Establish the Marketing Mix for the Business Venture

The marketing objectives and the marketing mix are related and support one another. Both aim to help a business reach the target audience, attract new customers and increase profit. The term, Marketing Mix refers to the 4 Ps, which are:

• Price – price or value that is set for a product
• Product – product must perform as expected or intended
• Place – place is the point of sale
• Promotion – promotion includes all the activities required to promote the product to the customers, such as advertising.

For a further definition of a marketing mix, read What is Marketing Mix? The article discusses the 4 Ps of marketing: price, product, place and promotion, and will expand your understanding of such.

Explore the table below that expands on the definition of the 4Ps of marketing, and ensure that you fully understand the definitions:

Explore the Marketing Mix and the 4Ps for more details on the 4Ps of marketing.

Some resources refer to the 5th P of marketing. The 4 Ps of Marketing can also be expanded to include people's roles. People within the marketing mix refer to customers, customer service and other staff engaged in the business and their role in marketing.

For example, if you are interested in adding an online element to your business, you would need to consider issues such as:

• Whether your customers have access to the internet
• If your customers are comfortable buying your products or services online
• Whether you have the necessary staff with the required skills to manage an online business
• The additional financial costs: shipping costs, taxes etc.

Click and read the following, and action the associated tasks:

Workplace Process and Procedures

Your organisation may have a policy and procedure with guidelines for creating marketing objectives and the marketing mix. Gather the relevant people, as stated in the design and refer to guidelines for governance, registers or forms that need to be completed, and the process to establish the marketing mix. This ensures that all staff and relevant stakeholders clearly understand their roles and responsibilities and therefore have a better chance of achieving set goals.

Developing marketing objectives and the marketing mix is important, as it can help your business grow, reach the optimum target audience, attract new customers, and increase your profit. The step-by-step process is as follows:

1. Analyse the business objectives
2. Align the marketing objectives to the business objectives
3. Take into consideration the target audience and your customer base
4. Research and assess the competition
5. Review the distribution channels and the location of the business (where applicable)
6. Decide which promotional and marketing activities you will use
7. Ensure you have the right people in the right roles to achieve your marketing objectives

Assess Marketing Mix

You can gauge the effectiveness of your marketing mix by using measurable outcomes, such as lead generation, online analytics and bottom-line value. However, because the marketing cycle is long, you need to rely on other evaluation factors, such as:

• Cost-per-lead
• Cost-per-customer-acquisition
• Component ranking
• Competitive analysis.

Further Reading

Read How to evaluate the success of a marketing mix from Gaebler.com, which you will find useful as it focuses on gauging the effectiveness of the marketing mix through measurable outcomes.

Distribution or marketing channels move products and services from the business to the consumer and other firms. These distribution channels, such as wholesalers, retailers and sales agents, are all involved in making a product or service available for use or consumption. They are the paths that products and services take on their way from the manufacturer or service provider to the end consumer.

For instance, a manufacturer of light bulbs may produce the light bulbs, but the distribution channel that takes them from factory to customer is likely to include wholesalers and retailers. These links in the sales chain are the light bulbs’ channel of distribution.

Companies develop various distribution strategies or channel strategies for their products and services, based on a variety of factors and potential steps in the distribution process or intermediaries.

There are different levels of channel structures. These are:

• A two-level channel structure is where goods and services move directly from the manufacturer to the consumer.
• A three-level channel structure is where retailers order the products from the manufacturer and directly sell those products to the consumer.
• A four-level structure is when manufacturers sell to wholesalers, who sell to retailers, who sell to the consumer.
• A five-level structure is when a sales agent serves as an intermediary between the manufacturer and its wholesalers.

Here, the business needs to evaluate the costs of the distribution channels; and the available benefits resulting from using the distribution channels.

Read this article about distribution channels  to further your understanding of distribution channels.

When establishing the marketing mix for the new business venture, select marketing and promotional activities that suit the target market according to your set marketing strategies. Conducting market analysis and research is important, as it allows you to analyse others in your market (direct competition), define your target market, and in turn, inform your pricing strategy which aids in the generation of a sales forecast.

When you produce a marketing strategy, a mix must be created. In the Marketing Mix and the Five Ms of Marketing, Clayton Reeves recommends involving the 5 Ms of Marketing to convince buyers to purchase your goods and services. These are:

• Mission
• Money
• Message
• Media
• Measurement

Read the article,‘Marketing Mix and the Five Ms of Marketing'. The report provides a framework for marketing activities for an advertising platform. You can use the following strategies in a virtual context:

• Conduct market research using online tools such as Google Trends
• Read prediction blog posts
• Subscribe to relevant newsletters
• Discover trends in social media such as Facebook (Trending section) or Twitter (Moments section)
• Check out YouTube trending videos

Promotional Activities in Marketing and Advertising

Promotional marketing activities inform customers of the availability of products and services. Promotional marketing activities aim to provide the right product and services at the right place at the right price. Effective promotional markets can also persuade customers to buy products or engage services they might not have otherwise needed. This practice can reinforce consumer ideas and behaviour relating to a product and change the consumer’s mind.

Customers and the industry expect that honest advertising practices are used when marketing and promoting a business. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) protects the rights of consumers through rules in the Australian Consumer Law, including:

• False or misleading statements
• Social media
• Managing online reviews
• Door-to-door and telemarketing sales
• Country of origin claims
• Bait advertising

Users go into an interaction with a company with certain expectations. When the interaction does not meet their expectations, you see pain points in a customer journey. To identify these instances, first reflect on who the persona is. Putting yourself in the user’s mind space will allow you to understand which interactions conflict with the user’s prior ideas and expectations.

It would help if you analysed the customer journey to understand how customers interact with your brand to ensure that any applied strategies will lead to success. A customer’s journey, or path-to-purchase, assesses all the experiences or touchpoints customers have when they engage with a company or brand. The customer journey is as follows:

To effectively create a Customer Journey Analysis, create a framework that includes qualitative data in the customer journey by:

• Step one – building trust with your customers
• Step two – thinking about product attributes and not about product price
• Step three – examine lead generation.

It is also essential that you build emotional engagement into your customer journey. Customer reactions to products or services can determine your marketing strategy's success and the fate of your products or services.

Further Reading

Visit the Customer Journey Analysis for more detailed information on the tools that can be used to analyse a customer journey. Additionally, the article explores how that journey can be mapped and analysed to help companies design products and services to help customers meet their needs.