Suppose we did an experiment where I gave five people a bucket filled with red roses and I told them it was their job to sell their roses at the best possible price point to maximize profits. If you had one of those buckets, what would you do? I would guess that in your mind, you would begin to think through steps to formulate a plan to sell your bucket of roses, correct? Let’s examine this marketing strategy.

Step one: define your target market. Who is likely to buy red roses? Do children buy roses? Not likely. Do senior citizens buy roses? More likely, but not your best target market. Do women buy them? Yes, but still not your best target. Men buy red roses, they buy them for women, and they tend to buy them on special occasions. That special occasion piece is very important to defining your target market. Valentines Day is coming up on Saturday. More red roses are sold to men on Valentines Day than any other time of the year. Timing is critical when defining your target market. You have to sell when your target market is ready to buy, not before and not afterwards. Are men going to purchase roses a month before Valentines Day? No. Are they going to purchase them the day after – on February 15? No. And one more thing about your target market: they have an expectation of how you package the product. They want roses to be bundled and sold by the dozen. Thanks to someone who effectively marketed one dozen red roses as a symbol of love, men expect that you meet this standard. Try to sell eleven roses together and you fail. It is all a part of understanding your target market.

Step two: understand what your competition is doing to sell their products. There are four other people with buckets of roses that are competing with you. Beyond the buckets, there are florists, produce sections of grocery stores, online flower sites, and roadside vendors who are selling roses for Valentines Day. Understanding how your competition is selling will help you formulate a plan to attract buyers to your roses. A competitive analysis will define the tactics of the other side. For instance, they might be selling roses below the average price and drawing in bargain hunters, or they may be including an extra, like a vase if you purchase a dozen roses. Whatever their tactic, you need to understand it so you can do something different. Marketing is all about making your product stand out from the pack. Give the target market a reason to buy from you before they would consider a competitor.

Step three: consider your marketing mix. As defined by the classic book Basic Marketing. A Managerial Approach, by Jerome McCarthy, the four Ps of marketing are Product, Price, Promotion and Place. This is a formula where four criteria come together. They are critical to making a sale. First, understand your product. In our example, red roses are a perishable product that must be sold in a short sales cycle. They will begin to wilt and die in a matter of days, so it is important to sell them earlier rather than later. Price is driven by the supply and demand of the market. The price of roses on Valentines Day is as much as three times more than the rest of the year. There are two key factors here. Remember that the habits of your target market is to wait until the day they need the flowers to buy them. There is a deadline and demand is at its peak for about 24 hours. They cannot wait until the day after Valentines Day for the price to drop. The second factor is competitive pricing. There is always someone who is willing to undercut the competition. If you have access to more roses than you have in your bucket, this may be a plausible scheme. I can make $10,000 more money selling 1,000 dozen roses at $39.99 than I can by selling 500 dozen roses at $59.99. That leads to the next two Ps: Promotion and Place. Can I actually sell 1,000 dozen roses on Valentines Day? That will depend on how well I have done in advertising my product to my target market, along with the reason they should choose me over my competition. The other factor is Place. Where are these roses being sold? I have to find a place that is easy for my target market to find and where they will travel. In the case of online marketing, your place may be a web site. How easy is it for your target market to find you? If you are selling roses out of a bucket, you need to go where men who need to buy roses on Valentines Day are going to be.

Now this goes beyond selling a bucket of roses. As you can guess, you can put anything in your imaginary bucket, including your products and services. The concepts are still the same. To get the most out of whatever you are selling, you have to have a marketing strategy that takes into consideration your target market, your competition and your marketing mix. Without it, you will either not get the sales you are capable of or sell your products short.