise 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 money once.

Marketing is the main tool used by modern firms to draw prospective customers to do business with them and not with their competitors. It is a very broad topic that is affected by a great number of internal and external variables, but when done well it can be the one business practise that could make or break a corporation. Any time spent on marketing will reap rewards, although spending this time correctly can yield extraordinary results.

So where should you begin when constructing a marketing strategy for your own business? Well, every situation is different, and every business 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 company to be used as a marketing platform. It is known as the “Marketing Mix”.

The Marketing Mix

The marketing mix was a phrase that was first coined in the 1950′s and is a phrase 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 tool, but rather a delicate balance of different elements of business operations.

The term was later built upon 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 clear 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 rapidly form a customised and effective marketing plan.

When we were planning the release of some of our Nottingham floor scarifiers we employed concepts from the marketing mix to create a strategy.

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 crucial 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 customers are going to spend money with you.

Several people don’t think that marketing has any role 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 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? This is not necessarily the case.

Take the computer software market as an example. There are many well-known brands of both operating system as well as software application solutions on the marketplace already, and because the market is fairly well saturated it would be very 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 or Apple, it would be more effective to look at what types of product are sought after in the current marketplace, and how viable it would be to produce and sell them.

Once your goods have been designed and created it is still a critical 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’.

A different form of this part of the marketing mix is called product variation and is generally 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.

The motor industry uses this technique 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.

An example of one of the most recent forms of promotional marketing is our own horse games for girls website which offers flexible and accessible means to target potential consumers.

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 useful tool to use), but rather using the price of your products as a strategic tool designed to achieve any particular objectives your company has.

Although it may seem obvious, it is still worth noting 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 cheapest price to be the best price. Actually 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 strategy, 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 though, pricing can be covered by two main principals; price skimming and penetration pricing.

Price skimming

The main idea behind price skimming is to make as much cash as possible from the segment of the market which is price-insensitive and are going to be willing to spend a premium amount of money to receive a product or service early on.

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 nearly any price they wanted to and there would still be a loyal core of customers that would pay it.

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 monetary rewards can be made long into the future. It can be a risky strategy, but when used correctly it can setup revenue streams for many years to come. When setting a price for penetration it is still essential to not give a poor impression of your product by aiming for too low a number.

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 produce or undertake.

To optimise our website for search engine marketing we selected bean chairs and childrens bean bags for a targeted key phrase because it relates to our company and what we do.

Place

Place is the part of the marketing mix that’s often not addressed by companies, but it’s still a significant part of selling your product effectively. 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 typical 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 network between your manufacturing plants and shops and other outlets around the world. Since distribution of a physical product costs money it is crucial to determine your own priorities and adapt your distribution network accordingly. This is the principal use of this part of the marketing mix.

With the growing use of the Internet by your potential 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 an entire distribution channel in download-based markets such as MP3s) firms are now able to reach out to a large 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 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.

Advertising is one of the most common forms of promotion. Typically 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 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.

Another significant part of promotion involves branding, which may not necessarily yield more product sales directly, but goes back to one of the initial purposes of marketing; getting customers to pick your product over those of your rivals. When all other parts of the marketing mix are equal it could be branding that swings a customer’s choice.

Putting it into Practise

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