Introduction
The Mediafire.com operates in the online cloud support industry and has been in existence for more than eight years. From its inception, the company’s product line objective has been to provide quality products at the convenience of the clients.
The services offered by the company include online file hosting, cloud storage, file synchronization, and software vending. The company has expanded from the US to all other continents due to its customer-centricity business model.
The company’s marketing plan has been successful in customer base expansion and market penetration in the competitive online business platforms. This analytical treatise attempts to explicitly carry out a marketing audit of the Mediafire.com Company. The audit reviews product performance, distribution, pricing, promotion, and expanded marketing matrix strategies.
Marketing Audit
Products that benefit from quality, feature and style improvements
The Mediafire.com has several products that are able to benefit from quality, feature, and style improvement since the company operates in a market that is sensitive to technological changes. For instance, the Mediafire SharePoint is an application which allows enterprises to backup their documents via a private cloud.
This application by the Mediafire comes with a system for functionality or information delivery via a site. Through its ‘Cloud app model’, this application enables a user to create personalized apps which the Mediafire.com controls and hosts (MediaFire, 2015, par. 3).
The infrastructure for the SharePoint application is clunky and often unrealistic to use, especially for small businesses. Besides, the application is rudimentary since its hosting option is restricting. The application has to rely on REST API and JavaScript in order to interrelate with allied SharePoint framework.
In addition, the SharePoint application has series of cross-server communications which might negatively impact on its performance, especially when in use in large organizations (Blythe 2006). Unlike other apps, the SharePoint application is not very flexible and does not provides customized solutions to each business needs, and easy to use.
There is a need to make the product more compatible with programming languages such as NET, JavaScript, Client Object Model, and HTML among others. The will make the application to be able to support provider, remote, and on-premise hosted apps (Cone 2011).
Besides, the proposed modification will ensure that the SharePoint application has series of options for hosting besides multiple platforms for creating related applications. As a result of modifying the file sharing product, the SharePoint allocation will have the capability of efficiently replacing the sandbox and farm solutions thus, guaranteeing satisfaction to the administrators, users, and third-party application customer.
New products worth adding
There are three new products that are worth adding to the current array of online support that the Mediafire.com offers to customers across the globe. For instance, the company may integrate the OpenStack, Rackspace, Eucalyptus, and CloudStack to ensure that the current cloud deployments are customisable within different servers, as opposed to the current centralized server.
By integrating the above applications into the current cloud hosting system, the Mediafire.com will be in a position to expand its scope of operation since the new products will assist customers in creation, deploying, and hosting of different business applications (Cheverton, 2004).
Besides, the proposed applications can compute, network, and store different all-encompassing cloud deployments. In addition, the new products are compatible with KVM, Hyper-V, XenServer, and Xen Cloud Platform (XCP), which make the Mediafire server user friendly.
The pricing objectives, policies, strategies and procedures
Pricing of products and services is of fundamental importance in the four elements of marketing mix that generates profit for business enterprises. The factors that influence the price of commodities and services can be categorized as external and internal (Dagnino & Rocco, 2009). Pricing thus, is more than just simple calculations of the cost of production and setting up a mark-up.
Consequently, pricing policy becomes a major component of enterprise marketing plan, which is part of the whole business plan. The pricing objective adopted by the Mediafire.com Company is quantity maximization since the company’s main mission is to become a leader in terms of market share amongst companies vending online software and cloud support services.
Consequently, the pricing objective of the company seeks to maximize the number of the products and services sold online. Owing to the pricing objective of the company; quantity maximization, the company’s marketing strategies include multiple pricing, ‘good, better, best’ pricing, loss leader pricing, and product bundle pricing (Farooq & Jan, 2012).
Multiple pricing aims at luring customers to make large purchases by offering slight discounts to customers who buy goods in large quantities. The prices of single items are slightly higher to those that purchased in bulk. For example, buying two software applications at once will cost the customer approximately $3 less than buying single software.
Besides, the prices are offered in a series of three formats with the price of each series rising above the price of the previous series. For instance, cloud hosting series of files for a similar client will cost less than hosting the same number of files for different customers (Ira, 2002).
The products are also bundled together and the customer who buys one item can get older or complimentary software for less. Product bundling has helped the company to achieve its objective by making it possible to sell items that might have not been sold.
In calculating the unit cost of the online products retailed by the Mediafire.com, the company applies the Conjoint Analysis, which is a marketing research tool that is used to determine attributes of each product and how the features affect the prices. The choice to use conjoint analysis is supported by the fact that it is flexible and less expensive to carry out than concept testing (Farris, Bendle, Pfeifer, & Rebstein, 2010).
