Definition of Marketing Mix - Product, Price, Place and Promotion

Getting the marketing mix right for your product or service means you are covering all of the important bases in your marketing campaign. Here is a definition of marketing mix and a description of its main components.

The term marketing mix refers to the primary elements that must be attended to in order to properly market a product. Also known as The 4 Ps of Marketing, the marketing mix is a very useful, if a bit general, guideline for understanding the fundamentals of what makes a good marketing campaign. Here is a brief description of each component of the 4 Ps of the marketing mix.

Product: The marketing mix concept has its roots in the 1950s U.S. corporate marketing world, and the practice of marketing has obviously evolved tremendously since this term was invented. One of the changes is that there are a lot more services available nowadays, such as those available online. Also, the distinction between product and service has become more blurry (e.g., is a Web-based software application a product or a service?). Either way, product here refers to products or services. The product you offer needs to be able to meet a specific, existing market demand. Or, you need to be able to create a market niche through building a strong brand.

Definition of Marketing Mix - Product, Price, Place and Promotion

Price: The price you set for your offering plays a large role in its marketability. Pricing for offerings that are more commonly available in the market is more elastic, meaning that unit sales will go up or down more responsively in response to price changes. By contrast, those products that have a generally more limited availability in the market (but with strong demand) are more inelastic, meaning that price changes will not affect unit sales very much. The price elasticity of your offering can be determined through various market testing techniques.

Place: This term really refers to any way that the customer can obtain a product. Provision of a product can occur via any number of distribution channels, such as in a retail store, through the mail, via downloadable files, on a cruise ship, in a hair salon, etc. The ease and options through which you can make your product available to your customers will have an effect on your sales volume.

Promotion: Promotion is concerned with any vehicle you employ for getting people to know more about your offering. Advertising, public relations, point-of-sale displays, and word-of-mouth promotion are all traditional ways for promotion. Promotion can be seen as a way of closing the information gap between would-be sellers and would-be buyers. Your choice of a promotional strategy will be dependent upon your budget, the type of offering you are selling, and availability of said promotional vehicle.

Marketing has come a long way from the 4 Ps of yesteryear, and yet understanding this marketing mix is for your product remains very relevant today. The marketing mix serves as an excellent touchstone for continually checking that you are covering all of the bases in your marketing campaign.

Definition of Marketing Mix - Product, Price, Place and Promotion
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Email Marketing - Communicate Properly With Your Subscribers

List of Good Email Marketing Practices

Build a list of people that will benefit from your message. Your campaign starts with a list of emails. The more contacts that you have on your list the better. But what is the good of having 100,000 contacts if 90% of them are not interested in what your message is?
Capture 100% opt-ins by giving your prospects the option to sign up through trade shows, website or social media newsletter sign-up.
There are some pretty cool email marketing softwares for purchase out there but I prefer to use online email software. Its cost-effective, scalable and created to be very user friendly. When it comes to these platforms some are good and some are bad. I prefer i-Contact.
Build a branded template to represent your companies image. You usually have the option to choose from pre-built templates or for a more customized design you can hire an expert to build your vision.
Schedule specific messages to coincide with key events you want to highlight.
Run click-through reports to find out what groups are interested in what service or product you offer. Then bundle those groups into specific lists that receive those specific campaigns.
Link your messages with any social media accounts you have set up. this increases your visibility.
Educate yourself with CAN-SPAM Act. Always give your recipients the option to opt-out of your messages.
Utilize the multiple reporting features you have at your disposal. This is how you will refine your marketing and find out what is workin and what isn't.
Create a interconnected web-work online. Link you campaign to you website, social media, blogs etc.

