Small Business Marketing Plan: 4 Factors to Consider

Marketing is critical to your overall success in business. In marketing you need to consider several important factors to determine your overall strategy. These factors can be broken down into 4 distinct categories.

Product

This is obvious. If you don't have a product or service to sell then you really have no need to market anything at all. I remember my first attempt to make a business. I didn't have anything to sell at all. And so I decided to build a website. It was a great experience, I learned HTML and SQL, as well as a programming language or two, but I didn't have any marketable product. Although my site looked great, nobody came. I lost a fair chunk of change, because I went into business without a product.

Price

Once you have something worth selling you need to determine how much to sell it for. You can't set your prices too low, or you will loose money. I know of a company that has a fantastic product, and best of all it sells very cheap. In fact it is too cheap, because the company sells it at a loss of one cent per unit. That doesn't sound like a lot, but keep in mind that this company produces and sells 100 million a year. Once they realized that this was why their company was turning out a loss year after year they raised the price 5 cents a unit. Nobody noticed because the retailers absorbed the price change and they were in the black.

Placement

On the other side of the coin there are companies out there that, to create a perception of value, will charge excessively for their products. Much more than you'd expect. The Rich dad products for example are very expensive, $98 for a computer game, $200 for a board game. It is robbery, yet people will pay it. Why? Because it is supposed to be educational. And educational tools tend to be expensive. So Rich dad makes huge profits on their products. This is called placement of the product. It is about how it will be perceived by customers.

Promotion

I love to work with promotion. They are the bread and butter of all marketers. The idea is simple; it is what you do to make the placement of your product happen. You can advertise, get publicity, or promote your product without spending a dime. Coca-cola is a master of promotion. The better you are at promoting your product the more successful you will be.

These are the 4 factors that contribute to a great marketing campaign. Remember to consider all of them carefully, before you do anything. They are essential to building a plan for success.