Marketing is crucial for any business, large or small. If you’re running a startup, you may think that you don’t need to invest in marketing the way the large enterprises do, but that’s simply untrue. You may not have the budget to dedicate to the most expensive marketing tactics like the largest organizations do, but you still need to create a brand identity and maintain brand consistency with customers.
Fortunately, social media and other technological advancements make it easier, and cheaper, to engage with customers than ever before. You can build up your company’s reputation online and establish relevancy with your target audience through content marketing. The more insights you can provide about your business and the more you can convince potential customers that you have the solutions to their problems, the more your bottom line will increase. In order to ensure that everything goes to plan, your marketing department needs skilled managers who can adapt your marketing strategy to any situation. Here are the four pillars of marketing management you should know by heart.
Product
You can’t be in business without offering some kind of tangible products or services. Creating an effective product or service requires best practices, such as thorough market and competitive research. This is where a business intelligence platform, such as a market research information system (MRIS) can come in handy.
An MRIS can collect data in real-time from market reports, financial journals, and even competitor analyses without your marketing team having to worry about manual research. This lets them focus more on effective product development and testing. Great products not only meet your target audiences and their needs, but they also live up to the high quality and convenience standards that customers have come to expect.
Price
Even the best products and services will struggle to succeed if they’re stuck with the wrong price. Price goes beyond the out-of-pocket cost to the customer as well. While it’s certainly true that no customer wants to overpay, if a product is priced too low, a customer may perceive it as having a lower value.
Because of this, your marketers and sales team need to work together to find a price that customers are willing to accept that also reflects the true value of what you’re offering. Naturally, you can’t forget about making a profit from all this, so you’ll need to determine an effective price range by adding up fixed production costs, along with any variable product costs while leaving room for a profit margin.
Place
While the place pillar used to refer to the physical locations the products and services will be sold at (and it still does), these days, the increasing popularity of online shopping means that place refers to general access to products. The more popular your products become, the more you’ll need to increase access to them.
You may start by offering products on your own website, but as they take off, you may decide to work with a large seller and distributor, such as Amazon, to ensure your products can always get where they’re needed. Business intelligence platforms can help with this by analyzing the efficiency of your supply chain.
Promotion
This is what most people think of when they hear the term “marketing.” Promotion is everything you do to inform customers about your products and how they solve customers’ problems. Promotion does include traditional advertising, but it also involves engaging with customers on social media and reaching them through original content creation.
In order to simplify promotion, it’s a great idea for brand managers to take advantage of marketing asset management. With this technology, you can organize all of your digital files and marketing assets in a single source, which makes all assets easy to find, utilize, and even repurpose for additional use.
With this database, you’ll be able to track all of your content history and lifecycles, so you’ll know which marketing materials are working and which materials will need to be tweaked. Asset management like this makes it easier for your entire team to align goals and ensure your promotion is as effective as possible.
