Elements Of A Successful Marketing Campaign

Nearly every company on the planet sets out with the main objective of earning money. This is generally done by manufacturing some form of product, or offering a service, and then charging people money for it. This fundamental principle is fairly straight-forward, although it contains many specific details.

First of all, it is a very rare case that a company can offer a product or service that is genuinely unique and cannot be provided by anybody else. This means that your company will be contesting with other businesses that sell a similar product and you will both be trying to earn money from the same customers, who only want to spend their cash once.

Marketing is the primary tool used by modern firms to draw potential 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 one business practice that could make or break a company.

So where should you begin when constructing a marketing strategy for your own company? Well, each situation is different, and every company will have its own set of advantages and flaws 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 platform.

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 system. It demonstrates the fact that marketing is not a simple, blunt-edged business tool, but rather a subtle balance of different elements of business operations.

The term was later built upon 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 company managers and marketers to quickly associate the elements of marketing to the strengths of their own organisations, and by doing so could very rapidly form a tailored and effective marketing plan. The four P’s are Product, Price, Place and Promotion.

 

Our company already sells a prosperous range of wheelchair accessable vehicle yet we still use fresh marketing suggestions to improve our revenue numbers.

 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 critical of all. It describes 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 actual product that your company is selling. In fact, the common train of thought very often bears the exact opposite sentiment. Surely it should be the opposite way around – your manufacturing department creates a product for sale and then it is the task of the marketing department to discover ways to sell it, right?

Take the computer software market as an example. There are many well-known brands of both operating system and software application products in the market already, and because the market is fairly 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 developing an operating system and then attempting to craft a marketing strategy to rival the likes of Microsoft and 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 goods have been fashioned and created it is still a critical skill to be able to objectively review your own products to recognise the reasons why a customer would buy your product rather than a competitors’. The technique is called product differentiation and forms one of the fundamental skills of the product part of the marketing mix cake.

Another form of this part of the marketing mix is called product variation and is generally used to either lengthen the lifecycle of a product already in the market, or to make your new product attractive to as many customers as possible. Again, this technique can be applied at all stages of product development.

The car industry uses this technique very effectively by offering various engines, trim packages and interior options with the cars that they offer. They use the marketing mix to good effect to sell their own products in an incredibly competitive marketplace. Although these companies may have huge marketing budgets, the same principles can be applied to all businesses.

To maintain a standard corporate image a company ought to update their site an example would be 1TB hard drives that echo colors, fonts and images associated with their 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 determine the top price that your customers would spend (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 objectives your company has. The potential benefits of an effective pricing strategy 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 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 cheapest price to be the best price. In fact a price that is too low can sometimes turn customers away.

There are many questions that you need to ask yourself when devising a good pricing plan, key amongst which are the price sensitivity of your customers, what your rivals are doing and how can pricing boost your own profits. From a strategy point of view however, pricing can be covered by two main principals; price skimming and penetration pricing.

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 are going to be prepared to spend a large amount of money to get a product or service early on. Not only can this technique yield excellent economic benefits, but it can also promote an exclusive and high quality image of your product.

This pricing technique 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 base 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 cash 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 benefits can be earned long into the future. It can be a risky strategy, but when employed correctly it can setup revenue streams for many years to come.

Another thing to bear in mind is that “price” is the one 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 produce or carry out. So it is even more essential to get your pricing technique right.

When our company was performing market research before a new product release I discovered that get a boyfriend was the key phrase that promoted the most “value for money” impression.

Place

Place is the component of the marketing mix that’s often overlooked by companies, but it’s still a significant part of selling your product effectively. In a nutshell, it describes the method in which you deliver your product to your customer, and consequently how you receive money from them.

The most typical implications 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 plants and retailers and other outlets around the world. Since distribution of a physical product costs money it is important to identify your own priorities and adapt your distribution network appropriately.

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 distribute their products. By using the Internet as a point of contact (or even as a complete distribution channel in download-based markets such as MP3s) companies are now able to reach out to a huge pool of possible customers. Effective positioning of your product or service can therefore yield impressive financial results.

Promotion

When you say the word “marketing”, most people immediately 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 employed on a very individual basis or as a mass communication tool, and whilst it may be an expensive undertaking it is often an essential one.

Advertising is one of the most common forms of promotion. Typically it would be done by posting on billboards, creating short clips for TV and radio or by physically distributing flyers or leaflets to potential buyers. With the arrival 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 may not necessarily yield more product sales directly, but goes back to one of the initial functions of marketing; getting customers to choose your product over those of your competitors. When all other parts of the marketing mix are equal it can be branding that swings a customer’s decision.

Putting it into Practice

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

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