All marketing resources will eventually talk about your marketing mix, but what do they mean exactly? Marketing mix is a term that the marketing world tries to hold as a private term that only the industry knows about, but as a small business owner, you need to understand how to plan and implement your marketing mix.

The marketing mix is defined as the four P's of marketing: product, price, place, and promotion. These four areas make up the complete outline for product or service marketing. Once you have defined the variables for each P, you have a basis for proper marketing.

Market research will play a major role in each area of your marketing mix. You must understand what you are competing with in regards to products and pricing. Although you may have a new and unique item with an innovative type of distribution, you still must compare your product or service to existing ones.

Here are the four P's of your marketing mix for small business marketing.

P #1: Product

The product or service or selling must be defined first. What are you selling? How will it be packaged? Determine your product's features, and then build the benefits from them. At this point, you will make all of the decisions relating to your product or service: style, quality, packaging, warranty, etc.

P#2: Price

Pricing actually plays a vital role in the branding and image of your product. Determining your price can be difficult, especially if you product is in a widely-variable industry. You must determine pricing strategy, retail and wholesale pricing, possible bundling, and any type of discounts.

P#3: Place

Place refers to how you will distribute the product. Will you sell to retail stores, or will you sell directly to customers? Is your product a wholesale item? The decisions made about distribution will affect your marketing mix in terms of how you will warehouse your products, how you will process orders, what types of channels will you use, and how will you cover the market.

P#4: Promotion

Promotion is the area where you will make decisions on how people will learn about your product. What types of sales strategies and promotions will you use? What kind of sales force will you need to sell your product? How will you use public relations and publicity to support your product? There are many aspects of the promotion element of your marketing mix. In fact, the other three P's will affect your promotion strategy.

Decide on the first three P's before you tackle Promotion, but ultimately, each P will coordinate with the others. Once you complete your marketing mix decisions, review the entire plan to make sure you have a consistent and precise marketing mix plan in order to properly sell, distribute, and promote your product.

You may have had all the best intentions that you were going to focus on your small business marketing plan and have reached your marketing goals by now, but you haven't done it. Don't panic. Here is a list of marketing tips that, if followed, will ensure that you do achieve the marketing goals that you want to this year and for years to come.

1. The first stage in a successful small business marketing plan is that you need to remember that it is a plan and not a quick fix. Think about what your marketing goals are for the next three years rather than the next few months. If you imagine where you want your business to be in three years, it is far more realistic and less stressful than if you expect to have reached everything by the end of next week! These marketing goals can be to reach a certain level of income, pass a milestone number of clients or any other quantifiable goals.

2. Think carefully about your motivation to achieve your marketing goals. It is important to ensure that you actually want to achieve them rather than feel that they are expected of you. Don't have items in your small business marketing plan that you truly do not believe in or want. If you have a real desire to reach your marketing goals, you are far more likely to reach them.

3. Another point is to have marketing goals that are challenging. One of the main benefits of attaining these targets is that they inspire you and take your small business marketing strategy to new heights. Of course, you don't want to have unrealistic ambitions that you are almost guaranteed not to realize, but you do want to have goals that demand the best from you.

4. Consider how you are going to reach your marketing goals. You need to have a small business marketing strategy that identifies the steps that you need to take to ultimately reach your target. These can include seeking out new clients, networking and hiring more staff to help cope with the increase in business that you anticipate achieving. Your small business marketing plan should be as detailed as possible and follow a natural flow from where you are now to where you want to be and what it will take to get there.

5. Your small business marketing plan should take into account any additional skills that you will need to achieve your marketing goals. There are many ways to gain valuable knowledge without having to spend a lot of time and money on courses, including the internet.

The best way to maximize the benefits that you can gain by improving your skills is by having a clear idea of what your business aims are. This will give you the basis to find ways that you can increase your business acumen.

Copywriting is an essential part of any small business marketing strategy. Whether it is writing sales letters, brochures, marketing emails or website copy, all businesses need a good copywriter. Hiring professional copywriters can be extremely costly but you can save money by improving your own copywriting skills. Your small business marketing plan should include provisions for improving your copywriting skills by any of the numerous ways available until you can afford to hire a professional.

If your ultimate marketing goal includes expansion of your business, you are going to need to learn a number of complex skills involved in management.