List of Bad Email Marketing Practices

Email Marketing - Communicate Properly With Your Subscribers

Don't purchase your list. This is a big no no and can get you black listed. There are plenty of companies on the web that will sell you email lists. The problem is that they sell those same lists to hundreds of other people. Imagine being one of the people on those lists and getting bombarded by all these companies. Someone will complain and that's when people get blacklisted.
Send your messages using a business email. When your message comes across and its sent from [blahblah@gmail.com] it just doesn't seem as professional.
Do not add people to your list without them knowing. Its against the CAN-SPAM Act. and the law.
Most email messaging software requires that you have an opt-out option on you email, however if there isn't, make sure you don't send without it.
Don't try to jam too much content into one blast. This could overwhelm the recipient and turn them off.
Keep your design consistent. Don't send out a circus of images and content. Your message should revolve around the brand of your company.
Try not to message to often. Once a day could make people angry.
Don't send with just images. Most email providers have images turned off by default. If you have text the recipient will at least know what the message is about until they can activate images.
Don't send without an online link to your email message. If people cannot see the message in their email they will be redirected to an online version where they can see you message.
Don't forget to study your reports to see what your market wants.

Email Marketing - Communicate Properly With Your Subscribers
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Effective Marketing Strategies for Property Managers

Many small companies get creative when it comes to running their businesses on tight budgets. It can be a challenge to compete with large or small marketplace players, especially when resources cannot always be allocated to areas that do not directly drive bottom line revenues.

Marketing always falls into this category. It doesn't generate revenue of its own even though it gives sales the tools it needs to generate its revenue. Therefore, from a finance perspective, marketing is the non-revenue generating extra that they think they can afford to cut. In reality, they cut marketing and then slowly see a decline in sales. Some understand what they have done to themselves. Some never make the connection.

Marketing is, in fact, a resource and a support network that assists and enables not only sales but also internal culture and communications. Marketing even on a local/regional level includes several elements that get exposure and leads for vacant properties.

Effective Marketing Strategies for Property Managers

Most property management groups have the staff, resources and budgets to handle their local and regional marketing elements. This can include everything from brochures, advertising and websites.

Today's marketplace for rental property encompasses much more than local opportunities and it takes a different strategy to take advantage of the market changes.

Developing national presence to attract renters outside of your local market presents great challenges to your resources.

Get creative with your national strategy.

Look for venues that present you to a national market. By participating in partnerships that open access nationally, property management groups of all sizes can expand their market beyond their city limits.

Venues with national scope enable single companies to include themselves in a comprehensive palette of choices and therefore broaden their range of potential customers to a national level. These venues create a marketplace environment that utilizes complex Internet marketing strategies to reach the consumer base. Individual property management groups just don't have the resources to support this. The price points for being part of the marketplace, however, remain at affordable levels for individual groups.

Almost immediately, a locally and regionally focused property manager can diversify its customer base and protect itself from sometimes fickle localized market conditions.

This strategy is terrific and works incredibly well. Property managers all over the United States are growing their businesses in ways that their traditional local methods cannot.

This grows your market, but it still doesn't provide you with unique services that differentiate you from other property management groups, does it?

Become Unique. Offer more.

What else do your renters need that you can provide?
What could help you make your business run more smoothly or more cost-efficiently?

The answers to these questions should give you a good start.
Or you can partner with someone who can help you make the answers to those questions a reality.

By working with other companies who have like needs, or by finding a service provider who has created an environment for your market niche, you can quickly enhance what your business offers.

For example, your renters need to have renters' insurance. Through a partnership, you may find a way to offer access to one - easily and perhaps even inexpensively. For your own business, your consortium connections may get you access to business operations services that free your employees up to spend more time with your customers - not in front of a computer screen.

The beauty of this approach is your LOW total investment cost. Partnership gives you price point advantages for services and products you previously may have been unable to consider. All the while, you maintain the flexibility of a small company.

Partnerships and consortium programs can open up access to tremendous benefits that impact your growth, your market differentiation and your business stability. Elements such as these enable you to insulate yourself from local market changes, to take advantage of growth in other geographic areas and most certainly to create unique values that identify your company as the property management group that everyone wants to do business with.

