Using the Four P’s of Marketing in a Digital Economy

Having the right marketing mix could be the difference between success or failure. While there are many ideas around the web when it comes to a marketing strategy, sometimes going back to the basics is best. In this video, I’ll walk through the traditional “Four P’s of Marketing” and show how they can be applied to our digital economy. 

Video Transcript:

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We’re going to talk about the four P’s of marketing today. Those four P’s are Product, Place, Promotion and Price. These four P’s are essential to having success and making sure that your product or your service gets to the right people and actually allows them to take the right action, the action that’s going to help you promote the business, promote the product and make some money as well.

When we do this in the traditional sense of marketing, there’s a lot of things coming to play. A lot of bigger businesses typically are into this route and do a little bit more planning, but this doesn’t mean that smaller companies or companies online shouldn’t also think about these four basic principles, these four P’s that we can really understand and then allow us to help inform the decisions that we’re going to make.

The first one is Product. When you’re designing a product or trying to find the type of product you want to sell online, it’s important that you understand what your audience is looking for and what they need. Yes, every once in while you’re going to create something that they didn’t know they needed, but to be honest, this doesn’t really happen all the time. You’re not, you can’t just count on being a Steve Jobs or a Henry Ford and creating something people didn’t think they knew they needed, but what you can do is look at the industry, look at your talents, see where you fit up well and see what you have to offer. Maybe it is a widget. Maybe it is a book. Maybe it’s a course. Maybe it’s a software. Understanding the type of product that your users would use is going to allow you to position that product much better in the marketplace. You have to remember online, there’s a lot of different ways to sell. You could pretty much sell anything online. You’ve just got to make sure that there’s a product market fit when you’re finding the right products.

The second thing is Place. Where are you going to sell this? Traditionally this is where people would buy places in a grocery store like a certain shelf, like a product promotion shelf or inside of a big box store like JC Penney’s and Sears that used to be around, things of that nature. Today, obviously the landscape has shifted. Where are you going to place your product? There are some basic places, like your website, but then you’ve got to talk about how you’re going to get people to your website. Maybe it’s social media like Facebook, things of that nature. Maybe it’s going to be something like Amazon or another marketplace website like that where you can buy some placement or set up a place for somebody to shop. Now, the big key there is to make it easy for them to purchase your product, to take those steps necessary to make that commitment to you.

The next P is Promotion. Now, we’ve got a product. We’ve got somewhere to sell it, but now we’ve got to get people to that. A lot of people just go online and say, “How do I promote a product online?”

As we’ve talked about a couple of times in this show, that’s not the best way to do it because everybody is different, every market is different, every segment is different. You’ve got to do your homework and understand where the people are. Then, you know where to target.

Then, another one, a kind of a subset P under Promotion would be, be persistent in your promotion. SEO is going to take a couple days, a couple weeks. It could take a year, a year and a half to get going. The same thing with social media. If you want to do social selling well, you have to be authentic, which means you’ve got to be on time, online all the time and answering and engaging. Know your platform. Know the channels you want to go at and then be persistent in that promotion.

The last thing and this may be the most important thing, is Price. You don’t want to price it too low. You don’t want to price it too high. You’ve got to understand what people want, what they’re willing to pay for a product.

Now, this is where A-B testing is really cool online. When you’re shopping in a traditional sense, you can put two of the same products on a shelf and price one at five dollars and one at ten dollars and see what people would buy. No brainer, people would see that and they’d go, “Okay, I’ll buy this one.”

But, with A-B testing, you can segment your traffic and you can say, “Maybe people pay ten. Maybe they’ll pay five.” You’ll be able to run some tests there and understand what’s actually going to be the best price for your product so that you can increase your margins and also deliver value to your customers.

This was a short, very quick and hopefully very helpful orientation to the four Ps of marketing. Once again, they are: Product, Place, Promotion and Price. Make sure you begin to think about these concepts whether you already launched your product or you’re getting ready to launch something. They’re going to help you make sure that you’ve got it in the right place at the right time to engage with the right type of people. Until next time, Happy Marketing.