Do you have an online marketing mix for your Muslim Audience? If you do, congratulations, you have the fundamentals of a successful halal business in place. If you don’t, it’s OK. Stick around and let me help you create one.

Your online marketing mix for your Muslim business will help you shape every element of your marketing process. This in turn will enable you to run a stronger, highly functioning, and profitable halal business online.

Remember that every business model has different requirements. Your Muslim business model may be one that benefits completely from a purely online approach or may need a combination of online and offline tactics.

This article will give you insight on how to build a Muslim business marketing model solely through online methods. With a little fine-tuning, you will be able to utilize and implement it for your halal business. This should be the case even if your halal business is not entirely based online.

First, I will briefly explain the traditional marketing mix – which is built on the 7 P’s. Then, I will take you through each of the 7 P’s individually through the lens of online marketing.

The Traditional Marketing Mix for Your Muslim Business

The Evolution of the 7 P’s

The marketing mix has come a long way since 1960 when McCarthy coined the term in his book, Basic Marketing: A Managerial Approach. Back then it consisted of four marketing components (a.k.a 4 P’s).:

Product
Price
Place
Promotion

Over the years, the marketing mix has grown to include more elements. In 1981,Booms and Bartner added four more elements to the marketing mix:

People
Process
Performance
Physical Evidence

I know what you are thinking; that’s 8 right? Well, ‘performance’ ended up being used as a subcategory of the ‘process’ component.

The Introduction of the 6 C’s

No, don’t worry we are not going to go through the entire English alphabet. This is the last bit I promise you.

With the markets becoming more customer-centric, customer-driven marketing components were added to the marketing mix by Lauterborn and again by Shimizu. A combined list looks as below:

Consumer
Cost
Convenience
Communication
Commodity
Channel

So for your business that targets Muslims, you would use the marketing mix framework for making effective marketing and business decisions.

A marketing mix is also a tool for developing business strength and minimizing weaknesses. It improves flexibility, innovation, and competitiveness in the marketplace.

The 6 C’s have been incorporated into the 7 P’s and a simplified model of the online marketing mix may look like this depending on the type of halal business you run:

Implementing the Online Marketing Mix for Your Halal Business.

Now, the fun part begins. Let me show you how you would implement the online marketing mix for your halal business. I will discuss all the 7 P’s through the lens of online marketing.

For this, I have chosen a fictional halal business – Mahabba.com – to make it more palatable for you.

Product

Matrimonial Service

Mahabba.com is a Muslim matrimonial website for Muslim singles looking to get married. Its services are 100% online. There is no physical presence and all match-making and consultation are made virtually. These services are available for premium members only.

Since the COVID-19 outbreak, Mahabba.com has extended its services with virtual ‘nikaah’ (signing of the marriage contract).

In 2020, Mahabba.com started offering pre-marriage consultation and coaching on the rights of husband and wife. Because the vision of Mahabba.com is to bring back family values to strengthen the Muslim nation, they will also offer marriage therapy, financial training, and parenting coaching.

The owners – Ayman and Nabila- believe that since the creation, management, pricing, and the actual distribution of Mahabba.com’s services happen online that their business model is genuinely scalable online.

Creating or Improving Your Online Halal Product or Service

You might be creating a halal online product or service from scratch, taking over an existing entity, or trying to improve what you offer. Within an online marketing mix, you must take into consideration all the aspects that surround the product or service itself.

Think about the questions that potentially help you deliver a better halal online product or service. This list is not exhaustive but a good place to start strongly:

What’s the branding around my product or service going to look like?
Shall I offer a product line or a set of products in a range/mix?
What extra services do I need to implement around the product?
What does the end cycle of my halal online product or service look like? For example, is it upgradeable, or is it update-based?
What guarantees should I offer for my halal online product?

Think of:

Design
Quality
Features
Options
Packaging
Market positioning

If you can answer all the questions above, you will be on your way to producing a high-quality online product or service or even to modify your current Muslim business model.

Online Halal Product or Service Ideas

You will use the product section of the marketing mix when exploring new ideas for your halal business or even improving your current product or service offer. There are several choices you can explore.

Muslims today have become more inclined towards products and services that fit their values. You can read about it in the article: 6 Reasons Why Businesses Targeting Muslims Will Thrive in 2020 and Beyond.

One way of innovating new halal business models is by redefining existing physical products into the digital space.

