In session 7 of A Marketing Podcast I discuss the development of a marketing mix as part of your marketing strategy. The marketing mix is the biggest and most complex part of your strategy. In this session I break down the development into three simple steps and identify some things to keep in mind as you validate your mix.

Session 7: Show Notes

Recap of Previous Sessions (related to strategy development):

* [FREE DOWNLOAD] Small Business Marketing Strategy Template

* Session 2: What is a marketing strategy and why do I need one?

* Session 3: Establishing goals and objectives

* Session 4: Understanding and developing your target audiences

* Session 5: Performing a marketing SWOT analysis

* Session 6: Creating your selling proposition

What is a marketing mix?

Some marketers associate, or even assimilate, the 4 p’s of marketing to the marketing mix

Quick overview on the 4 P’s – thanks to E J McCarthy in 1960.

Product/Service

Place

Price

Promotion

At AMP I refer to the marketing mix as the group of tactics you plan to use to execute your marketing strategy

Goals for your marketing mix

By defining a set of tactics it allows you to focus on tactics that are determined to be highly likely to succeed, and avoid others along the way

It’s not to shut down the potential of doing other tactics, we’ll talk about adjusting as we go in the session about executing your strategy

To provide yet another guideline for your marketing – it’s another piece of the road-map

Things to consider when developing your marketing mix

* Now is a good point in the development of your marketing strategy to get help from a professional marketer if you feel you need some help

* The marketing mix, although it will guide us, is not set in stone. We still need to be realistic and somewhat agile in regards to the tactics we use

* Forget about budget – we’re not there yet – plus it kills your brainstorming

Developing your mix

Step 1 – Brainstorm

List out all the tactics you can think of:

* Tactics you think will work

* Tactics you’ve tried in the past

* Tactics you’ve seen others try

* Tactics that are popular at the time

* Online and offline

In the template I have outlined some basic tactical groups to get you started, those are:

* Advertising (TV, radio, magazine, newspaper, SEM, display network, video on sites like Youtube, sponsorship’s of events, etc)

* Content Marketing

* Inbound Marketing

* Social Media

* Presentations

* Public speaking, conferences, trade-shows, webinars, etc)

* Events

* Print Media (direct mail, coupons, pamphlets, newspaper, magazines etc)

* PR

* Email Marketing & Communications

* Experiential marketing

* And so on

Again this is a good step to get a marketing professional involved. This is where they will provide a ton of value from a tactical idea point of view.

Step 2 – Order by effectiveness

Reorder your tactics in order of effectiveness using the following criteria:

* Refer to our goals and objectives

* Refer to our audiences

Step 3 – Validation

The following list of items must be checked off for each of the tact...