Formulating a Marketing Plan: Marketing Basics
The term marketing is defined as a management process that facilitates the shift of goods and services from concept to customer. Marketing is a necessary tool to increase customer awareness and assist sales platforms to secure new customers while maintaining current clients.
Further, strategic marketing practices help build lasting and sustainable customer relationships by prioritizing customer satisfaction.The basic marketing cornerstones are the 4 P's—product, price, place, and promotion. The combination of these facets is the “marketing mix” that demonstrates an offering to customers. As it pertains to interfacility transport, the 4 P's can be described as follows:
• Product—what you offer: patient transport, customer service, packaging
• Price—what you charge for the service
• Place—your location and distribution channel: geographic network
• Promotion—how you are going to tell people about it: advertising, selling, and incentives
Another fundamental marketing principle is the product life cycle. Although this applies mostly for products that have a defined timeline before they expire or require redesign, life cycles should be considered for services (such as transport) that use innovative responses to service issues as well as innovative products such as patient monitoring equipment and communications devices. Marketing strategies differ depending on where products are in their respective life cycles.