Effective Marketing Strategies for Property Managers
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Jill Purdy is director of marketing for Rent2Buy America™. Rent2Buy America, LLC is a Charlotte, NC based Internet venue for rental property. By focusing on the needs of property managers and the demands of renters, Rent2Buy America makes advertising properties easy and effective, and renting homes easier than other traditional processes. Rent2Buy America has properties available across the United States and works with national partners to offer products and services to renters and to property managers that help them each reach their goals.

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The e-Marketing Plan - Brief Overview and Working Scheme

I. Summary of a marketing plan

The marketing planning (concretized in the marketing plan) is an essential organizational activity, considering the hostile and complex competitive business environment. Our ability and skills to perform profitable sales are affected by hundreds of internal and external factors that interact in a difficult way to evaluate. A marketing manager must understand and build an image upon these variables and their interactions, and must take rational decisions.

Let us see what do we call a "marketing plan"? It is the result of the planning activity, a document that includes a review of the organization's place in the market, an analysis of the STEP factors as well as a SWOT analysis. A complete plan would also formulate some presumptions on why we think the past marketing strategy was successful or not. The next phase shall present the objectives we set, together with the strategies to achieve these objectives. In a logical sequence, we will further need to evaluate the results and formulate alternative plans of action. A plan would consist in details of responsibilities, costs, sales prognosis and budgeting issues.

The e-Marketing Plan - Brief Overview and Working Scheme

In the end, we should not forget to specify how the plan (or plans) will be controlled, by what means we will measure its results.

We will see how to build the marketing plan, what is its structure: after we will see how to build the traditional marketing plan, we will take a look at the e-marketing plan and see how the unique features of the internet will require some changes in the approach of writing a marketing plan.

But, before we continue, we must understand and accept that steps of the marketing plan are universal. It is a logical approach of the planning activity, no matter where we apply it. The differences you meet from a plan to another consist in the degree of formality accorded to each phase, depending on the size and nature of the organization involved. For example, a small and not diversified company would adopt less formal procedures, because the managers in these cases have more experience and functional knowledge than the subordinates, and they are able to achieve direct control upon most factors. On the other hand, in a company with diversified activity, it is less likely that top managers have functional information in a higher degree than the subordinate managers. Therefore, the planning process must be formulated to ensure a strict discipline for everyone involved in the decisional chain.

II. The general marketing plan

The classical marketing plan would follow the following scheme of 8 stages:

1. Declaring the mission: this is the planning stage when we establish the organizational orientations and intentions, thus providing a sense of direction. In most cases, this is a general presentation of the company's intentions and almost has a philosophic character.

2. Establishing current objectives: it is essential for the organization to try to determine with preciseness the objectives to be reached. These objectives, in order to be viable, must be SMART. SMART is an acronym and stands for "Specific", "Measurable", "Attainable", "Realistic" and "Timed". The objectives must also convey the general organizational mission.

3. Gathering information: this stage is based on the concept of marketing audit. After performing the audit of the macro-environment by analyzing the STEP factors (social, technologic, economic and politic), we should turn the focus upon the immediate extern environment (the micro-environment) and analyze the competitive environment, the costs and the market. Finally, we will conclude with the SWOT analysis, by this way we will have a general view upon the internal environment compared to the external one. The SWOT analysis combine the two perspectives, from the inside and from the outside, because the Strengths and the Weaknesses are internal issues of an organization, while the Opportunities and Threads come from the outside.

4. Re-formulating objectives: after the close examination of data gathered in the previous stage, sometimes it is needed to re-formulate the initial objectives, in order to address all the issues that might have come up from the previous stage. The distance between the initial objective and the re-formulated objective will be covered by appropriate strategies. We must ensure the re-formulated objective is SMART as well.

5. Establishing strategies: several strategies are to be formulated, in order to cover the distance between what we want to achieve and what is possible to achieve, with the resources at our disposal. As we would usually have several options, we should analyze them and chose the one with more chances to achieve the marketing objectives.

