Introduction
A marketing plan refers to the segment of the market to which a given product gets marketed. It owes its definition to gender, age, and/or socio-economic category of people. Market Targeting involves analysis, evaluation, and clear attachments made to the projected actual markets before entry of the market.
Target marketing encompasses a planned approach that involves the creation of a marketing mix that is particularly geared to a market segment and group of buyers. It market segmentation followed by piling your efforts of marketing on particular or just main segments (Barringer & Duane, 2008).
Target marketing is pertinent in making the pricing, promotion, and distribution with regards to your services and/or products increasingly cost-effective and easier. It simply helps with a focus as regards marketing activities in totality.
Positioning
Positioning entails how marketers attempt to foster an identity or image perceptions of their target market as regards its brand, product, or organization. It can as well be done by identifying a market niche as regards a product, brand, or service by use of marketing placement strategies that are conventional like promotion, distribution, packaging, price, and competition.
Positioning happens psychologically to the market targeted. It refers to the summative insight that the market developed of an exacting company, servicer, or product relative to the target’s perceptions as regards the competitors of the same class. It usually happens despite the reactivity, passivity, or proactive notation of management as regards the continuous process of evolving a position. Although a company is able to influence positively the perceptions by employing strategic actions that are enlightened.
Marketing Mix
Price: Price indicates the amount to be paid by the customer as regards the acquisition of the product. When materials of high quality are used in a product, then it attracts an obtainability of higher prices.
Product: This insinuates the service /product obtained by the customer. A product considered to be good is able to market itself since it is able to present benefits to the customer. A product would be differentiated due to its different packaging, properties, and design.
Promotion: Promotion describes the manner of persuasion and convincing of the customer to buy the product. Promotion is necessary for emphasizing the new features that have come of a product.
Place: The place is the manner in which the product gets its distribution to the customers. A campaign for advertising conducted in a particular area of the country needs circulation with regards to the product to be in place prior to the campaign guard against disappointing customers (Barringer & Duane, 2008). The marketing mix proves vital in placing the marketing strategy into action – this means, the actions that accompany the marketing plan.
Service or Product Development Strategy
Differentiation strategy would be used to create a product or service which is unique by using different techniques to make the services provided by the product to be unique. Distribution/provision of the service would also be diversified to have a bigger market reach.
The exclusivity translates to margins of profit exceeding the industry average. It would also important to incorporate supportive conditions which would make the strategy to be more effective by practicing product or service re-engineering and incorporation of personnel creativities.
Promotion Strategy
Advertising will be done by use of magazines, trade journals, newspapers or advertising through direct mail, broadcast advertising using TV or radio, outdoor advertising. Another promotion strategy that would be used is marketing collateral done by the production and distribution of brochures, flyers, posters, and newsletters. Your design of the promotional package should be catchy and informative.
Promotional activities like sponsorships as regards special events, conducting contests trade shows, fairs, community projects’ participation, give-away, coupons, and free samples. Public speaking and conferences, meetings of professional associations promote efficiently by giving contacts for sales.
Place or Distribution
Use of chain of intermediaries, each with the responsibility of passing the product/service down the chain to the next organization, before consumer utility. The practice, commonly called the channel /distribution chain has each element having its own particular needs, to be in consideration by the producer besides those of the all-important consumer. Where an organization offers digital products, like information, entertainment, or software, electronic distribution through the Web, file download/ e-mail is used.
Pricing Strategy
Some pricing strategies are competitive pricing where a company uses competitors’ prices as a benchmark for their prices, cost makeups by assessing own cost structure, closeout used when there is inventory in excess (Barringer & Duane, 2008). Membership and use of trade discounts help in customers’ segmentation. Bundling and quantity discounts reward customers for larger purchases. Versioning is used with technical products/services and involves selling the same general product in configurations of two or three.
References
Barringer, B & Duane, R. (2008). Entrepreneurship Successfully Launching New Ventures 2nd International Edition. Pearson Education: Upper Saddle River