MARKETING STRATEGY

The following modules have been designed to help you develop a marketing strategy as they relate to your business.

Make your choice by clicking on the key word in color.

• Evaluate your line of products or services to see how it meets the needs of your market.
• Identify that segment of the total market that is most likely to buy your product or service.
• Determine the best price at which you should sell your product or service.
• Select the marketing channel that is most suitable for your business.
• Differentiate among the various available advertising media with respect to cost, audience quality, and probable sales from each advertising dollar.
• Understand the principles of direct selling so that these principles can be applied to any aspect of your marketing message.

In only two years twenty million people visited the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D. C. Sidewalk vendors do very well around the museum. With the enormous traffic, glittery trailers, and hawkers' shouts of "Hot Dogs Here!" "Fresh Pizza!" "Cold Ice Cream" and "Hey, Souvenirs!" the vendors have combined locations, products, and customers for steady profits. This shows the simplest and the ultimate in marketing. All the elements of marketing are here--a plan, survey, product selection, pricing, location, advertising and it is still the basic transaction, person to person, often with hectic bargaining. Marketing is such an all inclusive concept.

As the operator of a small business, you can control some elements of marketing more closely than others. Obviously, if you are already in business, you have made basic decisions about what your product will be; you have established basic prices for your goods or services; and you probably have some ideas about how to promote your business.

Marketing involves not only making the initial decisions about each of the above elements, but also reviewing those decisions periodically to be sure that your business is operating as profitably as you had planned.