The Importance of Marketing Mix and the 4 Key Mix Elements

The marketing mix section of your small business marketing plan concentrates on the tactics used to achieve the marketing and business plan. Those tactics can be categorized as the four 'P's' of marketing: product, price, promotion and place(also known as the distribution channel).

A common analogy used in describing marketing mix is relating the mix (in marketing mix) as being the ingredients in a recipe: you need to get the quantities of each element right or the result will not be what you need or expect.

Consider the following questions carefully when you build your marketing plan:

* When developing your marketing tactics for the product, you must consider the features, advantages and benefits of the product. Define all the characteristics of your product. Define and rank which are most valuable to your target market? Why are they valuable to your market? Define what is unique about your product and why it has a competitive advantage (something that is not easily duplicated). Consider conducting a marketing research survey to test your assumptions. You may be surprised to find out that what you thought was important to your market is not. Make sure you can address all these questions in your marketing plan.

* Pricing your product sounds like a straightforward process but the reality is that it is a very complex process. At what stage in the life cycle is the product? Product life cycle stages will influence price. Are you the high cost, high value provider? Or the low cost, high volume provider? Does your product have unique attributes that can not be easily duplicated? Does your product have a competitive advantage not easily overcome? Are you trying to buy your way into the market? Be very careful with this 'buy-in' strategy --it is often very challenging to move a low price up. Is this product a loss leader for your sales of another, more profitable product? There are still more questions to consider when developing your price and you must analyze each answer carefully before determining the price for your product. Typically it is a good idea to plot your price attributes on a grid - you can visually see where you are on a grid and better assess if that is the right place to be.

* Promotion includes a number of marketing communications tactics. Should you build a direct mail program (is your product conducive to a printed description; do you have a good targeted mail list)? Can you market your product online? Are traditional advertising methods (print, radio, television) the most appropriate? What kind of budget do you have? Does your product have a strong enough brand? If not focus on building a stronger identity and brand. How can public relations efforts help you promote your product? Can you successfully participate in trade shows and industry events to sell your product? How will you craft your sales story: from sales letters to sales pitches? Have you build measurements into each of your promotional vehicles? Do you truly understand your market and your audience? Recognize that you will need to use more than one of these tactics to launch a successful marketing campaign.

* Place is how your product moves to market. What distribution channel will you use? Will it be a business-to-business channel or a business-to-consumer channel? Will you sell using your own sales staff, or will you outsource sales and use distributors or sales agents? Can you sell your product online or must it be offline and in-person? Is your market geography wide or narrow? What are the implications of the answers to these questions on your marketing mix?

When building and creating your marketing plan you must consider these elements of your marketing mix because they will have a significant impact (positive if well planned and managed; negative if poorly planned and not managed) on your product's success or failure.

All small business owners go into business expecting success; not all plan for success. Ensure that your small business enjoys success by developing a strong strategic marketing plan that includes a comprehensive marketing mix.

About the Author

Kris Bovay owns Voice Marketing Inc, the business and marketing services company. Kris has worked for, and with, a range of small, medium and large businesses and has been able to help business owners focus on their challenges and improve their business results. Kris has a masters degree in business administration, with a specialty in marketing, operations, planning and strategy. For more business advice, visit http://www.more-for-small-business.com/ and for more on marketing go to http://www.more-for-small-business.com/marketing-mix.html

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5 Critical Rules Of Effective Company Website Design

Your companys website needs to incorporate an attractive front-end that captures the interest of your visitors. It should encourage their trust and elevate their perception of your business. But, proper website design also involves creating a robust back-end that can support your companys growth over time. Many website owners approach the development of their sites without giving adequate announcement to navigation, search engine affection, and scalability. This essay gives you as well as the five critical rules of effective web page design.

Rule 1: Search Engine-Friendly Fix

A few websites dont desire to acquire business like the hunt engines. Places such as CNN on the internet and NYPost on the internet take pleasure in tens of thousands of visitors each day as theyve realized a "top of comment" notification browse cyberspace. Excluding, certain online pages desire commerce from Google, Yahoo and MSN. Good web page arrangement entails creating locales so the biggest search engines can only find, move slowly, and index one another.

Rule 2: Intuitive Navigation

At the present time, recruits taste brusquer briefing spans than forever prior to. Anytime theyre prying for hint on your online page, they want to get right of entry to it soon or theyll cleanly alteration on to hunt in other places. Your web pages navigation venture should be intuitive and easy to familiar with. Graphics and buttons should use at any rate-defined labels. Links should be fixed and instantly well known. This is an frequently lost sight of rule of apposite web page organization and it can sabotage an in a different way booming business.

If youre designing your district on your own, ask for the instruct of an had web page developer. Chicago is one of a number of major cities abode to a huge cadre of authority designers who could be energized to digest your online page. Chicago online page arrangement companies tolerate precise proficiency in intuitive navigation.

Rule 3: Clean And Effortless To Read

A general mistake that millions of interest owners type is to clutter their online pages in addition to multiple fonts and graphics. Whats more regretful, they all the time cram so a lot of hint onto their web pages that visitors turn out to be overwhelmed and depart. Your website should use fonts and graphics to create agree with and ask visitors to stay on your location. That means each page should be clean and effortless to read. There should be a lot of white space that allows guests eyes to relieve while they fathom comment.

Rule 4: Grounded For Scalability

As your business grows, your web page necessitate to grow and it. In the initiating, you may basically grant one or two products. Ahead long, you may award dozens of merchandises and services, when coping with lots of blogs to promote your agency. Your web page organization plans should incorporates space for sudden increase. Youll hunger to believe effecting a guaranteed buying groceries cart that is fixed to an inventory database. You should program to understanding a fulfilled administration algorithm that includes blogs.

The key to scalability is planning anyways in hints. A couple of people outsource this mission to a web page developer. Chicago, New York, San Antonio and Los Angeles boast a number of developers who can assist recommend your design efforts to aid your companys eruption.

Rule 5: Consistent Look And Sense

Consistency all the time falls by the use of the goes off each time a website grows. Old designs, fonts, and graphics can be simply forgotten and usher to pages that pass through conflicting appearances. Regrettably, this lack of consistency across the pages on your website can disfigure the guests take of your business. Your web page plan should publicize a consistent look and imagine across every page that is within sight by the unrestricted.

Your web page is the primarily belief that clientele and leads will undergo of your problem. Beforehand they communiqu� you, theyll come out establishing a opinion of your ability to gratify their entails. To that end, your online page design should invite their accept as true with by deploying an intuitive navigation plan and a consistent look and consider. It should in addition be clean and simple to studied. After all, your web page should be find engine-personal and be grounded for scalability. These are the five necessary rules of efficient website organization that can precisely style or respite your problem.


Almost about the Originator

Aaron Wittersheim is an originator for Whoast, a leading

Relaited Links:

• Answers to Your 8 Most Pressing Questions About Directory Submissions
• An Overview Of Internet Marketing Education
• Why Do Direct Marketing?