Elements Of A Successful Marketing Campaign
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. This fundamental theory is fairly straight-forward, although it contains many specific details.
First of all, it is a very rare case that a business can offer a product or service that is genuinely unique and cannot be supplied by anyone else. This means that your enterprise will be competing with other businesses that sell a similar product 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 improve the chances of them spending money with you?
Marketing is the main tool used by modern businesses to draw prospective customers to do business with them and not with their competitors. It is a very extensive topic that is influenced by a great number of internal and external factors, but when done right it can be the single business practice that can 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 begin when constructing a marketing strategy for your own company? Well, every situation is different, and each industry 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 called 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 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 subtle balance of different aspects of business operations.
The term was later developed 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 quickly relate the elements of marketing to the strengths of their own organisations, and by doing so could very quickly form a customised and effective marketing system.
This marketing style is not restricted to physical products, other services such as duvet set single services may profit via new marketing ideas or a new point of view.
Product
Although every aspect of the marketing mix is a necessity, the “product” element mentioned as one of the four P’s is possibly 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.
Several people don’t think that marketing has any role 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 an item for sale and then it is the task 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 established brands of both operating system and software application products on the marketplace already, and since 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 situation?
Rather than creating an operating system and then trying to craft a marketing strategy to rival the likes of Microsoft and Apple, it would be more effective to look at what sorts of product are sought after in the current marketplace, and how viable it would be to produce and sell them. By being mindful of the marketing mix early on in your product development cycle you can avoid business dead-ends at a later stage.
Once your products have been fashioned and created it is still a critical skill to be able to objectively evaluate 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 known as product variation and is generally used to either extend the lifecycle of a product already in the market, or to make your new product attractive to as many customers as possible. Once again, this technique can be applied at all stages of product development.
The motor industry uses this technique 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 goods in an extremely competitive marketplace. Although these companies may have huge marketing budgets, the same principles can be applied to all companies.
“Product is paramount” is one of the main slogans used in our sunny plants organisation which aims to emphasise to all staff that we expect high quality production.
Price
Another key factor in the marketing mix relates to the price of your products or services. This is not a simple case of carrying out market research to determine the highest price that your customers would pay (although that can be a handy tool to use), but rather making use of the price of your products as a strategic tool designed to achieve any specific goals your company has. The potential benefits of an effective pricing plan are surprisingly large!
Whilst it may seem obvious, it is still worth pointing out that price has always been, and probably always will be, one of the key factors that customers take into account when they are making a purchase. It is also worth noting that customers do not always consider the lowest price to be the best value.
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 rivals are doing and how can pricing maximise your own profits. From a strategy point of view however, pricing can be covered by two primary principals; price skimming and penetration pricing.
Price skimming
The principal idea behind 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.
This pricing technique is frequently 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 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 tailored 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 create revenue streams for many years to come. When setting a price for penetration it is still critical to not give a bad 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 income for a business. The other members of the four P’s will all cost money to create or undertake.
Following using on-line tools to compare keyword search frequency we identified chicken cooking to steer our campaign 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 an important part of selling your product successfully. In a nutshell, it describes the way in which you deliver your product to your consumer, and consequently how you collect money from them.
The most typical implications of place-based marketing are the physical venues in which your goods are sold. For the majority of consumer products, this includes the distribution infrastructure between your production centres and retailers or other outlets around the world. Since distribution of a physical product costs money it is important to determine your own priorities and adapt your distribution network accordingly.
With the growing use of the Internet by your prospective customers, marketing strategies have had to take into account how they use the Internet to help deliver their products. By using the Internet as a place 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 large pool of possible customers. Effective positioning of your product or service can therefore deliver impressive financial results.
Promotion
When you say the word “marketing”, many people instantly 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 employed 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. The primary concern of promotion is to deliver a specific 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 handing out flyers or leaflets to potential buyers. With the arrival of the information age we have witnessed a great increase in promotion via e-mail and the Internet, or simply as targeted advertising material posted through your front door. The potential for individualised advertising has never been so great.
Another important part of promotion involves branding, which will not necessarily yield more sales directly, but relates back to one of the preliminary functions 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 sways a customer’s decision.
Putting it into Practice
As previously mentioned each business is different and will have different marketing needs. By using a balance of the four P’s reviewed above you can take an effective view of your own marketing strategy.
