A Proper Marketing Mix Strategy Helps In Establishing a Niche in the Market

Marketing is the action taken by businesses to sell the products or services that make a contribution to their turnover. It is important for every business, small or big, to understand and implement the right marketing mix strategy, which can help them in the sales of the items they make or sell.

There are four areas of marketing that contribute to the marketing mix and are considered the four Ps of marketing. They are:

• Product
• Price
• Place
• Promotion

Each of these factors has its own variables, and once they are correctly defined, they give you an outline for marketing of your product or service.

The product or service that you are selling needs to be correctly defined. Its features, how it is packaged must be clear, and then the benefits that can accrue to customers from their use must be built on.

At this stage you must decide on all aspects of your marketable product or products, whether it is style, the quality, the packaging or whether you intend to provide warranties.

Pricing is the next aspect of your marketing mix strategy that needs to be defined, as it has a very important role in the image that your product will have and the branding it will create.

This can be quite difficult and needs to take into consideration a lot of factors, and this becomes all the more difficult if there are a lot of variables, in the industry you are in business in.

You need to have a strategy on pricing, both for wholesale and retail, bulk sale and whether you are in a position to offer discounts to ensure customer loyalty.

The distribution of the product is determined by how you plan to distribute your product. Can you set up a system to sell directly to customers, or do you need to deal with retail stores?

Is your product only conducive to wholesale methods of marketing? These decisions affect the need for warehousing, and can affect your marketing mix, when costs get added on, because of this decision.

You also have to decide at this time how you will store your inventory, process orders and the avenues you will use to ensure that your product is available in the regions that have a market for it.

These three items, product, pricing and place have to be decided completely, before you move on to the aspect of promotion in your marketing mix strategy.

Each of these, including the promotion has to be coordinated with the other, and can influence it, in its own contribution to the marketing effort. Promotion of a product has to be undertaken, so that prospective customers learn about the availability of the item from your business.

This may require a number of strategies and the use of various media, and the strategies which can be used for this aspect of marketing are so varied and wide, that it requires a constant awareness of the effect of any strategy adapted, on the final sales figures.

It may be necessary to constantly review the success of each strategy, and find new ones to constantly boost sales. Public relations and how your business is perceived by the customers and the market in general, can also play a part in proper promotional activities, which are successful.

All these four aspects of a marketing mix need to be constantly reviewed and improved upon, as all of them can make a substantial contribution to final sales figures and bottom lines. A product can always be improved on to give it a USP that other competitors find it hard to match.

Pricing can be aggressive and offer advantages to customers that allow the business to capture a bigger share of the market. Proper and new methods of placing the product so that delivery times are reduced, or made more reliable can improve the image of the business.

Promotional activities can be constantly changed and every approach to promote the product must concentrate on different aspects of the product, which feedback from customers can help to pinpoint.

Proper research into potential markets and the purchasing power of various sections of society, who have need for your product, can help to concentrate marketing efforts so that it has the correct mix to enable growth and expansion of the business.