Elements Of A Successful Marketing Campaign

Practically every business 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 theory is fairly straight-forward, though it contains many intricate details.

First of all, it is a very rare case that a business can offer a product or service that is truly unique and cannot be supplied by anyone else. This means that your enterprise will be contesting with other businesses that sell a similar item and you will both be trying to earn 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 firms 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 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 benefits, although spending this time correctly can yield extraordinary outcomes.

So where should you start when constructing a marketing strategy for your own company? Well, each situation is different, and every business 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 known as 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 reflects the fact that marketing is not a simple, blunt-edged business tool, but rather a delicate balance of different aspects of business functions.

The term was later developed to include the idea of “four P’s” that described the critical elements of the marketing mix. The formalisation of these P’s made it very clear for business managers and marketers to swiftly associate the elements of marketing to the strengths of their own companies, and by doing so could very quickly form a personalised and efficient marketing plan. The four P’s are Product, Price, Place and Promotion.

Nearly every sector in the modern marketplace is reasonably competitive, especially conference production, in which proper marketing choices could mean the success or failing of the business.

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 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 element is not adequately managed then your company will find it hard to survive.

Several people do not think that marketing has any role 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 exact opposite sentiment. Surely it should be the opposite way around – your manufacturing department creates an item for sale and then it is the job of the marketing department to find ways to sell it, right? This is not necessarily the case.

Take 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 since the market is relatively well saturated it would be very tough (and expensive) to “take on the big boys”.

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 desired in the current marketplace, and how feasible it would be to manufacture and sell them. By being aware of the marketing mix early on in your product development period you can prevent business dead-ends at a later stage.

Once your goods have been fashioned and created it is still a vital skill to be able to objectively evaluate 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 basic 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 extend the lifecycle of a product currently in the market, or to make your brand new product attractive to as many customers as possible.

The car industry uses this technique very effectively by offering different 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. Although these companies may have huge marketing budgets, the same principles can be applied to all companies.

As part of our individual marketing plan, our business thoroughly studied what made our goods stand out from the masses.

To preserve a standard corporate image a company should update their own website to reflect colourings, text and also images associated with their branding.Our conference production company website is being redesigned at the moment.

Price

Another important 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 highest 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 specific targets your company has.

Although 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 don’t constantly 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 competitors are doing and how can pricing boost 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 principal idea behind price skimming is to make as much cash as possible from the sector of the market which is price-insensitive and will be willing to spend a large amount of money to get a product or service early on. Not only can this technique deliver excellent economic advantages, but it can also promote an exclusive and high quality image of your item.

This pricing technique 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. By making use of this method as part of a pre-ordering strategy, a company can help to smooth its own cash flow.

Penetration pricing

Penetration pricing is at the opposite end of the pricing spectrum, and is tailored towards gaining a large market share at a short-term cost so that financial benefits can be made long into the future. It can be a high risk strategy, but when employed correctly it can setup revenue streams for many years to come. When establishing a price for penetration it is still critical to not give a poor impression of your product by aiming for too low a figure.

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 produce or carry out.

Before our corporation started researching online marketing regarding plumbing apprenticeships there didn’t seem to be an clear choice of key phrase to use as our main target.

Place

Place is the part of the marketing mix that’s often overlooked by companies, but it’s still an important part of selling your product effectively. In short, it describes the way in which you deliver your product to your customer, and consequently how you receive money from them. It can be a fantastic marketing approach when applied correctly.

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 manufacturing plants 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 increasing use of the Internet by your prospective customers, marketing methods have had to take into account how they use the Internet to help distribute their products. By using the Internet as a place of contact (or even as an entire distribution channel in download-based markets such as MP3s) firms are now able to reach out to a large pool of possible customers. Effective placing of your product or service can therefore yield impressive economic results.

Promotion

When you mention the word “marketing”, many people instantly think of the promotional side 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 instrument, and whilst it can be an expensive undertaking it is often an important one. The primary concern of promotion is to deliver a particular message that will increase sales.

Advertising is one of the most typical forms of promotion. Typically 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 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 front 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 goes back to one of the preliminary purposes of marketing; getting customers to pick your product over those of your rivals. When all other parts of the marketing mix are equal it could be branding that swings a customer’s choice.

Putting it into Practice

As previously mentioned every company is unique 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 strategy.

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