So the best place to start would be looking at the basic products and services that everyone can’t do without and see if there is enough demand for a halal version. If you end up with a product that is not typically deliverable online, you will need to come up with a digitalization plan for your halal business idea.

Here is why Muslim businesses and organizations must adapt to Digital Transformation.

Digitalization of your product and services will enable them to some extent be an entirely online experience for your customers. In the example of our fictional company, Mahabba.com, they offer online consulting services.

Price

Upgradable Subscription

Price in an online marketing mix refers to the cost of a product your customer will pay.

In our example, when calculating the price, Ayman and Nabila need to take into consideration secondary factors such as the customer’s perceived value of an online product/service. They also need to consider how much time it takes for a customer with a free account to upgrade in order to get the services mentioned earlier.

By considering the time spent on acquiring their services in the pricing strategy helps Ayman and Nabila develop more accurate pricing for their services. Additionally, developing an understanding of each of their customer touchpoints can help them design better user and better customer experiences.

A typical customer – Junaid – for Mahabba.com might have the following customer journey:

Awareness that settling down should be a priority, most of his friends are already married
Finding it difficult to meet someone from work and does not like family referrals
Researches several Muslim matrimonial websites
Decides most of them have too many fake accounts and “time-wasters”
Registers for a free account at Mahabba.com
For months, maybe even years scours the site when he has free time
Goes for months without visiting Mahabba.com then gets triggered to come back
Mahabba.com nurtures him and keeps giving him incentives to come back
When the time is right he finally finds someone he is willing to talk to seriously
He now upgrades to premium in order to be able to talk to her

The above is the dream scenario and yet it takes quite a long time to reach. Many of those who have free accounts end up leaving and not coming back. Due to the long process, the cost of acquisition is quite high and the loss of sales is something that happens frequently.

Pricing their online service inefficiently will result in their business closing.

Pricing Models to Consider for Your Halal Business

The owners of Mahabba.com use the subscription pricing model as this is the most common model for the industry they are in. Depending on your industry, there are three typical pricing models that you can choose from for your halal business online.

The Software as a Service Model (SaaS)

In this subscription model, you will grant subscribers access to your online product or service. A subscription model for your online halal business is beneficial if your product is not static. Meaning it has updates, levels of complexity of using it, or its upgradeability (as in the case of Mahabba.com).

The Free Model

With the free model, you may offer your product for free and monetize through other means. The most common monetizing strategy for this model is advertising. This is when publishers or app creators sell space online to advertisers to advertise on their platform.

The Single Purchase Model

This is a one-price-for-one-product model, where your customer engages in a one-time purchase. This will suit you if you sell finished products. However, you need to incorporate customer support, onboarding, or anything else you may need to do post-sales activity into your price.

Promotion

Display Ads and Social Media

Promotion in the online marketing mix is the use of online marketing communication tools to target your audiences with content that ultimately leads to the desired business goal.

Mahabba.com uses a combination of display ads and social media marketing, both paid and owned (organic). Since finding your soulmate is an emotional issue, Ayman and Nabila believe that using the right visuals can trigger singles to visit their website.

They also know that social media platforms are rich with people who see others being happy in their lives. This makes it a good place to offer happiness through marriage for those looking for happiness and love in a halal manner.

Depending on your business goals, promotion may mean the use of online advertising, public relations, direct communication, and sales promotions to reach and influence your Muslim audience.

Choosing Promotional Strategies for Your Halal Business

The internet offers a plethora of effective strategies to include in your online marketing mix. The nature of your Muslim business and its online products or services will determine what strategy to implement.

For example, you may decide to advertise directly, build authority with content, or create a community on social media. Or you can do a combination of all of them.

Keep in mind that you can’t invest in every channel out there, just because it exists. This is why you need to understand who your audience is and where to find them. You also need to make sure that your promotional plans are realistic.

For example, investing in website content to boost your organic rank on Google takes time. When your business requires revenue today, this strategy should be replaced or supplemented by paid ads.

Here are a few examples of what you can use to promote your Muslim business online:

Search Engine Marketing (Google, Bing)
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Content Marketing
Online PR
Social media – Owned
Social Media – Paid
Video Marketing
Email Marketing
Affiliate Marketing

One of the biggest benefits of promoting your product or service online (online marketing) is the ability to track the results in real-time with the use of web analytics. Web analytics for your online marketing allows you to constantly optimize your efforts.

