You own a business and you want to communicate effectively to your target audience with a rock solid marketing effort, but is that effort supported by the pillars of marketing? There are five fundamental pillars that support every successful marketing strategy. Today I am going to walk you through each one so that you can move forward with a solid foundation.
1. Product: Your product or service is the most basic element to your business. It should satisfy a need or ease the pain of your target audience. The product must be well packaged, easy to use, and interesting. When evaluating your product, customer service and overall presentation are to be heavily considered.
2. Place: Your location is crucial to overall success. You must position your business to be in a location that is in close proximity to your target audience. Even if your business is strictly online your website address and online partnerships must position your business to get traffic from your target audience. They say location is everything and they are right, almost.
3. Promotion: You must promote to grow! Your target audience is not going to just dream about you and your products. They need to know what your doing and its all up to you to tell them. Great promotions make the target audience feel like they aren’t being sold something. These kind of promotions add value through interesting, entertaining, educational, and engaging content.
4. Price: The price of your product or service is very important to your success and should be evaluated carefully. Does it cost your customer to NOT have what your offering? Is what your offering have a perceived value that is higher than not having your product? These are good questions to ask yourself when determining price. There are four key points that you should consider when setting a price. 1. Cost to you. 2. What is the competition charging? 3. Overall industry mark-up. 4. Value to the customer.
5. Profit: Now we get to the good stuff. Essentially profit is the difference between the cost of your product and the price consumers pay. Efficient businesses do all they can to drive their costs down which increases profit without raising prices on consumers. Profits will fluctuate based on economic conditions, supply chain issues, consumer demand, and political policy. Smart business owners will regularly audit their pricing structures, and costs to keep profits flowing.
