The best products and services in the world will never achieve their full potential if people don't know they exist.

Marketing covers every aspect of putting your products and service into the hands of your customers. Every product has a unique set of features and benefits that will make it appealing to a certain number of people. Determining who those people are, how to let them know about your product, and how to put it in their hands are all marketing decisions. The following is a simplified overview. Marketing includes:

Sales Method

Pricing

Packaging

Distribution

Advertising & Promotion

Sales Method

If your product or service is complex, highly technical, or very expensive, you may need an experienced outside sales staff to demonstrate it to your potential customers. These salespeople can also deliver and set up your product.

If your product or service is fairly simple and/or easy to understand by your customer, you may be able use inside salespeople to answer a few questions and take orders.

These are a couple of examples, but there are as many combinations as there are products.

Pricing

Pricing can be determined by beginning with adding up the cost of materials and manufacturing then adding a profit margin. Remember to include percentages for the cost of salaries, facilities, distribution, and marketing.

In some instances there is also an intrinsic value to consider. People expect to pay a certain amount for different products and services. You may need to adjust your pricing up or down to fit these expectations.

Packaging

Packaging goes beyond whether or not your product fits in a box. What type of instructions, warranties, and other information needs to be included. This is also a great opportunity to include literature describing your other products which might be of interest to your customer. If your product is one that is reordered, you can also include an order form to make it easier for them.

Distribution

Distribution includes considerations such as whether your product will be sold in a store, through catalogs, directly from your company, or through distributors who sell similar items. You may want to utilize a number of these.

Advertising & Promotion

This is the way you let people know about your products and services. You might use direct mail, trade shows, press releases, video, interactive CD's, print, radio, or television advertising. Each of these has positive and negative attributes that must be considered based on the size of your market, the profit margin, and complexity of each of your products and services. You can usually achieve even better results by combining two or more of these so that they reinforce each other.