When you want to have a successful marketing strategy, it is hard to begin when you don’t have enough knowledge. A successful marketing strategy requires you certain variables to look into as you start your venture.
Therefore, it is very important that as you begin your business, you know the basic fundamentals of a successful marketing strategy.
Do you want to bag a professional toolkit to operate like a marketer? Then, this article is for you!
However, before anything else, let’s first define what marketing is. Marketing is a set of processes for creating, communicating, and providing value to customers. It is also for managing customer relationships in ways that benefit the organization and its stakeholders.
To establish a successful marketing strategy, we need to identify and fulfill the needs of individuals and organizations. We need to create superior value for all parties. Doing this helps us anticipate and satisfy consumer requirements profitably.
To learn more about this, let’s discover the seven fundamentals of successful marketing!
1. The 4Ps of Marketing
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People
Without people, a successful marketing strategy is pointless. Marketing revolves around the desires and needs of people. Sometimes, these needs are physical, such as clean water and nutritious food.
It’s a psychological need such as a need to impress. Sometimes, it’s a sociological need such as the need to fit into a culture or the need to stand out.
There is an infinite number of reasons for people to do what they do. Why they want what they want, and act as they do. Therefore, successful marketing should begin with an insightful understanding of the consumer.
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Price
Price does so much more than paying for your cost of goods and services. It tells something about the product and sets quality expectations. Price also separates the audience into those who can afford it and those who can’t.
Lastly, it even implies how you should consume the product.
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Place
Place refers to the location and how you distribute or sell the product. To learn the right place, you should decide whether you need to sell this in the online store, exclusive store, or a huge superstore.
These are critical strategic decisions that influence how your product is perceived. And the price consumers will be willing to pay for it.
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Promotion
Promotion is any way of promoting your product. This can be in the form of sales promotion, advertising, public relations, event marketing, or one-on-one selling.
2. Understanding Consumer Behavior
Consumer behavior is the study of why people do what they do. The better we can understand the emotional and motives for consumers’ actions, the better you will be at succeeding in marketing campaigns.
Good marketing can help to present our branding in the best possible light. To do this, you need to understand what your consumers want. Learn how they make decisions. Predict why they choose brands, and know where you can talk to them.
To learn consumer behaviour, try to spend an hour in a grocery store. Watch how other people shop.
From there, you can see different kinds of shopper. Some are fulfilling a specific list of goods. Others compare products before they buy one. Others are focused on purchasing the best deals through volume deals, sales and coupons.
The rest wander from one aisle to another and think of what to buy for next week.
3. Influences to Consumer Behavior
Understanding what consumers do is exciting. But it is only half the job. The significant thing to understand is why they do what they do.
Once you understand why you can begin to predict behaviour and in marketing, that means sales. There are three primary influences on consumer behaviour, which are the environment, culture and individual’s psychological makeup.
4. Individual Preferences
Have you ever bought a car?
If so, it will likely be one of the most expensive purchases you will make in your life other than a house. You probably researched different car brands, shopped around, took test drives and argued about the price.
How does the way you buy a car compare with the way you buy milk?
Chances are you go to the store. And if the price seems fair, you buy the milk. You don’t shop around, taste it first and haggle over the price of milk in the same way you do with a car.
How do you decide on a hair cut?
If it’s just a trim, you will probably go to wherever is closest. If you have a completely new style, then you might go to the salon with the best reputation.
All three are purchases, but the buying behaviour behind them is very different.
Some purchases require much research and some require none. Some require shopping for the best price some require shopping for the best service no matter what the price may be.
Every purchase is different.
5. Product and Brand Development
Product and brand development are the foundation of your marketing program. This includes every tangible and intangible part of the product how your product looks, tastes, smells. It also covers its level of quality, the quantity you sell it in and what it will and won’t do.
Brand development takes a product and distinguishes it from its competition and adds value.
6. Maximizing Profitability
While marketers have many roles, ultimately their role is to drive the profitability of a company. Profit is the money you have leftover from sales after taking out all costs and taxes.
Maximum profitability is found where the marginal revenue from each item sold is equal to, or greater than, the minimal cost of that item. In simpler terms, profit increases as long as you can make more revenue from selling an additional item than it costs to make it.
While that sounds simple, in a competitive market, maximizing sales and price can be tough to achieve. Competitors are forcing you to lower your prices as they attempt to push your sales down.
Most brands never reach their maximum profitability, or if they do, it is a very temporary event in a continually evolving marketplace.
So how can we increase profits? It’s either you raise prices and/or to cut costs.
7. Marketing Communications
You’ve almost arrived at the point where you can begin developing marketing communications. But first, we’ll take a peek inside advertising agencies, marketing services companies, and marketers . This is to know and see how they develop the work you see in magazines, on television and the Internet.
How Do Marketing Organizations Work?
Typically, with a major marketer, there are up to eight groups of people involved in developing marketing communications in a full-service marketing communications company, they are:
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The Client
This is the manufacturer/marketer of a product or service that hires individuals or a company to create and manage marketing communications for them.
In digital world, the client may hire digital marketing agencies or experts to help on the business side.
They participate in strategy development and judge and approve marketing communications, but these experts do not develop the communications themselves.
The client is often the brand manager who is charged with the overall management of the brand.
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Account Management
The account manager works directly with the client and is tasked with the management of marketing communications.
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Planning
The account planner interprets the client’s research as well as consumer trends to develop the creative brief and manage the work through the creative department. He makes sure that the work stays on strategy during its development.
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Creative Team/Producer
This traditionally consists of a copywriter (the person who writes the promotional copy) and an art director (the person who designs the ad). The creative team develops ads or other marketing communications.
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Internet Specialist
Eventually, the Internet creative will probably fold into the overall creative group. However, given that Internet development and production is the most current and useful in development and production than older forms of media, this is always dealt with separately at this time.
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Media
The media group determines the best place to put marketing communications to maximize their impact and negotiates the optimum price for the placement.
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Public Relations/Event Marketer
The public relations representative determines the most favorable way to manage the company’s public image in the news.
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Strategy Development
Strategy development is probably the most important single step in creating a successful brand. Your strategy is all about what you are going to tell your target audience to get them to do what you want them to do.
Therefore, the actual advert or marketing communication development is taking the ‘what’ information and defining ‘how’ you will present it.
Final Thoughts on Learning the Seven Fundamentals of Successful Marketing
Thank you for reach the end of this blog!
I hope that at this part, you already have an in-depth understanding of the seven fundamentals of successful marketing, which are:
- The 4Ps of Marketing
- Understanding Consumer Behavior
- Influences to Consumer Behavior
- Individual Preferences
- Product and Brand Development
- Maximizing Profitability
- Marketing Communications
If you have more questions about the seven fundamentals of successful marketing, leave your comments below. I’ll answer them for you!