Developing Your Marketing Mix

Optimizing your marketing mix is the best way to align marketing activities with your business strategies.

Developing your marketing mix refers to finding the optimal strategy for the four Ps of marketing:

• Product
• Price
• Place (Distribution)
• Promotion

These four components are the essential elements of your marketing plan. You can produce different results from your marketing efforts by altering your strategy for each of these ingredients in the mix.

It is kind of like baking a cake: the cake mix is primarily flour, sugar, eggs and milk. The final cake will taste differently depending on how you alter the amounts of mix elements, and which types of ingredients you choose (e.g., do you use regular flour or whole wheat, white sugar or brown, etc).

Just like the cake, you can vary the end result by altering the amounts and types of mix ingredients. By using variations of the four components, you have the ability to reach different segments within your target market.

This video by Professor Chris Birch from Staffordshire University talks about the mix of marketing.

For example, if you sell a product to a niche market, make sure that

• the product really is targeted towards the need of that market,
• your price is within the budget of that market,
• you are distributing your product in places where it will be seen by customers in that market, and
• your promotion communicates how your product solves the pain points of those target customers.