7 marketing essentials that your company must follow

Creating a great product is one thing, but taking it to your targeted audience requires specialising techniques in marketing. Let’s look at what will help you as a new company to attract and retain customer interest.

For any startup or existing company, the marketing approach adopted will tell a lot about its success. Today, let’s try and learn about the marketing essentials that form the soul of every organisation and its offerings. These aspects define the promotion of a product/service offered and how the organisation follows up on the marketing techniques thereafter to leave a lasting impression in the industry and in the minds of customers.

Do thorough consumer analysis

The foremost aim of a business is to create a customer. A thorough consumer analysis will help reveal planning for the product, price, promotion, and distribution. Consumer analysis includes examination and evaluation of the probable customer’s purchases, needs, and processes. Market segmentation of audience will be based on a consumer’s geographic location, demographics, behavioural and psychographic aspects.

Product planning will depend on consumer analysis to a great extent, especially when it comes to improvisation in the features and aspects of a product/service. The likes, interests, disinterests, feedback of the consumers will give an insight into the possibilities of a product’s chances of survival in a market.

Concentrate on the product/service

A product can be of convenience, luxury, utility, speciality, etc. Is the organisation launching a new product altogether or is it rebranding an existing service? Is the company introducing major changes in an already placed product or trying to diversify its offering? Be it any of the above; marketing for a product/service has to go parallel with the shaping of a product, new or old. If the advertisements or marketing mediums need a makeover in terms of voice, message, presentation, the same has to be articulated to suit the company’s interest.

Sometimes the packaging of a product influences the buying decision of a consumer. Thus, factors such as presentation, promotion, and appeal matters and cannot be overlooked. Overall, the service or product must entice people to want it.

Plan the pricing

Pricing techniques used will often spell success and failure of an offering. Sometimes, the popularity of a product/service is directly related to the pricing, and at other times, it is not. For instance, in a highly competitive market where companies offer the same type of product and excellence, the pricing of the product will affect the sales. A product costing a lower amount, in this case, may sell faster than a competing product.

Similarly, certain offerings do not get affected due to pricing. A high-priced medicine may still be purchased because of the necessity factor. Luxury products also remain mostly unaffected by the change in pricing. However, the sale of common goods may be impacted even if the price change is minuscule.

Market penetration and development

In market penetration, the organisation wants to achieve growth for existing products, in order to increase the market share in the current market segment. In market development, the company’s objective is to target existing products to a new/existing market by bringing in innovations. One of the marketing essentials is to the identity if a product/service needs to grow in the market or needs a creative touch and repositioning.

Sometimes, a certain natural calamity can affect a product adversely. For instance, in the lending sector, gold loans faced a mixed bag of reactions in Southern India, after the floods in Kerala. While the repayment capacity of borrowers dwindled and people started selling off gold than taking a loan against the same, many began monetising on the gold asset as they lost other means of monetary support. Gold financing companies in such a case had to provide added benefits such as lowered interest rate and zero processing fees to attract customers.

Advertising and publicity

A combination of publicity and advertising helps promote the company’s offering. Sales promotion via inbound or outbound marketing drives the sales revenue. Online advertising is a good idea to reach maximum consumers. It is cheaper than traditional marketing techniques, though the latter may not be completely defunct and serve as a medium for advertising, even today. For instance, for the real estate industry, both the newspaper advertorials and online adverts hold equal importance.

Similarly, companies often take on to new media routes to promote their products. Roadshows and events have become quite common to advertise services and products, which was not so a few years ago. Direct marketing such as door-to-door sampling of products has increased. Audience engagement is being focused on as more and more people are welcomed to provide a suggestion for a product that is not launched yet.

Diversification of the offering

Diversification is done in order to make the company independent and not dependent on just one product line. For instance, two unique shampoos bearing different names and launched as competitors while the parent company is the same. Thus, even if a customer purchases either of these products, the parent company remains in the limelight and gains profit.

The diversification can be in terms of pricing and the look of the product as well. For instance, a chocolate bar can get a new wrapper or a reduction in price. The company can introduce chocolate shots and cakes along with a chocolate bar and further diversify the product mix.

Secure distribution channels

Establishing distribution channel relations, inventory management, transportation, warehousing, wholesaling, allocation of resources and goods, etc, have to be accurate. If a product is readied as per the expectation of the target audience but does not reach the audience on time, the offering will fail to succeed. This is why securing distribution channels at the earliest is important.

The distribution channels are very crucial for the success of any service/product.

(Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of YourStory.)