No matter whether you’re strategically targeting 18- to 34-year-old high-income males or 65- to 85-year-old fixed income retirees, you’ve got to reach them effectively and efficiently. That means finding the right balance of marketing tools and program elements to create and deliver the right product or service to consumers at the right price, right location, right time, and with the right features and attributes.
At this stage, you want to bring in your marketing mix. The marketing mix, or the Four Ps — promotion, place, product, and price — are the combination of actions you have to serve your target market.
Think of each P as a leg on a chair. If they don’t all support each other, the chair falls over. The same thing is true for your marketing mix. Each element needs to support the other. If any inconsistencies exist, your customers will notice.
One of the main keys to the success of any marketing program is creating a marketing mix that’s 100 percent relevant and resonates with your target market. The following list covers all four Ps and how they fit in to the market.
Product: Your marketing mix is based on and built off your products and/or services. Products are defined as anything that’s capable of satisfying customer needs. Make sure that you have a product or service geared toward the need of your target market.
Price: Make sure that your price is within the budget of your target market to create that marketing mix that your customers desire. From the customer’s perspective, price is the monetary expression of value, and that value is enjoyed by customers. Therefore, value equals benefits minus price. This P is one of the easiest Ps to change. But remember that price really is the only place that actually directly determines revenue generation.
Promotion: Just having a good product at a good price isn’t enough. These benefits have to be communicated to the customer. Gear your promotional messaging to solve the problems that customers encounter.
You can communicate with your customer in hundreds of ways and more ways are being added every day. (Even manhole covers have logos on them!) The high-level channels include advertising, direct marketing, personal selling, sales promotion, and public relations.
Place: This P is also known as distribution. Ensure that your distribution efforts are seen by your target market. Place determines where customers can buy or receive your products and services. For product companies, place refers to all the locations a customer can find your merchandise, such as resellers’ stores, the company’s own stores, a catalog, e-commerce website, or a reseller’s website.
For service companies, this P is often thought of in terms of convenience. How easily can a customer buy services from you? For example, a dry cleaning service increased convenience by centrally locating its operations, offering a delivery and pick-up service, and partnering with several tailors in town.
Estella’s Exotic Escapes specializes in high-end, hard-to-find vacation packages. However, half of the packages she offers include mega-chain hotels in places like Cancun and Kona. Her prices are geared toward a large budget, and her ads are in publications that have a subscription base of senior citizens.
Do you see the marketing mix chair falling over? The legs of the chair don’t support each other. Clearly, this example is over exaggerated, but you always want to make sure that your marketing mix has a message that works together.