By David Malherbe – Published in Drakenstein Gazette – Friday 8 November 2013
To market your products or services does not come cheap. To ensure that you do not waste money, you need to have a strategy, and a strategy needs planning. Your strategy can consist of any or a combination of the following elements:
- Product: You can have a strategy to emphasize the features of the product or service when advertising. E.g. best quality, best materials used, long lasting (e.g. batteries), handmade, etc. If your product / service is of the best quality, it may not be the cheapest, but you point out the product quality.
- Price: When you emphasize the price in advertisements, you’ll most probably say things like “best price in town” or “visit us for the lowest prices.” But the lowest price seldom means best quality product or service, because it is more expensive to produce better quality. Therefore consumer’s biggest choice usually lies between wanting the best quality or do they have a limited budget and look for the best price?
- Promotion: This is the way to get the message about your products or services to the consumers. Will you do personal sales, advertisements in newspapers or on radio, put flyers in post boxes, or whatever? How will you promote what you do? You can make use of glamorous and expensive advertising or go for a more affordable option.
- Distribution: Where will consumers be able to acquire your products or services? You can supply your address or you can advertise that it is available at selected stores, or at a store near you, or we bring the service to your doorstep.
Therefore your marketing strategy has much to do with which of the above elements you’ll emphasize when marketing your products or services. When you sell luxury German vehicles, you tell the prospective clients about the wonderful features, because they do not buy it because it is the cheapest.
But when you sell vehicles to students or young people who just started working, your marketing will definitely emphasize the lower price. The possibilities are endless. Look at advertisements and see which of these elements you can identify.
David Malherbe and Dewald Scholtz will discuss this topic in more detail Monday evening from 19:00 till 20:00 on Radio KC 107.7 FM in the program “You the Entrepreneur”
(David Malherbe is a business- and career consultant and lives in Wellington. He can be contacted via his web page www.jedidiah.org.za or T/F 021-873 0262 or on Facebook at “Jy die Entrepreneur.”)
