Set Up for Success: Review Your Marketing Mix

As you probably know, four core elements make up the heart of your business marketing mix: product, price, place, and promotion.

Because these elements are under your control, the goal of any business marketing manager is to adjust them in such a way that customers are attracted to your company and will come back time and again.

Without the four Ps pushing things in the same direction, marketing initiatives can be confusing, contradictory or, worse still, pulling each other apart completely.

Review Your Business Marketing Mix

As simple as it sounds to organize the classic 4 Ps of the marketing mix for your business, regular reviews are important to make sure all the moving parts are in sync. Use the various elements to delve deeper into what you're currently doing and how it could be adapted to deliver more for your business. 

Product

Core: What you sell. The product or service that satisfies a specific need of your customer, including its uses, features, and unique value.

Questions to Ask: How does what you offer benefit your ideal customer? What main problem does it solve or how does what you do improve their life? What are the unique benefits provided by your product that set it apart from competitors?

Price

Core: The price point of what you sell, relative to competitor pricing and your customer's perception of value.

Questions to Ask: What are the price points in your industry and how sensitive is your customer to a change? What does a certain price say about your what you sell? Distinguish between price and value; price is what they pay, value is what they get. Which price point gives the customer a feeling of good value and still makes you money?

Place

Core: Where your product or service is sold, as well as the places in which you need to be visible so that your customer finds it.

Questions to Ask: Think about your ideal customer; where do they gather and what do they do there? Can you build a presence there for your business? What marketing materials and methods are right for each different place? Will you join competitors in popular spaces or nurture new ones of your own?

Promotion

Core: An extension of place that focuses on the marketing materials and methods used by your business. Individual approaches that build into your overall brand.

Questions to Ask: How do you want your business to be seen by the customer? What elements of your business help to communicate the value of what you offer? Think of channels and time; what medium will get your marketing message to potential customers and when should it be used? 

Setting the Stage for Success

Use these first four elements of the marketing mix to review where you are in your industry and how you need to position your business to attract and retain new customers. From that simple base, you can expand out into a 7 Ps marketing mix (or more!) and diagrammatic representation to deliver a final positioning message for the wider business to follow.

Understanding all elements of the marketing mix can help any business, big or small, develop a better feeling for who customers are, what they want and where they gather.

Even a simple exercise with this foundation marketing principle works well to get employees looking out at customers, focusing on external benefits, not only internal features.