6. Any small business plan has a much better chance of success if the targets are realistic. It is essential that you take time to thoroughly analyze which of your marketing goals, if any, are unrealistic. You need to be brutally honest at this stage and remove any targets that are simply impossible to achieve.

7. The next stage is to break down your three year small business marketing plan into three separate one year plans. This enables you to specify which marketing goals you want to reach by the end of the first year and the second year with the ultimate aim of having reached all of your targets by the end of the third year.

8. Prepare a detailed step-by-step plan for each of your marketing goals. You need to include every action that you are going to need to take to achieve targets on your small business marketing plan. Some of these steps will follow on from each other while others may have to be worked on together. It is important to be as detailed as possible with this stage of your small business marketing plan to maximize your chances of success.

9. Use a calendar. It doesn't matter whether you use an electronic form of calendar, or a leather-bound diary, you need to transfer your detailed small business marketing plan into an actual timeframe. This will enable you to keep achieving your marketing goals on schedule.

10. It is worth having a monthly review of your progress. This is invaluable for ensuring that you have not let your small business marketing plan slide too far from your original schedule. If you find that you have not achieved as many marketing goals as you hoped in a particular month, due to whatever reasons, use it as a motivator to do better the next month.

You may well find that your marketing goals alter slightly as you work through each one. This is another reason why following these 10 steps is a good way of assessing what your aims should be and to help you realize them. Your small business marketing plan is likely to be far more successful.

Many small business owners and managers approach marketing in a shotgun approach. They throw money at different marketing activities and hope that something hits their target. In most of these cases, the results are poor. Owners and managers start blaming the radio stations, the ad agency, or even the marketing consultant who told them marketing was the most important activity of their business. They don't understand the need to plan and map out their marketing efforts. Planning is key to reduce marketing costs and increase effectiveness.

Why create a marketing plan?

When an entrepreneur starts a business, they decide on the product or service, determine where they are going to get it, and plan on how they will sell it. Most owners and managers don't realize that this planning actually coincides with marketing planning, but in order to be successful a conscious effort has to be applied to planning marketing activities that correlate to creating the product or service and selling it.

As we discussed in the marketing concept of consistency, marketing must be consistent. In order for marketing to be consistent, it must be planned. You must plan each step of your marketing just as you do a business plan. Most businesses have realized the need for a business plan. It helps to guide where the company is going, what is expected, and what they will do when they fail or succeed. These are the same reasons for creating a marketing plan. You must know what the goal of your marketing is, how much you are budgeting, the expected results, what to do if you exceed or fall short of your goals and expectations, and how to relate your marketing to the rest of your company.

What is the difference between planning and strategy?

Planning consists of your marketing roadmap. It tells you where you are starting, what's your end point, and what the path is to get there. Your organization's goals are included in planning. Budgets, analyses, and forecasts go into your planning.

Strategies are how you accomplish your goals and forecasts. In fact, strategies are part of the plan. Strategies tell you how you will get from the starting point to the end point and the specific way you will take your planned path. Strategies consist of the action steps that you will implement to obtain the forecasted results. To sum it up, planning creates the big picture and strategies make up the individual parts of the big picture.

What goes into marketing planning?

Marketing planning is typically conducted by your executive staff. The top-level managers usually provide input and feedback for the necessary goals and objectives to make your company successful and maintain a high level of growth. If you have a dedicated marketing department, they will ultimately be responsible for the marketing plan and its contained strategies, but the entire company must be involved in creating the basic outline of your marketing plan.

The marketing planning should begin with an overview of your business and what you intend on selling. When starting here, you should define your business specifically and break down your products and services so that everyone involved understands the basis for all of your marketing planning. Your marketing planning should consist of goals and objectives that relate to the goals and objectives of your business plan. From there, you should analyze your target market, competition, strengths, weaknesses, threats, and opportunities (SWOT). You should also include what you are budgeting for this marketing plan so you can plan strategies correctly. Forecasting your expectations will give you benchmarks to evaluate your marketing planning, which leads to the need to determine how you will assess your results and what types of metrics need to be installed to successfully review your progress and success or failure.

Creating a roadmap is vital to being successful in business and marketing. Marketing can be expensive, wasteful, and ineffective if not properly planned. The old adage, "Failure to plan is planning to fail," is very true in the realm of marketing. Even though many of today's marketing activities include free and low-cost tools such as social networking, engaging marketing activities without planning can become expensive in regards to time spent.