Resources for Your Online Promotion

Here is a powerful list of articles that will help you navigate your way through the world of marketing to Muslims online. You will learn both technical and cultural aspects of marketing to your Muslim audience effectively.

The Muslim Consumer

Advertising to Muslims Online

Social Media Marketing for Muslims

Islamic Advertising Principles and Ethics

Content Marketing for Muslim Consumers

How to Write Content That Your Audience Cannot Ignore

Place

Website and Live Video Platforms

Place in the online marketing mix defines the place where and how you provide your products and services to your Muslim customers.

Mahabba.com has a matrimonial website where Muslim users can register and look for a spouse. They also have a contract with Zoom and use it for virtual ‘nikaah’ ( signing of the marriage contract), pre-marriage consultation, marriage therapy, and parenting coaching.

When discussing place in the online marketing mix it’s important to consider the convenience factors for your Muslim customers. Enabling the most convenient place for them to access your online products and services is crucial for the overall experience.

Apart from the main place where you provide your product and services, Muslim users may guide you to other places. You may have to sell them your products where they hang out too. Facebook Shop is a good example of a place you can set up where your users hang out.

People

Good people make great brands. No matter how good your product is, your business requires people to help run it. The quality of the people involved is important both internally and in customer-facing functions.

In the Mahabba.com example, the proper people would be involved in the different services being offered. Based on the service they offer they would need:

Front-end and back-end web experts
Designers and software developers
Business Managers
Marketeers
Marriage counselors
Experts in Islamic Jurisprudence ( specializing in marriage and divorce)
Legal team
Customer service

All of the above people represent the values of our fictional example, Mahabba.com’s brand.

Emphasis on Customer Support

There are many options and combinations of online customer support you can introduce into your business workflow. You can, for example, integrate social media as a channel for customer support. This of course, in combination with email, chat, or phone.

Customer support is vital in an online setting when interactions are not physical. A well-engineered customer support system provides customer satisfaction and brand loyalty.

But it also provides data that you may use to improve your business process, customer experience, product, service, and targeting.

Process

The process in the online marketing mix defines the needed procedures and optimization of delivering online products and the core experiences of it. You have to ask yourself what tasks are necessary for your product or service to provide its core experience to your Muslim customers.

When it comes to the marketing mix, the process is a component of service that sees the Muslim user experiencing your offering. You may say it is something that your customer participates in at different points in time.

In our example, Mahabba.com’s Muslim singles will experience their offering from the time they visit their website all the way to tying the knot and maybe even further.

At each stage of the process, your business is looking to:

Deliver value and enhance services
Use feedback to optimize the process
Use the process to retain customers and upsell
Tailor the process to the needs of different individuals

The better the process you have in place, the easier it will be for your business to grow. Documenting every step you take, will help you gauge the health of your business from an online marketing perspective. It will also help you find critical errors early on before they lead to significant failures.

Physical Evidence (Online Evidence)

Physical evidence in an online marketing mix refers to the virtual environment experienced by your Muslim customers. This includes multiple channels such as social media platforms and forums with your website being the most important of all the channels.

Mahaaba.com creates online brand awareness across multiple channels using online evidence. These channels help them expand service experiences for Muslim singles.

Your design and layout are important and should make the user experience simple and straightforward. If Muslim consumers struggle to find what they want from you, they will move to your competitors.

Your online evidence should also match how you want your business to be perceived by your customers and potential customers.

With the website being the most important online evidence make sure that:

Your website is easy to navigate
Products and services you offer are clearly displayed with key information
Muslim users can find key information about your company
Keep customer service at the forefront of your website (Chatbots are a good example)
Your customers should be able to contact your organization easily
The design should use colors, text, and images that reflect your organization’s personality

Conclusion

When you decide to work with a complete online marketing mix, you will be able to develop a better online marketing strategy for Muslim consumers. In short, your organization will enjoy the following benefits:

Have a valuable guide for resource allocation
A well-defined responsibility allocation process
Develop the ability to optimize your marketing efforts
Be able to facilitate your communication process

It is vital to form the right partnerships for each of the 7 P’s if you do not possess the skills or don’t have the time to execute them properly.

You can contact Muslim Ad Network for your advertising, the main component of ‘Promotion’ for most organizations.

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digital marketing, halal consumer market, Internet Advertising, Islamic Advertising

What’s Your Online Marketing Mix for Your Halal Business?