
Marketing Strategy and Sales
Creating products/services is merely one aspect of the business in terms of its ability to deliver. But if potential customers are unaware of what you have and what you are able to offer, then your products/services will not translate into sales. Click here to see diagram.
Marketing StrategyYour marketing strategy for the business begins to fill in the gaps in your overall strategy. What you are communicating through your marketing strategy is the marketing mix you have chosen. This will be different for each product, service and revenue stream – but there's usually a significant level of overlap (it's hard to market one product as a "quality" item when you market others as "low-cost substitutes for well-known brands")
As an example of the marketing mix at work, take perfume. Broken down to its essentials, perfume is nothing more than water with a smell. But the price that customers pay for perfume is many times the value of water.
Because the marketing mix has been so well-crafted that the customers' image of perfume is that of an exclusive, luxurious, sensual product – far removed from our crude description of it as "water with a smell". The image in customers' minds is created with the building blocks of the marketing mix: Price, product, place and promotion.
Let see how:
Product: The product is essentially water with a smell. However, customers see something more that this, because perfume is sold in a sophisticated and well – designed bottle, with expensive-looking packaging. Because it looks expensive, customers begin to think that it is expensive.
Price: The cost price (excluding packaging) of perfume is perhaps less than R13.00 per bottle. If it is sold for many times that, the customers' perception again changes. If it expensive, it must be special.
Place: Perfume is not sold at every local shop but is only available from expensive-looking retail shops that already have an up-market image. This makes the product exclusive (or appears so) and again, the customers' perception of the product changes – if the product appears exclusive, it must be so.
Promotion: Perfume is not sold by local leaflet drops or mass mailings, but is promoted by elegant life-style advertisements on national television and in glossy up-market magazines
Your marketing plan should in essence contain the following information:
Target market: Identify characteristics of your customers. Describe how you arrived at your results. Back up information with demographics questionnaires and surveys. Project size of your market.
Competition: Evaluate indirect and direct competition. Show how you can compete. Evaluate competition in terms of location market and business history.
Methods of distribution: Tell about the manner in which products and services will be made available to the customer. Back up decisions with statistical reports rate sheets etc.
Advertising: How will your advertising be tailored to your target market? Include rate sheets promotional material and time lines for your advertising campaign.
Pricing: Pricing will be determined as a result of market research and costing your product or service. Desribe how you arrived at your pricing structure and back it up with materials from your research.
Product design: Answer key questions regarding product design and packaging. Include graphics and proprietary rights information.
Timing of market entry: When you plan to enter the market and how you arrived at your decision.
Location: If your choice of location is related to target market cover it in this section of your business plan.
Industry trends: Give current trends and project how the market may change and what you plan to do to keep up.
To improve your marketing plan and strategy, define how you could achieve business growth by the following:
Market Penetration - How you market your existing products to the existing customers. This means increasing revenue by, for example, promoting the product, repositioning the brand, and so on. However, the product is not altered and we do not seek any new customers.
Market Development - How you market your existing product range in a new market. This means that the product remains the same, but it is marketed to a new audience. Exporting the product, or marketing it in a new region, are examples of market development.
Product Development - This is a new product to be marketed to your existing customers. Here we develop and innovate new product offerings to replace existing ones. Such products are then marketed to our existing customers. This often happens with the automotive markets where existing models are updated or replaced and then marketed to existing customers.
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