What are the Elements of a Marketing Mix?

What is a marketing mix?

The marketing mix is the set of controllable, tactical marketing tools that a company uses to produce a desired response from its target market. It consists of everything that a company can do to influence demand for its product. It is also a tool to help marketing planning and execution.

It’s importance:

There are several benefits of the marketing mix that makes it important to businesses;

• Helps understand what your product or service can offer to your customers
• Helps plan a successful product offering
• Helps with planning, developing and executing effective marketing strategies
• Helps businesses make use of their strengths and avoid unnecessary costs
• Helps be proactive in the face of risks
• Help determine whether your product or service is suitable for your customers
• Helps identify and understand the requirements of customers
• Helps learn when and how to promote your product or service to your customers

The 7 Ps of Marketing Mix

Product

Product is a good (such as music players, shoes etc.) or service (such as hotels, airlines, etc.) that is offered as a solution to satisfy the needs of your customer.

When developing the product, you need to consider its life cycle and plan for different challenges that may arise during the stages of it. Once the product reaches its final stage (sales decline phase), it’s time to reinvent the item to win the demand of the customers again.

Price

The next element of the marketing mix is the price your customer is willing to pay for your digital product. This helps determine the profit you will be able to generate.

When setting a price for your product, consider how much you have spent on producing it, the price ranges of your competitors, and the perceived product value.

Place

This is about the distribution center of the product and the methods used in distributing it to the customer.

Wherever this is, it should be easily accessible to the customer. For example, if you have a physical store, it should be located in a place that can be easily discovered by the customer. If you own a website to market your digital product, make sure it is easily navigable.

Promotion

Promotion refers to the methods a business uses to gain the attention of the customers to their product. These includes sales promotions, customer service, public relations, advertising etc.

When creating your promotion strategy, consider the tactics used by your competitors, the channels that are most effective in reaching your customers, and whether they match the perceived value of your product.

People

This refers to the people – both your customers and employees – who are directly related to the product or service.

While you need to study your target market to understand whether they are in need of the type of product you are offering, you need to hire the right people who are capable of giving their best to build it.

Process

Systems and processes play an important role in building and delivering a quality digital service to your customer.

Make sure that you process is free of bottlenecks and blockers in order to reduce the unnecessary expenses associated with executing the service.

You can use process maps to map process steps and analyze them to identify where you need to make marketing improvements.

Physical Evidence

Physical evidence refers to what the customers see when consuming your product or service. This could include your branding, packaging, the physical environment where you are selling your product etc.

Make sure that all physical aspects associated with your marketing product or service adhere to its values.