The extent to which the prices set are sound on cost, demand, and competitive criteria are within the scope of product affordability, product differentiation, and product usability at the Mediafire.com. For instance, due to multitude and complexity of factors involved in determining the price of products, the Mediafire.com has been proactive in assembling relevant information on the market conditions, which determine the long term price changes.
However, the short term price policies are tactical in nature as they endeavour to realize short term business objectives, and are employed by the Mediafire.com in relation to the goal they are intended to achieve for each pricing strategy (Ferrel, Lukas, Shembri, & Outi, 2012).
Distribution objectives and strategies
Marketing strategy distribution channels are essential before actualising projections of a blueprint. As a matter of fact, this plan functions on the margins of informed decision making after comprehensive research on the viability and sustainability of a new product or a modified product.
In order to achieve desired margins in sales and total revenues generated, a proper marketing plan should integrate entry strategy, comparative advantage, and market segmentation since in most cases, there is always a strong competitor or competitors that passing might prove challenging due to existence of consumer perceptions and household names.
The Mediafire.com Company’s distribution objectives and strategies are to meet the demand of customers across the globe and ensuring efficiency in the supply chain management. The Mediafire.com Company’s supply chain management is stable to ensure that customer confidence is guaranteed. As a development strategy, marketing experts within the company have proposed different expansionary channels in managing online marketing through internet tools (Kotler & Keller, 2012).
As a strategy for further penetration of the expansive global software and cloud hosting, the Mediafire.com has improved on its distribution network by adding a fleet of automobile product display shops. These automobiles are fitted with visible posters of the company products. The automobiles are allocated to different regions across the US where the availability and visibility of the company’s products are minimal.
In order to successfully implement this strategy, the Mediafire.com Company has doubled its current expenditure on product distribution channel to the market. However, this cost is projected to substantially drop after a short period of time as the company will start to benefits from economies of scale as a result of dispatching more products into the market due to improved product visibility (Harris & Dennis, 2007).
Properly designed online marketing and product distribution management has facilitated the success and sustainability of the company’s online marketing since it operated within stipulated business laws. To increase credibility and maintain professionalism, the current distribution channels of the Mediafire.com Company encompass processes and features that flawlessly facilitate healthy and lifetime relationships between the business and its clients.
Among the new development elements that have been incorporated in the current distribution strategies include trust, fair retribution process, and passing accurate information to target audience (Cone 2011).
In summary, since the current distribution channel is already developed and the Mediafire.com brand preference stable, the distribution strategies are very realistic since marketing resources (distribution patterns) are fully operational to facilitate a market exercise on target and segmenting position for the company’s products. The market share increase is to be realized within twenty four months with periodic updates activated after every month to facilitate progress and success measurement against projections of the market share expansion objective.
The organization’s promotional objectives and strategies
The Mediafire.com actively uses the new media element (NME) techniques to promote both their production and their vision on art and fashion. They are willing to use innovations in style, which brings fruits of colourful, bright presentation of online products with unusual forms.
Such a production has to be published and promoted on Instagram, company website, and social media where software creators, vendors, and users can see promotion and be excited. The Mediafire.com has its own website where promotional campaign is a little bit more than just gallery with pictures. The website functions as a blog where they can announce upcoming products and form customer community. The company’s website is part of its communication strategy and it requires professional attitude in order to keep content under control (MediaFire, 2015, par. 7).
The Mediafire.com Company’s website has been optimised through the use of the Search Engine Optimisation strategy and is tailored to include a unique cookie which is transferable to the users of the website. The unique cookie for the website is transferable to all primary and secondary visitors of this site hence broadening the spread information on the website across the US and beyond.
Optimising the SEO has the potential of making the website go viral since the unique cookie will spread to the primary and secondary users (Blythe, 2006). Through timely appeal to emotions and self prejudice, the Mediafire.com products are packaged to engage the ‘perceived goodness’ and need to identify with ‘the ideal’ in the functionality and deployment within different television, social, and print media advertisements (Liu, Liao, & Peng, 2005).
These attractive values are clearly painted as perfect in the various advertisements about the products through use of bright and powerful communication themes such as universal compatibility with the programming languages such as NET, JavaScript, Client Object Model, and HTML among others. In order to make this strategy successful, the advertisement messages are modelled on the platform of consistency and direct appeal to the target market.
