Almost every company on the planet sets out with the main objective of making money. This is usually done by manufacturing 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 genuinely unique and cannot be supplied by anyone else. This means that your company will be contesting with other businesses that sell a similar item and you will both be trying to make money from the same customers, who only want to spend their cash once. So how can you increase the chances of them spending money with you?

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 influenced 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 company. Any time spent on marketing will reap rewards, although spending this time efficiently can yield extraordinary results.

So where should you start when creating a marketing strategy for your own business? Well, every situation is different, and each business will have its own set of advantages and weaknesses 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.

The Marketing Mix

The marketing mix was a term that was first coined during the 1950′s and is an expression that is used to express 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 aspects of business operations. It got its name because it is similar to the ingredients list for a recipe.

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 business managers and marketers to quickly relate the elements of marketing to the strengths of their own organisations, and by doing so could very quickly create a personalised and effective marketing strategy. The four P’s are Product, Price, Place and Promotion.

Nearly every sector in the modern marketplace is competitive, particularly Egyptian cotton bedding, in which good marketing decisions could mean the success or failing of the company.

Product

Whilst every aspect 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 customers are going to spend money with you.

Many people don’t think that marketing has any place 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 find ways to sell it, right?

Consider the computer software market as an example. There are many established brands of both operating system and software application products in the marketplace already, and because the market is relatively well saturated it would be very tough (and expensive) to “take on the big boys”. So how could the principles of the marketing mix help in this circumstance?

Rather than developing an operating system and then attempting to craft a marketing strategy to rival the likes of Microsoft or Apple, it would be far more effective to look at what sorts of product are sought after in the current marketplace, and how viable it would be to manufacture and sell them.

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’. The skill is called product differentiation and forms 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 lengthen the lifecycle of a product currently in the market, or to make your new product attractive to as many consumers as possible. Again, this technique can be applied at all stages of product development.

The car industry uses this approach 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.

To maintain a standard corporate image a company ought to update their own portal an example would be how to make curry that reflect colourings, fonts and images associated with their own branding.

Price

Another key 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 top 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 goals your company has.

Whilst it may seem obvious, it is still worth noting 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 value.

There are many questions that you need to ask yourself when devising a good pricing strategy, key amongst 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 though, 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 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 get a product or service early on.

This pricing strategy 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 almost 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 firm can help to smooth its own money flow.

Penetration pricing

Penetration pricing is at the other 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 high risk strategy, but when used correctly it can setup 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.

Another thing to keep in mind is that “price” is the one part of the marketing mix that will generate revenue for a business. The other members of the four P’s will all cost money to create or carry out.

Following using on-line tools to compare key phrase lookup frequency we chose chicken cooking to direct our strategy for online promotion as well as off-line advertising materials.

Place

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

The most typical ramifications of place-based marketing are the physical venues in which your products are sold. For the vast majority of consumer products, this involves the distribution network between your manufacturing centres and shops or other outlets around the country. Since distribution of a physical product costs money it is important to identify your own priorities and modify your distribution network appropriately.

With the growing use of the Internet by your prospective customers, marketing techniques have had to consider how they use the Internet to help distribute their products. By using the Internet as a place of contact (or even as a complete distribution channel in download-based markets such as MP3s) firms are now able to reach out to a large pool of possible customers. Effective positioning of your product or service can therefore yield impressive economic results.

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 merely one branch of a more complete system. Promotion can be employed on a very individual basis or as a mass communication instrument, and whilst it may be a costly undertaking it is often an important one. The primary concern of promotion is to deliver a particular message that will improve sales.

Advertising is one of the most typical 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 seen a great increase in promotion via e-mail and the Internet, or just as targeted advertising materials posted through your door.

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

Putting it into Practice

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