Understanding the marketing mix in your business is crucial to your success as an entrepreneur. But the problem is – even before our real problems start – most people don’t even understand what a marketing mix is, or why it’s so important.
The Marketing Mix
Many business owners do not have an effective marketing mix, and instead, if they have any marketing at all, they focus only on one or two streams.
While this is tempting and easy, it’s also a mistake. Because not only are you vulnerable to having these essential streams cut off (and it does happen, with changes in fashion, technology and even government legislation), but you’re also leaving vast sources of potential profit untapped.
What’s more your marketing mix isn’t just about having different channels of marketing in your marketing strategy – for example print advertising, email marketing and direct mail – but it’s also about using different media within those channels. I’ll come back to this in a moment.
What Goes in Your Marketing Mix
Let’s look first at what we might call your true marketing mix – the different media you use.
Most business owners settle on one medium for their marketing – and they typically settle on it almost by accident. They find something that seems to work, and they decide that’s that – their marketing is sorted.
But this is dangerous thinking. For example, say you’re a local plumber and you find you get most of your work from an ad you run in one of the local papers. And then all of a sudden the paper goes bust. Or you fall out with the proprietor and he or she won’t run your ads any more. Or some other plumber comes along with a better ad and steals all your responses away.
What then?
Well, you’re stuffed, that’s what.
What’s more, by focusing on just that one ad. you’re ignoring the many thousands of people in your local area who don’t read that paper!
Now, let’s look at marketing within the channel.
Some people respond best to written words – like ads, postcards and letters. But others might respond better to a CD or a DVD – sounds and pictures, in other words.
The Ideal Marketing Mix
Ideally your marketing mix will comprise many channels and ways of getting your message in front of your target market: direct mail, Internet marketing (both natural search and Pay Per Click), advertising, radio, TV and so on.
And them within each channel, you should be using multiple media. So, for example, if you’re using direct mail, you might want to send letters, CDs and DVDs; if you’re using print ads, then you can send them to web-pages with streaming video, audio and, of course, written copy.
The only limitation to this is your own imagination.Image Source: http://images.google.com
