Almost everyone who starts a business recognizes that it’s important to tell people that they are indeed “open for business”. In fact, most of those people contact us printers for the basics – business cards, stationery, maybe some brochures so they can do just that. Or at least they used to – until they fell under the hypnotic spell of “Free Business Cards”, closely followed by the mesmerizing drum beat of “order online”.
Like all good printers everywhere, I can list a dozen reasons why my customers should buy these staples from me, a real live printer girl, instead of some anonymous online printer who will surely misprint your graphics onto incredibly flimsy stock, miss your deadline, and place a nasty cyberspace hex upon your PC if you complain,.
Right...
OK – that’s a bit of an exaggeration, although I’ve seen everything except maybe the hex. The real issue is that our online behemoth print shops got that way, not because of their great sales techniques, or their unique products, but because they put together a business plan that also included a consistently executed marketing plan.
The Four Ps
Do you remember the 4 Ps of Marketing from the last post? As some of you correctly noted when you wrote me, the classics of the marketing mix are Product, Price, Place and Promotion. (Place = Distribution) These designations date from the mid-1960s, and a good case can be made for updating them to reflect modern marketing communications. We’ll talk about that down the road, but for now, let’s stick to the basics!
The most basic? Product. Period. No product, no sale. No sale, no revenue. No revenue, no business. Period.
The most visible? Promotion. You know – all the pictures, words, coupons, signs, events, press releases, websites, and everything else that tells your story.
The anonymous online print shop that is capturing your customers has done a great job of defining the product, and has clearly promoted that product to the point that revenues for at least one of them is up about 30% over last year. However – those 2 Ps alone are not fundamentally different from what the rest of us do. So why are your revenues not moving up at the same rate?
Well…let’s look at those other 2 Ps: Price and Place. By recognizing price as part of the marketing strategy, and managing place (distribution) with efficiency and economy, a perfect storm of marketing activities has occurred. I'm oversimplifying this a bit, but only to keep from writing so much that you fall asleep reading.
The lesson for the rest of us is not about cutting prices to the point where we’re giving products away. It’s about analyzing all four segments and aligning them to create our own “perfect storm”. These are not stand-alone tasks. They are integrated strategies, comprising specific, planned tasks, organized around achieving one goal: increased revenues.
No matter where or when you opened for business, whatever your marketplace is, whoever your ideal customer is, you have the power to increase your revenues. The first step? Knit your 4Ps into one "BIG P" – it’s called Plan!
Drop me a line and tell me how you’re going about that – I’m truly interested!
:) mb
If you’d like to learn more about the ins and outs of the 4Ps, follow this link to broaden your understanding: http://www.netmba.com/marketing/mix/
Like all good printers everywhere, I can list a dozen reasons why my customers should buy these staples from me, a real live printer girl, instead of some anonymous online printer who will surely misprint your graphics onto incredibly flimsy stock, miss your deadline, and place a nasty cyberspace hex upon your PC if you complain,.
Right...
OK – that’s a bit of an exaggeration, although I’ve seen everything except maybe the hex. The real issue is that our online behemoth print shops got that way, not because of their great sales techniques, or their unique products, but because they put together a business plan that also included a consistently executed marketing plan.
The Four Ps
Do you remember the 4 Ps of Marketing from the last post? As some of you correctly noted when you wrote me, the classics of the marketing mix are Product, Price, Place and Promotion. (Place = Distribution) These designations date from the mid-1960s, and a good case can be made for updating them to reflect modern marketing communications. We’ll talk about that down the road, but for now, let’s stick to the basics!
The most basic? Product. Period. No product, no sale. No sale, no revenue. No revenue, no business. Period.
The most visible? Promotion. You know – all the pictures, words, coupons, signs, events, press releases, websites, and everything else that tells your story.
The anonymous online print shop that is capturing your customers has done a great job of defining the product, and has clearly promoted that product to the point that revenues for at least one of them is up about 30% over last year. However – those 2 Ps alone are not fundamentally different from what the rest of us do. So why are your revenues not moving up at the same rate?
Well…let’s look at those other 2 Ps: Price and Place. By recognizing price as part of the marketing strategy, and managing place (distribution) with efficiency and economy, a perfect storm of marketing activities has occurred. I'm oversimplifying this a bit, but only to keep from writing so much that you fall asleep reading.
The lesson for the rest of us is not about cutting prices to the point where we’re giving products away. It’s about analyzing all four segments and aligning them to create our own “perfect storm”. These are not stand-alone tasks. They are integrated strategies, comprising specific, planned tasks, organized around achieving one goal: increased revenues.
No matter where or when you opened for business, whatever your marketplace is, whoever your ideal customer is, you have the power to increase your revenues. The first step? Knit your 4Ps into one "BIG P" – it’s called Plan!
Drop me a line and tell me how you’re going about that – I’m truly interested!
:) mb
If you’d like to learn more about the ins and outs of the 4Ps, follow this link to broaden your understanding: http://www.netmba.com/marketing/mix/