As indicated by the current marketing manager of the company, market penetration for the Mediafire.com products has been possible due to the unique qualities (Jin, Suh, & Donavan, 2008). Advertisements are very manipulative and use tactics that directly and involuntarily appeal to the mind of the target person.
Usually, advertisements appeal to memory or emotional response. Reflectively, the success of the Mediafire products promotion messages are deeply entrenched in the principle of keeping reliable and professional reputation in exchanging ideas and convincing customers. The advertisement messages are presented in two channels, that is, below-the-line and above-the-line.
Under the below-the-line approach, the products are marketed directly through the print and visual press. On the other hand, under the above-the-line approach, the advertising messages are presented via the social media to appeal to the customer segment consisting of the young technological gauchos and digerati (Roberts, 2005). The use of promotional strategies for the Mediafire.com products was informed by the need to;
Attract
The main objective of the Mediafire.com marketing plan is to attract the younger customers market through the company website and a twitter fan page in order to sell the applications. The objective aimed at packaging the Mediafire.com products as favourite of the younger customers who frequent social media and actually share a common technological culture. Apparently, this segment forms the largest bracket of those who will use the software and cloud hosting applications (McKinney, 2005).
Customer retention and loyalty building
Properly modified Mediafire.com products website and the social media pages have been successful in reassuring the customers on quality. Through massive recruitment of the Mediafire.com product fans in the twitter page, the company has not only benefited from an increased traffic of online compliments, but also recorded high rates of customer loyalty as most customers are influenced by reactions from other clients.
This customer retention strategy was meant to position the company as a market leader in terms of customer satisfaction tracking and response (Pergelova & Angulo-Ruiz, 2013). This was achieved through optimisation of the Mediafire.com products website’s search engine.
Promotion and points of sale
Since the Mediafire.com products are based on B2B model, the company’s promotion and advertising activities include usage of all marketing tools of B2B. With its decided joint partner strategy, the company has recruited several marketing companies with the responsibility of marketing its products.
This strategy is has been successful since the contracted company have better knowledge of the industry, requirements, and approach to minimize conflict as a result of different perceptions (Stokes, 2011).
Improving promotional budget to get better results
The Mediafire.com may improve the promotional budget to get better results through increasing the current marketing budget allocation for social media marketing by 20%. Since most the products offered by the Mediafire.com Company are online based, increased online marketing activities will increase product visibility and intake from customers across the globe (Sarin, Challagalla, & Kohli, 2012).
The company may recruit an online marketing company to implement, manage, and generate feedback on the effectiveness of the short messages, link referrals, and fan pages. Since the company has a data base of the contact of the targeted clients, increased social media marketing will translate into improved sales recorded.
The use of expanded marketing mix to improve the performance
The Mediafire.com may use the expanded marketing mix to improve the performance of the company through creation and successfully implementation the marketing strategy to ensure customer loyalty and market expansion. The company’s product multi-branding as a positioning strategy may enable it to integrate the expanded marketing mix by balancing the elements of intangibility, inseparability, and heterogeneity in the 7Ps of its market mix as a result of improved product visibility for each target segment (Tynan & McKechnie, 2009).
The company can use a strategic brand equity model to integrate the advertisement approach to its market penetration strategies. To achieve this, the company should segment and differentiate its market along consumer-based market segmentation procedures. Specifically, the online kiosk model should use the local media channels to keep in touch with the target segment (Winchester, 2006).
This is summarised in the proposed brand equity model diagram below.
(Source: Self generated)
In order to increase credibility and maintain product visibility, the Mediafire.com website and social media channels should be modified to encompass processes and features that flawlessly facilitate a healthy lifetime relationship between the product and its clients across the globe.
Conclusion
Marketing communication strategies are important in aligning a company towards the target market in order to achieve optimal sales. The main determinants of a successful marketing communication plan lies in the proper brand alignment and research on segmentation.
In order to achieve the desired goals, Mediafire.com Company’s positioning ensures clear difference of its products from the existing products of other competitors. The strategic plan has internalised the aspects of business vision, mission, and values in its promotional, pricing, distribution, and marketing mix strategies.
The company has a potential of increasing customer base by introducing more cloud hosting systems besides improving on the current SharePoint product. The Mediafire.com Company is positioned to reap heavily from the recommendations proposed. Despite its wide market, there is need to counter competition and ensure business sustainability. Currently, the market dynamics discussed above should be skewed to optimise the company’s product performance.
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