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 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 company can offer a product or service that is truly unique and cannot be supplied by anyone else. This means that your enterprise 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 money once.

Marketing is the main tool used by modern organisations to draw prospective customers to do business with them and not with their rivals. It is a very broad topic that is influenced by a great deal of internal and external variables, but when done well it can be the single business practise that could make or break a company. Any time spent on marketing will reap rewards, although spending this time efficiently can yield incredible results.

So where should you start when constructing a marketing strategy for your own company? Well, every situation is different, and every industry will have its own set of advantages and weak points that must be taken into consideration, but there is a marketing principle that can be applied to almost any corporation 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 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 tool, but rather a delicate balance of different elements of business operations. It got its name because it is similar to the ingredients checklist for a recipe.

The term was later built upon to include the concept of “four P’s” that described the essential elements of the marketing mix. The formalisation of these P’s made it very clear 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 rapidly form a personalised and effective marketing strategy.

The “product” aspect of the four P’s can refer to any product, like chiropractic Nottingham, or any intangible asset being offered for sale by a business.

Product

Whilst every element of the marketing mix is a necessity, 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 selling, and at the end of the day it is the reason that buyers are going to spend money with you.

Many people do not think that marketing has any place to play when it comes to the actual 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 task of the marketing department to discover 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 solutions on the marketplace already, and since the market is relatively well saturated it would be incredibly 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 attempting to craft a marketing strategy to take on the likes of Microsoft and Apple, it would be more effective to look at what sorts of product are desired in the current marketplace, and how feasible it would be to manufacture and sell them. By being mindful of the marketing mix early on in your product development period you can avoid business dead-ends at a later time.

Once your products have been fashioned and created it is still a vital skill to be able to objectively evaluate your own products to recognise the reasons why a customer should buy your product rather than a competitors’.

Another form of this part of the marketing mix is called product variation and is typically 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 offer. They use the marketing mix to great effect to sell their own goods in an incredibly competitive marketplace. Whilst these companies may have substantial marketing budgets, the same principles can be applied to all businesses.

To preserve a standard corporate image a company should update their own web presence an example we found was wooden games that echo colours, text and graphics associated with their own branding.

Price

Another key factor in the marketing mix relates to the price of your products or services. This isn’t a simple case of carrying out market research to figure out the top price that your customers would pay (although that can be a handy tool to use), but rather using the price of your products as a strategic weapon designed to achieve any particular goals your business has. The potential advantages of an effective pricing plan are surprisingly substantial!

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 constantly consider the cheapest 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 competitors 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. These are outlined below.

Price skimming

The main idea behind price skimming is to make as much cash as possible from the sector 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 strategy 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 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 geared towards gaining a large market share at a short-term cost so that financial benefits 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.

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 create or undertake. So it is even more vital to get your pricing technique right.

Following using on-line tools to compare key phrase lookup frequency we identified underwater cameras disposable to steer our campaign for online promotion as well as off-line advertising materials.

Place

Place is the part of the marketing mix that’s often disregarded by companies, but it’s still an important part of selling your product successfully. In short, it describes the way in which you deliver your product to your customer, and subsequently how you collect money from them.

The most typical ramifications of place-based marketing are the physical venues in which your products are sold. For the majority of consumer products, this involves the distribution infrastructure between your production plants and retailers and other outlets around the country. Since distribution of a physical product costs money it is important to determine your own priorities and alter your distribution network accordingly.

With the increasing use of the Internet by your prospective customers, marketing techniques 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 complete distribution channel in download-based markets such as MP3s) firms are now able to reach out to a huge pool of potential customers.

Promotion

When you say the word “marketing”, many people instantly 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 can be a costly undertaking it is often an essential one.

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 buyers. With the coming of the information age we have seen a great increase in promotion via e-mail and the Internet, or simply as targeted advertising material posted through your front door.

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

Putting it into Practise

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