Marketing and Branding

Marketing and Branding: one of the most crucial parts of running a business. It is this component that plays a key role in educating your customers about your business and also significantly influences their decision of purchasing your products or services.

When marketing, 4 key elements are used to create strategic marketing plans:

• Product:
  • The product is the good or service which is being provided by your company to the customers. Successful products are products that essentially meet a need currently not met by the goods/services in the market.
  • Some guiding questions to ask yourself when working on a product/service are as follows:
    • What is your product/service?
    • How is your product/service different from what others offer?
    • What does your product/service do?
    • Does the product/service meet an unfilled need in the market or is it a new experience completely?
    • Who is your target audience?

• Price:
  • Price is the cost of a product or a service.
    • To identify a successful price, it is important to understand the audience and how much they would be willing to pay for your products/services.
    • Some guiding questions you may ask yourself to set your product/service’s pricing is:
      • How much do your customer’s pay for a similar product/service in the market?
      • How much are your consumers/customers willing to pay?
      • What is the best price that fits your target market?

• Place:
  • Place is the distribution channel of the company, it determines where the product is being sold and where the most visibility can be obtained for your product/service.
  • For example, if you are looking to sell a product for young people, you would benefit from placing your product near universities or shopping malls that young people frequent etc.
  • Some key questions to ask yourself to determine the place your product should be out of are as follows:
    • Where will you sell your product/service?
    • Where does your target market shop?
    • What distribution channels should you use to best reach your target market?

• Promotion:
  • Promotion is how your product or service is advertised.
  • In the past, promotion was done by print media, television commercials, word of mouth etc, but nowadays, there are more promotion methods - you can use email marketing, content marketing, social media marketing, influencer marketing etc.
  • Some questions to ask when deciding on product promotion are:
    • What is the best time to reach your target audience?
    • What marketing channels are most effective for your target audience?
    • What advertising will your audience be most persuaded by?