Developing Your Marketing Mix
Optimizing your marketing mix is the best way to align marketing activities with your business strategies.
What Is The Marketing Mix?
Developing your marketing mix refers to finding the optimal strategy for the four Ps of marketing:
These four components are the essential elements of your
marketing plan. You can produce different results from your marketing efforts by altering your strategy for each of these ingredients in the mix.
It is kind of like baking a cake: the cake mix is primarily flour, sugar, eggs and milk. The final cake will taste differently depending on how you alter the amounts of mix elements, and which types of ingredients you choose (e.g., do you use regular flour or whole wheat, white sugar or brown, etc).
Just like the cake, you can vary the end result by altering the amounts and types of mix ingredients. By using variations of the four components, you have the ability to reach different segments within your target market.
Why are these 4 P's so Important?
What makes this marketing mix of Product / Price / Place / Promotion so important?
These four elements are important because they force you to think about the key aspects of your customers' needs and wants:
- What type of product do they need? What features do they want?
- What price are your customers willing and able to pay? Are there multiple segments with different price points?
- Where will your target customers be expecting to learn about your product?
- How can you promote your product so your customers take action?
As a business owner, it is easy to fall into the trap of assuming everyone's needs are the same as your own, and select product features, price, placement and marketing based on your own personal preferences or habits. That may or may not coincide with the preferences of your most profitable customer targets.
How to Develop Your Marketing Mix
The video below gives a very good overview about the mix of marketing.
Remember that if you sell a product to a niche market, make sure that
- the product really is targeted towards the need of that market,
- your price is within the budget of that market,
- you are distributing your product in places where it will be seen by customers in that market, and
- your promotion communicates how your product solves the pain points of those target customers, in channels that they will see.
Next Steps
For more help, take a look at this article on developing an optimal marketing mix strategy.
Also, follow the 7-step process laid out in our marketing strategy ebook, and use our marketing plan package to lay out your marketing strategy. You can download the ebook and the marketing plan package in the Seven Steps Store, along with other useful templates and guides.