6. Plan of actions: consists in a very detailed description of the procedures and means to implement the actions we want to take. For example, if the strategy implies a raise in advertising volume, the plan of actions should establish where the advertisements will be placed, the dates and frequency of the advertising campaigns, a set of procedures to evaluate their effectiveness. The actions we plan to take must be clearly formulated, measurable, and the results must be monitored and evaluated.

7. Implementation and control: consist in the series of activities that must be performed in order to run the marketing plan in accordance to the objectives set by the marketer. At this stage, it is critical to gain the support of all members if the organization, especially when the marketing plan is due to affect the organization from its grounds.

8. Performance measurement: constitutes the last but not the less important stage of the marketing plan, since we can achieve only what we can measure. In order to measure the performances achieved through the marketing plan, we need to constantly monitor each previous stage of the plan.

The marketing plan that has a feedback cycle, from 8th stage back to the 4th. That is because sometimes during the planning process, we might need to perform stages 4 to 8 several times before the final plan can be written.

III. The e-marketing plan

The e-marketing plan is built exactly on the same principles as the classical plan. There is no different approach, but there might be some formal differences given by the uniqueness of the internet environment. Many of these differences come from the necessity to ensure a high rate of responsiveness from the customers, since the e-world is moving faster and requires faster reaction from its companies, compared to the traditional offline marketplace.

Even though it is perfectly acceptable and is a common practice to use the 8-stage classic model for the e-marketing plan as well, you might want to consider the simplified version proposed by Chaffey, who identifies four major steps to build the e-marketing plan:

1. Strategic analysis: consists in continuous scanning of the macro- and micro-environment. The accent should fall on the consumers' needs that change very rapidly in the online market, as well as on surveying the competitors' actions and evaluating the opportunities offered by new technologies.

2. Defining strategic objectives: the organization must have a clear vision and establish if the media channels will complement the traditional ones, or will replace them. We must define specific objectives (don't forget to check if they are SMART!) and we must also specify the contribution of the online activities to the organization's turnover.

3. Formulating strategies - we do that by addressing the following essential issues:

- develop strategies towards the target markets;

- positioning and differentiating strategies;

- establish priorities of online activities;

- focus attention and efforts on CRM and financial control;

- formulate strategies for product development;

- develop business models with well-established strategies for new products or services, as well as pricing policies;

- necessity for some organizational restructuring;

- changes in the structure of communication channels.

4. Implementing strategies: includes careful execution of all necessary steps to achieve established objectives. It could refer re-launching of a website, promo campaigns for a new or rewritten site, monitoring website efficiency and many more.

Note: a common strategy to achieve e-marketing objectives is the communication strategy. The steps to built a coherent communication plan will be presented within a further article.

IV. The e-marketing plan (sample titles)

1. Executive Summary

a. overview upon present conjuncture;

b. key aspects of the strategic e-marketing plan.

2. Situational Analysis

a. characteristics of the e-market;

b. possible factors of success;

c. competitors' analysis;

d. technological factors;

e. legal factors;

f. social factors;

g. possible problems and opportunities.

3. The e-Marketing Objectives

a. product profile;

b. target market;

c. sales objectives.

4. The e-Marketing Strategies

a. product strategies;

b. price strategies;

c. promotion strategies;

d. distribution strategies.

5. Technical Issues

a. website content;

b. website "searcheability";

c. logging security (for customers and staff);

d. customer registration procedure;

e. multimedia;

f. autoresponders;

g. order forms and feedback forms;

h. access levels to online resources;

i. credit card transactions;

j. website hosting;

k. website publishing;

l. technical staff (size, requirements)

6. Appendix

7. Bibliography

The e-Marketing Plan - Brief Overview and Working Scheme
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Otilia Otlacan is a young certified professional with expertise in e-Marketing and e-Business, currently working as independent consultant and e-publisher. She developed and teach her own online course in "Principles of e-Marketing" and is also a volunteer Economics teacher.

You can contact her via her personal website at BRAINmarketing.net [http://www.brainmarketing.net] or check out her developing Marketing, e-Marketing and e-Business resources portal at TeaWithEdge.com

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