In business, you likely get a sense, pretty quickly, about what works for you and your business, meaning that you often stick to this. In marketing, it’s no different. How you market your business and your services may well appeal to your loyal demographic, giving you little reason to vary your marketing influences, but settling could mean that you miss out on the opportunity to do even better.
Sometimes, you just have to come to terms with something new and accept that the only way that you’re going to move forward is to move outside of your comfort zone. This is true in many aspects of life, but perhaps most obviously in business, where the measurement of success that you’ll be dealing with, may well take the form of financial success.
2 Key reasons to expand your marketing influences
You Can Appeal to New Demographics
Say, for example, you’ve been sticking to social media as your primary form of marketing, this whole time. This might even mean that you’ve been exclusively using one singular platform, as it is the one that is most often used by the audience that you wish to appeal to.
While this might have done well for you so far, this also means that you have been doing little to actually expand and reach out to new potential customers. New customers lead to more business and more money, as well as more recognition, which just feeds those objectives even further.
The recipients of your social media marketing efforts could, hypothetically, be restricted to younger people who have regular access to the internet. So, if you were interested in reaching out to those who might not visit such online forums with the same frequency, you might want to do some research into working with professionals like Tatango on text message campaigns.
While you might figure that the audience who you’re most likely to receive business from is the one that you’ve already made aware of your services, there’s no harm in casting a wide net.
Your Name Will Gather More Recognition
The ultimate name of the game is to make as many people as possible aware of your business and their access to your services. So, even just doing things that will get your name out there can have a lasting impact on people. You might find that adverts that people don’t appear to pay much attention to, actually stick with them more than it would seem. This means that you might want to look at how appearing in ads on various web pages could benefit you.
As you become more prolific and varied in your forms of advertising, reaching wider audiences, you might even find that your social media pages begin to show signs of this newfound attention in the form of more followers. This can create a loop where your other means of advertising actually allow your original methods to become even more effective, as your posts and social media marketing can now reach all of those new potential customers that you’ve spent time getting the attention of.
Expanding the marketing influences beyond the ‘4 Ps’
Numerous authors developed extended marketing influences models from the classic 4Ps, which were intended to expand the focus of the 4Ps on material products through to the marketing of immaterial services.
The model of the extended marketing influences mix has established itself over the years with theorists and practitioners alike. It takes account of the fact that the marketing of intangible services is subject to different requirements than those of physical products. And therefore requires separate attention apart from the basic 4Ps of marketing managers.
On the basis of this consideration, the expanded marketing mix supplements the four basic pillars of the marketing mix (product, price, distribution and promotion) with these three additional Ps:
1. Equipment
Services have one fundamental characteristic: they are of an immaterial nature. Their quality can therefore hardly be objectively assessed by (potential) customers.
While the perception of high value and quality in a physical product from a marketing point of view still appears to be relatively easy to influence (implementation of a high-quality product design, elegant feel, etc.), this poses a far greater challenge in the case of immaterial services. Managers must therefore ask themselves: how they can activate and positively influence the quality awareness of services in their consumers.
In a buying situation, consumers look for possible indicators to minimize the risk of a bad buy. Material products can usually be touched and examined carefully before buying. But how can consumers safely evaluate the quality of a service?
The visible environment plays an important role before and while a service is used. Companies can influence the quality perception of their service with the type of equipment in a customer office, the ambience in a restaurant or with architecturally cleverly designed rooms.
All of these aspects should be considered by marketing managers when offering services from their companies. The equipment policy can thus contribute directly to the implementation of integrated non-verbal communication, which goes beyond the communication policy of the simple marketing mix. Here, too, it is important to have a uniform orientation towards the elaborated goals and tactics of the respective underlying marketing strategy.
2. Human resources policy
The personnel policy, like the equipment policy, is particularly applicable in service marketing.
If customers use a service, they primarily come into contact with the staff of the company that performs the service. It is therefore important for marketers to take this fact into account: After all, there is no material product that acts as a reference for the quality of the service. Customers and stakeholders are measured accordingly, the quality level of a service primarily on the appearance of the staff.
Even when using impersonal services such as streaming services such as Spotify, the quality of the answers to questions by e-mail or telephone can make a significant contribution to overall success on the market.
A successful marketing manager knows the importance of personnel policy. Accordingly, he / she will pay particular attention to aligning the corporate strategy with the appearance of the service-providing staff.
3. Process
As the third pillar of the expanded marketing mix, the process policy describes all management activities that encompass the service process. The aim of this marketing instrument is to design processes efficiently, to adapt them to changing conditions and, if necessary, to optimize them.
Put simply, this marketing element tries to establish customer-oriented business processes. It answers the questions of what, when, how, with what and by whom is done in order to provide the respective service.
Current studies to determine customer satisfaction (here using the example of online shoppers) show that this can quickly become a complicated and lengthy undertaking . In online retail in particular, numerous management and marketing processes have to overlap seamlessly in order to achieve the best possible customer experience. Starting with a clear presentation of products in the online shop, through to ensuring stocks and a seamless supply chain right up to the end customer’s doorstep.
Conclusion
The expanded marketing influences mix is particularly relevant for companies in the service sector. Even if the extended marketing mix is primarily of a theoretical nature, it serves as a helpful orientation for practice in order to be able to implement a developed marketing strategy holistically. Because only if all elements of the marketing mix are coordinated can the desired success be achieved in the long term.
