Effective Marketing Strategies An effective marketing strategy is essential to achieve the main objective of company and to enhance the

overall revenue. A good marketing strategy really helps in increasing revenue, reducing costs and growing profits. Well planned strategy also helps in saving money and of course time. A business owner should consider some important decisions while formulating a strategy. When it comes to marketing strategies it includes all the possibilities like product strategy, channel strategy, strategy for communication, and strategy for pricing. The product strategy depends on numerous factors. How this product can benefit the people if they use it? Try to elaborate all the features and benefits of product. The price of the product should be competitive and with supreme quality. It should meet customers need and requirement. The communication strategy is about the way to present information in front of people. Explore the product as much possible to create awareness. It is the responsibility of marketing management to create impressive messages to grab the attention of people. Also, it is better to use all means of communication to approach wider network. The pricing strategy should be suitable for customer and business owners as well. Make sure to keep suitable margin for the profit but the price should be competitive. Market bearing power should be considered while finalizing the product price. Promotions and discounts play crucial role in the effective marketing strategy, so create accordingly. The best channel partnering should be decided carefully; after all it is a matter of brand awareness. So, all these marketing strategies can work wonder for enhancing the brand awareness and brand loyalty.

Marketing Strategy The Game Plan

Your marketing strategy outlines your plan of action to achieve your marketing objectives. The difference between a marketing objective and a marketing strategy is that the objective states what you will do and a strategy states how you will do it. Where your marketing objective is specific, quantifiable and measurable, your marketing strategy is descriptive. The marketing strategy discusses how you will affect your target markets buying decisions through the infamous four Ps product, price, promotion and place (distribution) and how these get used to achieve your objectives.

Product Part of developing your strategy is to look at what you currently offer and rank them on their value to your company. If you are offering a product or service that is not producing the revenue you wish, part of your marketing strategy might be to replace those services with new ones.

Price Now is the time to look at your pricing strategy and cost recovery for your products and services. Determine what pricing changes you need to make in order to accomplish your objectives. Promotion All of the tactics you will use you get the word out is part of your promotion strategy. Advertising, direct marketing, events, public relations, and viral marketing (word of mouth) are all types of marketing tactics that can be used.

Place many businesses fail to understand the value of distribution channels. Even for small businesses, having partners who help you market and sell your services is valuable. By augmenting your services with partners, you bring value to your customers by offering them more complete services. Look at your business, find the holes and fill them with partners that can help you develop new clients.

Using the marketing objective stated above (to increase repeat business within your client base by 30% this calendar year); you might develop marketing strategies such as:

Develop a set of affordable services that help clients increase the productivity of their workforce. Create promotional materials such as an e-Newsletter and complimentary seminar series that includes knowledge and valuable offers to our current clients.

In this case, we have defined the type of product and its price (affordable services) we will use to go after increased sales within our client base. We will promote value through a client-only newsletter and complimentary seminar series that will contain educational information and action oriented offers for these new services. Some marketing folks may feel these strategies are too specific. For small businesses, if you can define how you are going to achieve your strategy, you should. Use the marketing program plan to describe the specifics of each tactic, but there is nothing wrong with specificity here. Your mission is to choose the strategies that fit your company and your products.

Planning for Profit

Goals, objectives and strategies different but interrelated and play an important role in the success of your business. To develop a successful marketing plan, focus on your marketing objectives and the accompanying strategies. Simply define what you are trying to achieve in measurable, specific terms and how you plan to achieve them in descriptive terms. Once you have your objectives and strategies, move on to your positioning, messages, and brand. As you continue to develop each layer of your marketing foundation, you will see your marketing effort become more focused, targeted, and consistent the three ingredients for success.

In fact, many confuse solid marketing strategy with pure tactics, or what we like to call, "brand juice." Visual identity, clever tag lines, creative "essence" advertising, edgy names, well-designed Web sites, big ticket giveaway promotions, publicity buzz-making are all key ingredients in brand juice and elements of marketing, but they are supporting elements. To be effective, such supporting elements must be part of a more comprehensive plan. Real marketing strategy provides a roadmap to creating and delivering true value to distinct groups of customers. All successful marketing strategies must begin and end with the customerthey cannot be an afterthought or taken as a givenso marketers must test their assumptions about their customers constantly. What goes into a marketing strategy? A cohesive combination of:

Targetingto whom are you going to market your products and services?

