Nearly every business on the planet sets out with the primary 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.

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 provided 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 firms to draw potential customers to do business with them and not with their competitors. It is a very broad topic that is influenced by a great number of internal and external variables, but when done well it can be the single business practice that can make or break a corporation. Any time spent on marketing will reap rewards, although spending this time efficiently can yield extraordinary outcomes.

So where should you start when constructing a marketing strategy for your own company? 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 rule that can be applied to almost any company to be used as a marketing framework. 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 express 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 aspects of business operations.

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 clear for business managers and marketers to quickly associate the elements of marketing to the strengths of their own organisations, and by doing so could very quickly create a customised and efficient marketing plan. The four P’s are Product, Price, Place and Promotion.

There are multiple sales routes for epoxy coatings and our business used marketing ideas to open new routes to our customers.

Product

Whilst every element of the marketing mix is a requirement, the “product” element mentioned as one of the four P’s is perhaps the most critical of all. It identifies the physical product or intangible service that your company 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 company will find it hard to make it through.

Several people don’t think that marketing has any place to play when it comes to the physical product that your company 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 manufacturing department creates an item for sale and then it is the job of the marketing department to find 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 solutions on the market already, and because the market is fairly well saturated it would be incredibly tough (and expensive) to “take on the big boys”. So how could the principles of the marketing mix assist in this circumstance?

Rather than developing an operating system and then attempting 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 sought after in the current marketplace, and how feasible it would be to produce and sell them. By being aware of the marketing mix early on in your product development cycle 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 review your own products to recognise 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 lengthen the lifecycle of a product currently in the market, or to make your brand new product attractive to as many customers 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 products in an extremely competitive marketplace. Whilst these companies may have huge marketing budgets, the same concepts can be applied to all companies.

Marketing plays a critical role in our own cheese graters business strategy and it should not be treated as an afterthought.

Price

Another key factor in the marketing mix relates to the price of your products or services. This isn’t 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 specific goals your business has.

Whilst 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 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 when devising a good pricing strategy, key among which are the price sensitivity of your customers, what your rivals 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 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 receive a product or service early on. Not only can this approach yield excellent economic benefits, but it can also promote an exclusive and high quality image of your item.

This pricing technique is very often used in the consumer electronics market where customers will often eagerly await the release 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 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 earned long into the future. It can be a high risk strategy, but when employed correctly it can create revenue streams for many years to come. When setting a price for penetration it is still critical to not give a poor impression of your product by aiming for too low a figure.

Another thing to keep 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.

Before our corporation began looking into online promoting relating to plumbing apprenticeships there did not seem to be the obvious choice of key phrase to use as our main focus.

Place

Place is the component of the marketing mix that is often not addressed by companies, but it’s still an important part of selling your product successfully. In a nutshell, it describes the method in which you provide your product to your customer, and consequently how you collect money from them. It can be a fantastic marketing approach when applied appropriately.

The most common implications of place-based marketing are the physical locations in which your goods are sold. For the majority of consumer products, this includes the distribution network between your production plants and retailers and other outlets around the world. Since distribution of a physical product costs money it is important to identify your own priorities and adjust your distribution network appropriately. This is the principal use of this element of the marketing mix.

With the growing use of the Internet by your prospective customers, marketing methods 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 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”, most people instantly think of the promotional side 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 can be an expensive undertaking it is often an essential 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 handing out flyers or leaflets to potential buyers. 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 material posted through your door.

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

Putting it into Practice

As previously mentioned every company is different and will have different marketing needs. By using a balance of the four P’s discussed above you can take an effective view of your own marketing strategy.