My MLM Dream Team

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

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 provided by anyone else. This means that your business will be contesting with other businesses that sell a similar product and you will both be trying to make money from the same customers, who only want to spend their cash once. So how can you increase the chances of them spending money with you?

Marketing is the primary tool used by modern organisations 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 right it can be the single business practice that could make or break a company. Any time spent on marketing will reap rewards, although spending this time efficiently can yield incredible outcomes.

So where should you begin when constructing a marketing strategy for your own business? Well, every situation is different, and every company will have its own set of strengths and weak points that must be taken into consideration, but there is a marketing rule that can be applied to almost any corporation to be used as a marketing platform.

The Marketing Mix

The marketing mix was a term that was first coined during the 1950′s and is a phrase that is used to express the fundamental building blocks of any marketing system. It reflects the fact that marketing is not a simple, blunt-edged business technique, but rather a delicate balance of different aspects of business functions.

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 companies, and by doing so could very quickly form a customised and effective marketing plan.The four P’s are Product, Price, Place and Promotion.

The “product” aspect of the four P’s could refer to any product, just like planning services, or any non-physical asset being offered for sale by a business.

Product

Although every aspect of the marketing mix is a requirement, the “product” element mentioned as one of the four P’s is possibly the most crucial of all. It describes the physical product or intangible service that your business will be offering, and at the end of the day it is the reason that buyers are going to spend money with you.

Several people do not think that marketing has any place to play when it comes to the physical product that your company is selling. In fact, the typical train of thought very often bears the exact opposite sentiment. Surely it should be the other way around – your production department creates an item for sale and then it is the job of the marketing department to find ways to sell it, right?

Take the computer software market as an example. There are many established brands of both operating system and 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 trying to craft a marketing strategy to take on the likes of Microsoft and 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 produce and sell them. By being mindful of the marketing mix early on in your product development cycle you can avoid business dead-ends at a later stage.

Once your products 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 should buy your product rather than a competitors’. The skill is called product differentiation and is one of the basic skills of the product part of the marketing mix cake.

A different form of this part of the marketing mix is known as product variation and is typically 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 approach very effectively by offering different 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 extremely competitive marketplace. Although these companies may have huge marketing budgets, the same concepts can be applied to all companies.

One quick and easy way to recognise several companies that carry out advertising effectively is to simply think of brand names related to a certain industry.

Price

Another important factor in the marketing mix concerns the price of your products or services. This is not a simple case of performing market research to determine the highest price that your customers would pay (although that can be a handy tool to use), but rather making use of the price of your products as a strategic weapon designed to achieve any specific targets your company has.

Although it may seem obvious, it’s still worth noting that price has always been, and probably always will be, one of the crucial factors that customers 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. Actually a price that is too low can often turn buyers away.

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 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 also 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 prepared to spend a large amount of money to receive a product or service early on.

This pricing strategy 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 nearly any price they wanted to and there would still be a loyal base of customers that would pay it.

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 financial rewards can be earned long into the future. It can be a risky strategy, but when used correctly it can create revenue streams for many years to come.

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

Our business wanted to appeal to a wider market and targeting schizandra benefits helped boost our visibility within the international business community.

Place

Place is the part 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 way in which you provide your product to your consumer, and subsequently how you collect money from them.

The most common ramifications of place-based marketing are the physical venues in which your goods are sold. For the vast majority of consumer products, this involves the distribution infrastructure between your production plants and shops and other outlets around the country. Since distribution of a physical product costs money it is crucial to identify your own priorities and adapt your distribution network appropriately.

With the increasing use of the Internet by your potential customers, marketing methods 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 whole 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 mention the word “marketing”, most people instantly think of the promotional aspect of the marketing mix, although as we have seen, this is only one branch of a more comprehensive system. Promotion can be used on a very individual basis or as a mass communication tool, and whilst it might 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, creating short clips for TV and radio or by physically distributing flyers or leaflets to potential customers. With the coming of the information age we have witnessed a great increase in promotion via e-mail and the Internet, or simply 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 will not necessarily yield more sales directly, but relates back to one of the preliminary functions of marketing; getting customers to choose your product over those of your rivals. When all other pieces of the marketing mix are equal it can be branding that sways a customer’s decision.

Putting it into Practice

As previously mentioned every business is unique and will have different marketing needs. 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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