Positioninghow are you going to differentiate yourself from competitors? Product/Service Attributeswhat attributes/features will the product/service have? Marketing Communicationshow are you going to reach the target and with what message? Pricingwhat price will you charge the target? Distributionwhat channels will you use to sell the product or service? Customer Servicehow will you manage additional customer needs?

Of these components, targeting and positioning are the two most critical elements. To paraphrase marketing guru Phil Kotler, if you nail the targeting and positioning, everything else falls into place. The targeting decision identifying the people you want to direct your marketing efforts towards is one of the first issues a marketer considers. Targeting is knowing where to concentrate forces. "To win a war you need to know where to attack," Dwight Eisenhower might have said to an audience of business managers. "We wouldnt have brought the Nazis to their knees if we had landed the Allied forces at Calais instead of the beaches of Normandy." Most marketers agree that focusing on subsets of current and potential customers is the most efficient way to develop a marketing program, but this immediately begs the question, which subset? There are literally hundreds of thousands of different ways to divide customers into subsets, also called segments. Consider just a few of the popular market segmentations we have observed among a variety of businesses: heavy, medium, light users; 18-to-49 year-old-women, 18-to49 year-old men, older women, older men; people who look like current customers, people who dont; current buyers, non-users; big customers the largest 10 percent versus nine other customer size groups; five different benefit segments; five different personality segments; and six different attitude segments. In this day and age of increasing personalization, some might even argue that the U.S. offers a number of potential target markets equal to the U.S. population. We recommend marketers discover segments by looking at a combination of all possible market drivers such as:
Category involvement: how important purchases in this category are to the buyer?

Product preference motivators: what characteristics are most motivating? Product purchasing patterns: how frequently do they buy? Media habits: what do buyers watch, read, listen to? Sociographics: how strong is their ethnic affiliation and religiosity? Demographics: what is their income, age, and level of education? Psychographics: what are their lifestyle attitudes?

The key to nailing targeting is finding the most efficient, scientific way of segmenting the market and to choose a target group based on its potential profit contribution. Dont believe the hype that companies cant evaluate target groups in terms of profit potential. Marketers can calculate with reasonable accuracy how much it will cost to reach people in a target group, how many will buy the product or service, and how much money they will give to one particular company using both secondary and primary data. For example, for two decades the major gasoline brands were in a state of pax gasolinathey went comfortably about doing their business, market shares changing only slightly from one year to the next. True, there were periodic price wars and promotions characterized by giving away NFL glasses and selling discounted Coca-Cola, but nothing so substantial as to wake the industry up from a deep complacency. By the mid-1990s, however, new low-price brands began showing up everywhere, and the major brands started to work hard to differentiate themselves, with an aim toward gaining more margin from the business. In that context, Mobil Corporation (now ExxonMobil), one of the most innovative marketers, commissioned a large-scale study to better understand its customers and prospects. The study results, reported in the Wall Street Journal, form the basis for the Mobil Friendly Serve campaign. The study found five distinct consumer groups, all roughly the same size numerically. The labels and numbers have been changed to maintain confidentiality.
Car Buffs are generally high-income, middle-aged men who drive 25,000 to 50,000 miles a year. They buy a premium gasoline with a credit card, purchase sandwiches and drinks from the convenience store, and will sometimes wash their cars at the car wash. Loyalists are men and women with moderate to high incomes who are loyal to a brand and sometimes to a particular station. They frequently buy premium gasoline and pay in cash.

Speedsters are upwardly mobile Gen Xers. They are constantly on the go, live in their cars and snack heavily from the convenience store. Soccer Moms are usually housewives who shuttle their children around during the day and use whatever gasoline station is based in town or along their route of travel. Price Shoppers generally are not loyal either to a brand or to a particular station and rarely buy the premium line. They are frequently on tight budgets and efforts to woo them have been the basis of marketing strategies for years.

Analysis of the data revealed that while Car Buffs and Loyalists represented only 38 percent of the population, they accounted for 77 percent of the potential profitability. Once Mobil knew the target, it knew whom to talk to and where to find them, how to communicate with them, in which media, about which products and services, at what price. As the Journal reported: These targets want classier snacks from the convenience store; human contact; quality products; top-notch, quick service; privileges for loyal users; attendants who recognize them; and a nationally available brand. They also want a reasonably competitive price, but thats not the most important consideration. Mobil addressed the needs of these two groups with Friendly Serve a marketing campaign characterized by clean restrooms, cappuccino in the convenience stores, a concierge to assist customers, and more recently a Speedpass payment system. Stations that have implemented the Friendly Serve program have seen double-digit sales and profit increases. Clearly making the right targeting decision takes time certainly more than the five minutes most marketers dedicate to it. Intuitively obvious target groups are rarely the most profitable so marketers that take the time to devise a market segmentation plan and discover the most profitable target will find themselves far ahead of the competition even this early in the marketing strategy process. How to Nail Positioning Once a marketer has identified the financially optimal target group, the next step is positioning. In an increasingly cluttered environment where buyers have very little time to ponder product decisions, products and services that stand for something important or remembered for something significant have an advantage.

