What is a Marketing Mix Strategy? – All You Need to Know, Tips & More
Table of Contents
When you take a marketing class, one of the fundamental topics that you are first taught is the marketing mix.
The marketing mix is also sometimes called the four Ps of marketing.
If you’ve ever taken a marketing class, you’ll already know what the four P’s are. If you haven’t, then they are:
- Product
- Price
- Place
- Promotion
Quick Summary
In this post, we’ll discuss the four P’s of marketing in detail and explore how they can be used to develop effective marketing techniques.
When you develop a marketing strategy, it can become difficult to boil things into four cookie-cutter aspects as suggested by the four Ps.
However, they can be a great help when you feel overwhelmed as they can help you take things step by step in order to develop a successful marketing strategy.
So without further ado, let’s get started.
What is a Marketing Mix Strategy?
A marketing mix can be boiled down to the techniques and actions that a brand uses in order to promote its products and services to the masses. It acts as a guideline to break down and act upon the four key components of marketing.
As stated earlier, these four key components are product, price, place, and promotion.
As you can probably tell, breaking down marketing into these four components can really help put things into perspective. It helps a company break down marketing initiatives so that they can effectively assign roles to different departments to develop more effective marketing campaigns.
To find out what a marketing strategy is, click HERE.
The Four Components of the Basic Marketing Mix
We’ve mentioned what the four P’s are and how, when they’re properly synchronized, they can help you develop an impactful marketing strategy.
Check out other types of marketing strategies like distribution marketing strategy, HERE.
Let’s discuss each of these four components in detail:
Product
The product is fairly self-explanatory. It’s what your business intends to sell to the masses and thus, wants to promote through its marketing efforts.
Naturally, it can be either a product or a service depending on what type of business you have and in what niche.
The majority of the work done to promote the product is, of course, done by product marketers and product managers within your team. If you have a fairly small marketing team, this could be one of many responsibilities that your marketers would handle.
To effectively nail the product aspect of the marketing mix, your product marketers need to understand every facet of your company’s product.
Moreover, they need to be familiar with the product’s key features, its unique aspects that give it a competitive advantage as well as any flaws that it might have. They also need to be aware of the pain points of the target audience and how the product can address them.
In return, this will help them develop effective product marketing strategies with brand messaging that will resonate with the target market.
Since product marketers will know the most about the product apart from the development team, they’ll also be in charge of educating salespeople for your company.
Price
The price, of course, refers to the price point of your product; How much you want to sell it for.
To determine an appropriate price for your product, you’ll have to take the help of many different pricing strategies and also conduct extensive market research.
First off, competitor research is important as you want to determine what similar products are typically priced at. If you price it too low, people won’t buy it because they may think it’s low-quality. If you price it too high, people will just buy from your cheaper competitors.
Hence, it’s important that you nail the price when you first launch your product if you want to have a shot at becoming popular.
You also have to take into account other factors such as marketing costs, development costs, etc. You have to set up an appropriate profit margin so that your company can achieve decent revenue in order to sustain itself.
Insights and opinions can also be gathered from consumers through public surveys and focus group activities.
Place
The place refers to where your product will typically be sold.
This could be online or through a physical retail store. Again, the ideal place for your product or service will depend on what it actually is.
If your product is software, obviously, the ideal choice would be to market and sell it online.
On the other hand, if it’s a tangible product, then you can have a combination of an online store as well as a physical retail store.
Determining the best place for your product will also involve extensive market research. You must determine your ideal buyer persona and then determine which channels that person would prefer.
Would they prefer to buy the product online? Or would they be wary of buying products online and would want to actually see the product in a store first?
As you can probably tell, the former works well for younger audiences while the latter works better when your target customers are older.
Once you determine whether it will be online or in-person, you’ll also need to determine the methods through which the product will be sold and shipped.
For example, if you intend to market and sell your product online, one common way to do this is through social media.
With social media, you can choose to have an e-commerce store set up right there on the social media platform itself. Platforms such as Facebook and Instagram allow customers to buy products from companies without ever leaving the site.
You can also choose to have a separate website for your online store. You can then provide a link to the online store within your brand messaging content on social media.
This can sometimes be difficult on social media platforms that have character limits since the links take up quite a few characters. This then leaves very little space for you to effectively communicate your brand message.
One way to solve this issue is to make use of link shorteners.
To shorten your link through Pixelfy, go to the website, register an account and log in.
Step 1: After you log in, you’ll be at the dashboard page for Pixelfy.
From the dashboard page, you can check out insights and analytics from previously shortened links.
You can also use the fast shortener box at the top to shorten any link you want.
Step 2: Copy the link to your brand website or online store and paste it into the fast shortener box as shown in the screenshot below.
Once you paste it in, you’ll be redirected to the next page. If you don’t get redirected to the next page, click on the Shorten button to go to the next page manually.
Step 3: On the next page, you’ll get the shortened link to your brand website or online store. You can copy this shortened link and use it within social media posts.
Promotion
This pretty much encompasses all of the marketing efforts that you will use in order to make the target market aware of your product or service.
Naturally, these marketing efforts will depend on who your ideal audience is. For example, teenagers would be much more receptive to promotional efforts on social media rather than traditional marketing methods such as billboards, etc.
Promotion within the marketing mix refers to any and all techniques that you use to promote your brand. This will include a combination of paid advertisements as well as organic approaches such as word-of-mouth, content marketing, etc.
It will also include marketing planning and how you intend to develop and nurture public relations. You’ll also need to define the marketing tools that you will need to make your marketing efforts more efficient and effective.
A good marketing mix strategy provides a comprehensive approach to all the four Ps of marketing so that every important aspect is appropriately addressed.
If you ever feel overwhelmed when trying to develop a marketing strategy, refer back to the four Ps to ground yourself. Take it step by step and read the marketing mix definition to determine how many aspects you have addressed and how many still need to be addressed.
Wrapping Things Up…
That’s how a marketing mix strategy works and how you can use product, price, place, and promotion to inform your marketing decisions.
It’s a great way to keep your marketing efforts on track and ensure that your company becomes and stays relevant for a long time to come.
If you have any more questions, please feel free to reach out in the comments section below. Check out more content like this on our blog.
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