Marketing Mix

The Marketing Mix can get very complicated for small business owners. But only if you let it. Many marketing 'gurus' tend to use lots of industry knowledge when really, they don't know much about you and the best ways to promote your business.

The marketing mix is comprised of 4 elements, more commonly called the 4 P's.

Product - which refers to your product or service that you are selling. When researching this element, you must be prepared to tear your product to shreds to see if it will actually stand up. Compare your product to your competition and see how you sit in the marketplace.

Place - This element of the marketing mix refers to how you will be distributing your product/service. Will you have a bricks and mortar shop? Or will you be online? What about distributers? MLM, Party Plan? The distribution of your product will help you to determine how you price your service or product.

Price - Many business owners really get stuck on this one. It's actually quite easy if you have similiar products to compare yours to. Align yours with your competitors and see how you come up for value for money. Set your price based on theirs and where you would like to sit in the marketplace. Do you want to be the cheapest? Do you want to be known for quality?

Promotion - Once you have the above worked out, the next element of the marketing mix is the promotion of your product/service. This encompasses plenty of various marketing strategies. This is also where most business owners get caught out. By spending money on a strategy that is not suited to your business, you are just wasting it. There are so many different strategies out there that you will need to have a mix of 3-5 going at once. Do your research, don't just settle for basic newspaper advertising. Get creative!!

Small business marketing ideas - Benefits of Joint Ventures

Posted by: admin in Marketing Strategies

Let’s imagine a situation where we have two Internet marketers who know each other. One has a great product that will sell very well but he has no mailing list, no affiliates, nothing. The other is a great marketer with tens of thousands of subscribers in his mailing list, but the problem is he has nothing to sell to them. The very obvious solution here is to give the product to the great marketer with lots of contacts, and split the profits between them. This, my friend, is the very essence of Joint Ventures.

As more and more people start their own home based businesses online, the market is going to get more and more saturated and the competition will grow fiercer by the minute. The fastest, most effective and easiest way to build your own online business empire is through joint ventures. That is, join forces with other marketers to sell your product.

  When you joint venture with another marketer, you can ask him (or her) to send an endorsement of your product to his existing mailing list, so you do not need to worry about collecting subscribers from scratch. You already have an easily accessible target market. The trick is to find the right marketer whose subscribers will be interested in your product. Once you achieve that, you won’t even have to worry about generating traffic to your salesletter or finding affiliates to promote your product. All of that is already done for you.

When you joint venture with a solid player in the field, your perceived value and reputation will instantly increase because if this well-known person in the field is willing to work with you as a team, you must have some substance! Hence, when you manage to hook up a joint venture with someone who’s a “regular player” in your niche market, your status will instantly change from “total newbie” to “guru status” overnight!

Last but definitely not least, you will get a chance to build a lasting relationship with a big figure in your niche market, and that alone will worth more than the profits you pull in over that single Joint Venture. When you have a dominant figure in the market as your friend, you will gain a lot of privileges and perks that no newbie like you could ever get their hands on – for example new insights into interesting product ideas and marketing strategies. You can’t even buy that for hard cash!

So, start looking up a potential Joint Venture partner and try your best to convince him or her to strike up a deal with you!