A powerful positioning leads to a powerful brand. But positioning is a difficult concept because it embodies the value proposition the bundle of benefits and attributes a company wants to offer buyers at a certain price to positively differentiate the product or brand from competitors. Its a message so clear, so succinct but so powerful that, once launched, it begins to move customers and prospects toward the brand. Most importantly, it is a message to the target group. Usually, the positioning is a one- or two-sentence statement even a word that captures the message a marketer wants to imprint in the minds of customers and prospects. It describes your product or service and how it is different from and therefore better than the competitions. Examples of long-running positioning strategies for companies or brands include:
Easy to useApple Exceptional Performance for driving enthusiastsBMW SoftnessCharmin tissue Authentic, real, originalCoke Guaranteed next-day deliveryFederal Express Wholesome family entertainmentDisney Improves the quality of lifeGE StrengthHefty plastic bags Accepted everywhereVisa SafetyVolvo For the youthful, hip generationPepsi Thrills and excitement for preteens and adultsUniversal Studios Theme Park Nutritious, low-fat, low-calorie foodHealthy Choice Pure, clean, naturalIvory Soap Good value for family mealsTaco Bell

At its core, positioning is the reason why people buy one product rather than another. They believe it offers greater value, strength, prestige, fun, safety or nutrition (or some combination of elements) than another product or service. If marketers had unlimited time and a prospects undivided attention, they could tell him everything about the product or service. But a company does not have endless time, and prospects are notoriously inattentive. The most any business can say are those few things prospects care about and will remember.

Marketers want to fix a succinct message in peoples heads to induce trial and use among prospective buyers or reinforce current purchasing among current customers. Positioning is valuable because when you have it, the other marketing elements follow naturally: pricing, marketing communications and promotion, and distribution. As you segment a market, simultaneously investigate all potential attributes and benefits that might motivate customers in a category. These include all the ways a business can differentiate itself: product, service, personnel, image. At this point the company does not know if any of them actually motivate behavior. The goal is to generate a long list of attributes and benefits that might form the basis for a powerful positioning strategy. These should represent both attributes and benefits of the product and tangible and intangible facets. To uncover these attributes and benefits, a company might do a category scan, exploratory research, personality assessment, social values analysis, emotional exploration, or some combination of all five:
A category scan is a close review of all the attributes and benefits, tangible and emotional, that competitive brands in the category employ. Exploratory research includes focus groups, in-depth interviews, or both. The focus groups do not produce the positioning, but rather ideas for the list of attributes and benefits. Marketers should not rely on the outcome of focus groups to make the final positioning decision. Personality assessment is an analysis based on primary or secondary data on the key personality traits that potentially underlie behavior in the product or service category. Since there are literally thousands of potential personality traits, it takes an expert to provide some insight into which ones might be relevant in the product category and to select the measures of those relevant traits a study ought to include. Social values analysis breaks social values and how they drive human behavior into eight categories. A marketer can establish how relevant each of these values is to consumers either directly, by measuring relevance in a research study, or indirectly, by inspecting secondary sources closely. Emotional exploration looks at peoples psychological needs and how a particular product or service category addresses them. All of these techniques are just as appropriate for business-to-business as for consumer marketers and appropriate for both services and products
Finalizing the Positioning Decision

Like the targeting decision, the positioning decision is not one that should be made in a one-hour meeting. Since the items on the list become the elements of the brands positioning and the connecting threads of an entire strategy, the list must be as all encompassing and creative as possible. Once a company has a list, management reduces it so it can go into a questionnaire to determine how motivating each of the attribute and benefit characteristics is to the market target and how buyers perceive competing brands on each of them. After marketers discover what motivates consumers and the perception of their products or services and those of competitors, they can rank-order a final list of category characteristics or potential positioning themes. Now the task becomes a creative one. Marketers develop a message strategy that puts the product or service in the most positive light. From there the advertising and marketing communications people go to work.
For example, facing deregulation, a tiny company called Green Mountain Power (now Green Mountain Energy) located in Burlington, Vermont, started to worry about competing with national power companies that could afford price cuts to attract customers. The company could not become the low-cost provider. Instead, it began to look at other differentiating factors for power. The company discovered a significant number of customers wanted clean energy and would pay more for environmentally friendly power. Green Mountain created a powerful positioning statement, Power provided by the raging rivers of North America, the prevailing winds, and the sun. No coal, no nuke, no kidding.

