Business Marketing

Almost every company on the planet sets out with the main 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.

First of all, it is a very rare case where 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 contesting with other businesses that sell a similar item and you will both be trying to earn money from the same shoppers, who only want to spend their money once. So how can you improve the chances of them spending money with you?

Marketing is the primary tool used by modern organisations to draw potential customers to do business with them and not with their competitors. It is a very extensive topic that is affected by a great number of internal and external factors, but when done well it can be the single business practice that could make or break a corporation.

So where should you begin when constructing a marketing strategy for your own business? Well, each situation is different, and every industry will have its own set of advantages and weaknesses 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 during the 1950′s and is a phrase that is used to describe the fundamental building blocks of any marketing strategy. It demonstrates 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 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 swiftly relate the elements of marketing to the strengths of their own organisations, and by doing so could very quickly form a personalised and efficient marketing plan.

 

Our company has risen to become a leader in wheelchair access vehicles after using customised marketing and advertising ideas across our complete 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 company will be offering, and at the end of the day it is the reason that customers are going to spend money with you.

Many people do not think that marketing has any role to play when it comes to the actual product that your company is selling. In fact, the typical train of thought very often bears the exact opposite sentiment. Surely it should be the other way around – your production 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 always the case.

Consider 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 since the market is fairly well saturated it would be very tough (and expensive) to “take on the big boys”. So how can the principles of the marketing mix help in this situation?

Rather than developing 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 sorts of product are sought after in the current marketplace, and how feasible it would be to produce and sell them.

Once your products have been fashioned and created it is still a critical skill to be able to objectively evaluate 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 forms one of the fundamental skills of the product part of the marketing mix pie.

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 brand new product attractive to as many customers as possible. Again, this method can be applied at all stages of product development.

The motor 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 good effect to sell their own products in an incredibly competitive marketplace. Whilst these companies may have huge marketing budgets, the same concepts can be applied to all businesses.

To maintain a standard corporate image a company should redesign their site an example would be maytag refrigerators which echo colours, text and also graphics associated with their branding.

Price

Another important factor in the marketing mix concerns the price of your products or services. This isn’t a simple case of carrying out market research to figure out the highest price that your customers would pay (although that can be a useful tool to use), but rather making use of the price of your products as a strategic tool designed to achieve any specific objectives your business has.

Whilst it may seem obvious, it’s 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 don’t constantly consider the cheapest price to be the best price.

There are many questions that you need to ask yourself while devising a good pricing strategy, key amongst which are the price sensitivity of your customers, 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 driving 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 large amount of money to receive a product or service early on.

This pricing technique 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. Makers could set nearly any price they wanted to and there would still be a loyal core of customers that would pay it. By making use of this method as part of a pre-ordering strategy, a firm can help to smooth its own cash flow.

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 benefits can be made long into the future. It can be a high risk strategy, but when employed correctly it can setup revenue streams for many years to come. When setting a price for penetration it is still important to not give a bad 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 create or undertake. So it is even more vital to get your pricing strategy right.

To optimize our website for search engine visibility we selected rice and peas as a targeted phrase because it relates to our company and what we offer.

Place

Place is the part of the marketing mix that’s 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 consumer, and subsequently how you collect money from them. It can be a fantastic marketing technique when used correctly.

The most common implications of place-based marketing are the physical locations in which your products are sold. For the majority of consumer products, this involves the distribution infrastructure between your production plants and shops and other outlets around the country. Since distribution of a physical product costs money it is crucial to identify your own priorities and alter your distribution network accordingly.

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 a complete distribution route in download-based markets such as MP3s) companies 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 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 might be a costly undertaking it is often an essential one. The primary concern of promotion is to deliver a particular message that will boost sales.

Advertising is one of the most common forms of promotion. Classically 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 coming of the information age we have witnessed a great increase in promotion via e-mail and the Internet, or just as targeted advertising material posted through your door.

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

Putting it into Practice

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