The key to success is understanding that you can't please everyone. A well-crafted marketing plan is full of dates and details. Carrying out market research may be one of the most time-consuming tasks at first, but it will pay off for years to come. This part should take up most of your planning.
Of course, doing too much research and not taking the necessary action can be detrimental, but in most cases, we find that people don't dig deep enough and end up paying expensive marketing companies to do their homework for them. After conducting your market research, identifying your target audience, and setting your marketing objectives, the next essential element is developing a marketing strategy. Choose the marketing or promotion strategies you want to work on. Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is a method of increasing sales without increasing traffic or advertising investment, simply by making changes to the website.
The product or service element refers to what you offer as a whole to your customers. Product decisions include functionality, brand, packaging, service, quality, appearance, and warranty conditions. The price element refers to the way in which you set the prices of your products or services. It must include all the parts that make up the total cost, including the advertised price, any discounts, sales, credit terms, or other payment arrangements.
Your prices will also depend on your company's position in the market; for example, if you advertise your business as an affordable car rental service, your prices should reflect that choice. Or, if it is a premium food product, its price should be higher than that of lower quality products to reflect the better packaging and the quality of the ingredients it offers. First of all, you must establish what your target market is, what media they consume, what will be the cost of those media, how many more sales you need to cover your investment and how you will collect information that shows how the promotion worked. When thinking about your product, consider key features, benefits, and customer needs and wants.
Not having the elements of your marketing plan set up correctly could lead to a waste of resources and money in the future. It forces you to think about what areas of your business you can change or improve, to help you meet the needs of your target market, add value and differentiate your product or service from your competitors. While the 5 P's are somewhat controllable, they are always subject to their internal and external marketing environments. It's presented so that even those without any marketing skills can understand the process they should follow in simple terms, allowing them to think in the right way so they can write a plan using the worksheets provided in the course.
The quality of marketing planning often determines the success or failure of a product; sometimes even the future of a company. When you're just starting to write a marketing plan, it's important that you first focus on the main elements you want to address. Implementing the strategy is the most costly step in the marketing planning process and often requires considerable human resources. In marketing (and in business in general) it's a good idea to have established objectives, activities and ways of measuring your efforts.
The 5 P's of Marketing Mix are an important tool that will help you select and create the right marketing strategies for your company. Your marketing goals could be to increase brand awareness, increase the number of leads your sales team gets, increase in-store traffic, and so on.