As the Green Mountain example illustrates, do not automatically select a low-price positioning even in a commodity category. Although many companies use the low-price positioning, offering the lowest price only works in the long run when the company is in fact the categorys lowest cost producer. Otherwise the lowest-price positioning is not sustainable and will drive the company toward bankruptcy. Formulating the remaining components of marketing strategy should reflect the needs, interests, habits, and behaviors of the target group and the motivating attributes of the positioning. As emphasized throughout this tutorial, building a marketing strategy takes time. We often hear marketers say, I dont have time to do the research. I need to make a decision now! They go on to make decisions based on intuition and gut-instinct about what they feel customers want.

Yet these same marketers somehow find the time to make the same decisions over again later when the marketing plan is not working. They make the same mistakes repeatedly, rather than try to get it right in the first place. These marketers have learned the hard way that, while just about anyone can make a decision, not everyone can turn the decision into a sustainable competitive advantage and profits. Those that have discovered and sustained an advantage recognized the critical nature and inherent complexity of the components of marketing strategy. Many tools and technologies exist today to help marketers make these complex decisions; all thats required is the will to use them.
Setting out clear marketing strategies is a crucial step for any business, not least for smaller businesses. While having a clear marketing strategy doesn't guarantee success, research shows that it's a key ingredient in improving your odds of profitable growth. In short, a successful marketing strategy ensures a need in your target market matches a product or service your business can deliver. Once you've found a match, your goal is to cost effectively communicate the benefits of choosing your offering to the target market. Remember though that acquiring customers is a difficult and expensive business, so when you've found a new customer how much are they worth to you: is it a one-off transaction or a more profitable relationship you hope to nurture over many years? Any marketing strategy you choose needs to be flexible, so imagine the strategy you set out as a series of sign posts rather than a fixed train track. By taking a flexible approach you'll be able to navigate unforeseen circumstances you'll come across along the way. Here are the 5 steps to developing a strong marketing strategy: 1.Understand your strengths and make your weaknesses irrelevant So what are you good at? A marketing strategy with substance must play to your strengths as a business. To lay strong foundations for your marketing strategy it's worth spending some time putting together a SWOT analysis, assessing your business' strengths and weaknesses; the market opportunities and market threats.

During this stage it might be worthwhile conducting some market research with your existing customers to get a more honest idea of your reputation in the market place. An anonymous email survey may give you more candid response - so be prepared for praise and criticism! If you're sending a survey out to 100 or fewer people try www.Zoomerang.com as it's free to use and easy to create a professional looking survey. Strengths might include: specialist knowledge, unique product features, personal service, flexible service. Weaknesses might include: inefficient computer systems, high customer attrition, limited financial resources, low employee skills. Opportunities might include: growth in market sector, change in government regulation, using the internet to reach new markets. Threats might include: new competition, economic downturn, more attractive alternative to your product/service2) Segment your market Many small businesses fall into the trap of thinking that their product or service will appeal to 'everyone'. Often the reason they do this is because they fear that excluding certain groups of people will limit their opportunity. This thinking couldn't be further from the truth - and remember that while you may think your target market is limitless your marketing budget certainly isn't! So, instead of trying to 'boil the ocean' let's instead try to characterise the needs of particular segments or groups of a market. The focus of your marketing strategy should be to identify their needs through market research and address those needs more successfully than your competition. By matching your strengths to the particular needs of a segment in the market place will give you the greatest chance of success. For example, there might be a market segment that considers quality first and foremost. If this matches your strength as a business that delivers a quality product then all your marketing activity should highlight the high quality of your product or service. 3) Write a marketing plan Once you've clarified your strengths, the market opportunity and your target market it's time to write it down in a marketing plan. Your marketing plan will crystallise much of the thinking you've done so far and help you to formulate the actions needed to put your strategy into place and the resources needed to make your goals a reality.

