Be a Marketing Guru
You do not have to spend a large amount of money to get a marketing degree. Actually many marketing specialists admit that the basics of marketing is in fact very simple and easy to understand by most readers. Actually after reading this article you will realize that we come across many marketing situations on a daily basis in spite of us not being aware of it, yet! This article is a mini-course in marketing for those who either do not afford it or do not have the time to do it.
Steps
- Know more about your customers: location, roles in family or work, education, income, preferences, manner and amount of product usage are some of the things you want to learn more about. Learning about size, reachability, profitability, effectiveness and dependability of the market segment investigated is a common practice.
- Identifying a market segment and assessing whether it is large enough to make profit is crucial and distinguishes between a “makeable” product and a “marketable” product. A product has a life cycle consisting of introduction, growth, maturity and decline. Identifying which stage the product is in, is important especially if the product is declining and new lines of products need to be introduced. Quality, price, advertising, research and development and service are the key competitive factors within industry.
- A plan to beat the competition must be developed now. One tool to use is SWOT analysis which stands for Strengths, Weaknesses (both internal), Opportunities and Threats (both external). Questions such as the following should be answered: What is your company good at and what is the competition good at? Who are we in the market? What are our resources versus those of the competition?
- Now you need to know how to reach to your consumer which involves distribution channels. Channel intermediaries include wholesalers, distributors, sales representatives, sales forces and retailers. We need to put into consideration how distribution channel costs add to the original cost.
- The marketing mix or the four Ps are product, place, promotion and price. How to differentiate my product? What type of distribution strategy should I select? How can I align my consumer analysis with my promotional efforts? And what should my price be? These are some of the questions that need to be answered at this step.
- The last step of marketing analysis is where the money comes in your pocket or goes with the hole you left unstitched in it. Here you need to know your costs and whether they are variable or fixed. Variable costs are the costs which vary each time such as hourly wages and production units. Fixed costs include salaries and rent. You also need to know your break-even point at which the fixed costs are recovered from the sale of goods but no profit is made at this point yet. Actually the whole point of marketing is to recover costs and make profits.
- Go back and revise the plan.
References
- The 10-Day MBA: A Step-by-Step Guide to Mastering the Skills Taught in Top Business Schools, by Steven Silbiger
