Elements Of A Successful Marketing Campaign
Almost every company on the planet sets out with the primary objective of making money. This is generally done by producing some form of product, or offering a service, and then charging customers money for it. This fundamental principle is fairly straight-forward, although it contains many intricate details.
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 supplied by anybody else. This means that your company will be competing 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.
Marketing is the main tool used by modern organisations 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 deal of internal and external variables, but when done right it can be the one business practice that can make or break a company. Any time spent on marketing will reap rewards, although spending this time correctly can yield incredible outcomes.
So where should you begin when constructing a marketing strategy for your own company? Well, every situation is different, and each company will have its own set of strengths 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.
The Marketing Mix
The marketing mix was a term that was first coined in the 1950′s and is an expression 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 elements of business operations. It got its name since 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 company managers and marketers to swiftly associate the elements of marketing to the strengths of their own organisations, and by doing so could very quickly form a tailored and effective marketing strategy. The four P’s are Product, Price, Place and Promotion.
When we were preparing the launch for our own fee protection offers we used concepts from the marketing mix to devise a strategy.
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 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 buyers are going to spend money with you. If this part is not adequately managed then your company will find it hard to survive.
Several people do not think that marketing has any place to play when it comes to the physical 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 other way around – your production department creates a product for sale and then it is the task of the marketing department to discover ways to sell it, right?
Consider the computer software market as an example. There are many well-known brands of both operating system as well as software application products in the market 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 take on the likes of Microsoft or Apple, it would be far more effective to look at what types of product are desired in the current marketplace, and how viable it would be to manufacture and sell them.
Once your products have been fashioned and created it is still a critical skill to be able to objectively review your own products to identify the reasons why a customer should buy your product rather than a competitors’. The technique is called product differentiation and is one of the fundamental skills of the product part of the marketing mix cake.
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 customers as possible.
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 great effect to sell their own products in an incredibly competitive marketplace. Although these companies may have substantial marketing budgets, the same principles can be applied to all companies.
To maintain a standard corporate image a business should update their own portal an example we found was childrens bean bags which reflect colours, 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 figure out the highest price that your customers would spend (although that can be a useful tool to use), but rather using the price of your products as a strategic weapon designed to achieve any specific goals your company has. The potential advantages of an effective pricing plan are surprisingly substantial!
Whilst 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 do not constantly consider the cheapest price to be the best value. In fact a price that is too low can often turn customers away.
There are many questions that you need to ask yourself while devising a good pricing plan, key amongst which are the price sensitivity of your clients, what your competitors 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 also penetration pricing. These are outlined below.
Price skimming
The main idea driving price skimming is to make as much cash as possible from the segment of the market which is price-insensitive and will be willing to spend a premium amount of money to receive a product or service early on. Not only can this technique yield great economic benefits, but it can also advertise an exclusive and high quality image of your product.
This pricing strategy is very often used in the consumer electronics industry where customers will often eagerly await the launch 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 other end of the pricing spectrum, and is geared towards gaining a large market share at a short-term cost so that financial rewards can be earned 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 establishing a price for penetration it is still essential to not give a poor impression of your product by aiming for too low a number.
Yet another thing to keep in mind is that “price” is the only 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 produce or carry out.
Our organisation has modified its company web site so pork cooking occurs very frequently and more people can find us through search engines.
Place
Place is the portion 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 way in which you provide your product to your customer, and subsequently how you receive money from them.
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 production plants and retailers 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 potential customers, marketing strategies have had to consider how they use the Internet to help deliver their products. By using the Internet as a point of contact (or even as an entire 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”, 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 complete 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 important one.
Advertising is one of the most typical forms of promotion. Classically 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 material posted through your door. The potential for individualised advertising has never been so good.
Another important part of promotion involves branding, which may not necessarily yield more sales directly, but relates back to one of the initial functions of marketing; getting customers to choose your product over those of your rivals. When all other parts of the marketing mix are equal it could be branding that sways 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.
This entry was posted on Saturday, March 27th, 2010 at 9:55 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.