Using SMART (Specific, Measureable, Achievable, Realistic, Time-based) objectives in your strategy should make measurement of your success easier to judge later on. Your plan is a working document and should be regularly reviewed so that it reflects any changes in your market. If you've not written a marketing plan before you can download a marketing plan template at Marketing Strategies 101 4) Decide on tactics to reach your market Now you need to consider how you're going to reach your market. Will you sell direct, through a partner channel, a retailer....? These decisions will affect how you go about making your target market aware of the products or services you have to offer and why they meet their needs. Typical approaches to communicating your message might be through print advertising, direct mail, telemarketing, public relations stunts, online, and point of sale (POS). While an approach that uses several communication channels usually works well, try to stay disciplined otherwise you'll burn your budget up fast and lose focus. It's worth considering some of the emerging marketing channels presented by social networking sites, too. However, while these channels might be a free or low cost way to promote your business, they can still take a lot of time to nurture. Ultimately the channels you choose should be dictated by what your target audience is most responsive to. By building up a detailed picture of a typical 'buyer' of your product (their gender, age, income level, family circumstances), you'll be able to start thinking more creatively about how to reach them. 5) Measure your progress and refine While marketing is not always an exact science, you should still be able to build a fairly accurate picture of the impact of your marketing activities and strategy. A simple start to measuring your success is to ask every new customer how they heard about your business. By putting in place mechanisms to track the effectiveness of your strategy you can judge how well you're performing today and use the results to shape future marketing strategy.

Competition-based pricing
Setting the price based upon prices of the similar competitor products. Competitive pricing is based on three types of competitive product: Products have lasting distinctiveness from competitor's product. Here we can assume The product has low price elasticity. The product has low cross elasticity. The demand of the product will rise.

Products have perishable distinctiveness from competitor's product, assuming the product

features are medium distinctiveness. Products have little distinctiveness from competitor's product. assuming that: The product has high price elasticity. The product has some cross elasticity. No expectation that demand of the product will rise.

[edit]Cost-plus

pricing

Main article: cost-plus pricing Cost-plus pricing is the simplest pricing method. The firm calculates the cost of producing the product and adds on a percentage (profit) to that price to give the selling price. This method although simple has two flaws; it takes no account of demand and there is no way of determining if potential customers will purchase the product at the calculated price. This appears in 2 forms, Full cost pricing which takes into consideration both variable and fixed costs and adds a % markup. The other is Direct cost pricing which is variable costs plus a % markup, the latter is only used in periods of high competition as this method usually leads to a loss in the long run. [edit]Creaming

or skimming

Selling a product at a high price, sacrificing high sales to gain a high profit, therefore skimming the market. Usually employed to reimburse the cost of investment of the original research into the product: commonly used in electronic markets when a new range, such as DVDplayers, are firstly dispatched into the market at a high price. This strategy is often used to target "early adopters" of a product or service. These early adopters are relatively less price-sensitive because either their need for the product is more

than others or they understand the value of the product better than others. In market skimming goods are sold at higher prices so that fewer sales are needed to break even. This strategy is employed only for a limited duration to recover most of investment made to build the product. To gain further market share, a seller must use other pricing tactics such as economy or penetration. This method can come with some setbacks as it could leave the product at a high price to competitors.[1] [edit]Limit

pricing

Main article: Limit price A limit price is the price set by a monopolist to discourage economic entry into a market, and is illegal in many countries. The limit price is the price that the entrant would face upon entering as long as the incumbent firm did not decrease output. The limit price is often lower than the average cost of production or just low enough to make entering not profitable. The quantity produced by the incumbent firm to act as a deterrent to entry is usually larger than would be optimal for a monopolist, but might still produce higher economic profits than would be earned under perfect competition. The problem with limit pricing as strategic behavior is that once the entrant has entered the market, the quantity used as a threat to deter entry is no longer the incumbent firm's best response. This means that for limit pricing to be an effective deterrent to entry, the threat must in some way be made credible. A way to achieve this is for the incumbent firm to constrain itself to produce a certain quantity whether entry occurs or not. An example of this would be if the firm signed a union contract to employ a certain (high) level of labor for a long period of time. [edit]Loss

leader

Main article: loss leader A loss leader or leader is a product sold at a low price (at cost or below cost) to stimulate other profitable sales. [edit]Market-oriented

pricing

Setting a price based upon analysis and research compiled from the targeted market. [edit]Penetration

pricing

Main article: penetration pricing Setting the price low in order to attract customers and gain market share. The price will be raised later once this market share is gained.[2] [edit]Price

discrimination

Main article: price discrimination Setting a different price for the same product in different segments to the market. For example, this can be for different ages or for different opening times, such as cinema tickets.