The 4 Ps of Digital Marketing

The 4Ps of marketing are the key factors that are involved in the marketing of a good or service. They are also known as the marketing mix, the ingredients that combine to capture and promote a brand or product’s unique selling points. This concept was developed in the 1960's but how is it still relevant when it comes to digital marketing.

For reference, the four Ps of marketing are:

• Place: Where do you sell your product or service? Could be a physical store, at someone's home, an online marketplace, etc.

• Product: What you sell. Could be a physical good, services, consulting, etc.

• Price: How much you charge. How does your pricing impact the perception of your brand to consumers?

• Promotion: How your product/service is presented to the public and the marketing mix behind it.

You might be asking yourself how the world of digital marketing fits into the traditional marketing mix. Or more specifically, how are the 4Ps of Digital Marketing made up?

Lets go through each of them in turn.

Place

Customer access to a product is being changed every single day. We’ve exceeded the switch from brick-and-mortar stores to eCommerce and are now looking to recreate the in-store experience in the digital world.

The Place for Digital Marketing is the Internet. Whether its accessed through a mobile phone, a desktop machine, your TV, Alexa, Kindle, Google Nest or the next IoT device, the Internet is the place where you sell your product or service online.

Price

Your pricing strategy is critical online. You have to be competitive and sell at the right price. This is the internet, and pricing is transparent. You don’t necessarily have to be the cheapest – but to compete you need to make sure your pricing models and the overall value proposition to the customer are compelling. This will help boost your profit margins.

Overprice And You Will Soon Find Out

Overprice your product and a host of price comparison sites will soon highlight the fact, as will the countless peer-review communities where consumers actively debate the relative merits (or otherwise) of everything from wedding photography to painting easels.

Product

This is what you have to offer – your unique value proposition to your potential buyers. A good product, of course, is the cornerstone of any successful marketing strategy, but it’s particularly crucial with digital marketing as opposed to traditional marketing.

A product or service that delivers tangible benefits and fills a real need in the marketplace - something that leaves the customer with a genuine perception of value - gives marketers the scope they need to do their job effectively.

Engaging With Customers Through Your Marketing Strategy

When you’re promoting something viable as part of the digital marketing mix, it’s much easier to engage with consumers and to convince them to buy. Again, a completely different proposition to traditional marketing.

Conversely, the best marketing minds in the marketing industry will struggle creating products that don’t deliver the goods.

And this is where the all-pervading, viral nature of the internet can really come back to bite
you.

The Marketing Mix That Goes Wrong

If you promote a product online to your target audience as part of the digital marketing mix, and that product doesn’t deliver, you’d better be prepared for the backlash.

Digital consumers are no wallflowers – they are vociferous and well connected. They won’t keep the shortcomings of your promotional activity, product or business to themselves – they’ll shout about it from the tallest building in cyberspace, and others will quickly pick up the cry.

Once that happens you can pretty much shelve your digital marketing strategy and go back to the drawing board.

Similar Principles to Traditional Marketing

So it’s important to make sure your product and the entire customer value chain associated with it are right from the start.

You need a solid foundation if you’re going to build a sustainable online business, and that all starts with sound promotional activities.

Promotion

Promotion is everything you do, online and offline, to get your product in front of your prospects, acquire new customers and retain existing ones.

As part of the Marketing Mix, promotion consists of content, communications and messaging that persuades your audience including buyers and purchase influencers to purchase your product or service.

Digital marketing plans, marketing activities and promotion tactics are all done through multiple distribution channels in this digital age:

Your Website

Using your website as part of your marketing mix can serve countless purposes, some of them are purely informational, others offer services, but in many cases your website is your product.

Your website is the hub of your digital world – and perhaps the most important element in your whole digital marketing strategy.

It’s a vital piece of online real estate to which all of your other online activity will direct your target audience. Its important that you get this piece of the digital marketing mix correct before you think about promotion tactics.

The Centerpiece Of Your Digital Marketing Mix

Many of the promotional activities that follow are about generating traffic to your
website – but traffic in itself is worthless.

To become valuable, traffic must be converted – and that’s essentially what your website should be: a conversion engine for the traffic being directed to it.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search Engine Optimization or SEO is the practice of increasing organic traffic on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP). It is also known as organic search marketing and can also be referred to as content marketing .

In the digital world, search engines are shop windows. They are an absolute necessity for giving visibility to a business. Getting listed at the top of Google's organic results gives a sense of worth to your brand and builds trust with a target market looking for your product or service.

A Major Distribution Channel

A company that does not have a top position in the Google results is missing opportunities to sell to, or communicate with, potential customers. And a business that does not appear in search results might as well not exist.

Over half of all web traffic comes from organic search and most marketers state that their highest quality leads come from SEO-engaged customers. Why is that? Because they are searching for a solution, and by being one of the top results you are fulfilling a need.

Pay-Per-Click Search Advertising (PPC)

PPC can help you achieve many business goals in the marketing world. These goals range from high-level brand exposure and thought leadership to a hot lead submission or ecommerce sale.

Promotional materials can manifest in many ways for Google Ads, but for the most part, they’re all part of grabbing the greatest amount of attention with ad copy.

Control Over Marketing Spend

PPC campaigns give businesses a lot of control over many factors. With all PPC campaigns, you are free to select the keywords that you believe will have the highest impact.

The success of marketing communications through pay per click campaigns can easily be measured through many metrics. This means that you can very easily see whether certain keywords are worth paying for and make any necessary changes accordingly.

Affiliate Marketing

When you work with affiliates, you are broadening your connections and widening your marketing mix. This allows you to reach out to industry leaders and build relationships with influencers.

Affiliates are able to reach their target audience through affiliate networks, which generally have a wider reach than your company’s own site - however effective your marketing strategies.

Because digital marketing affiliates are only paid a commission once the desired action has taken place, they’re more motivated to drive the conversion you’re looking for

Online Public Relations

Part of launching an effective digital marketing PR campaign is knowing your audience and where they hang out online. When you get this right, you’ll likely see placements and coverage from publications which perfectly align with your audience.

A key benefit of digital press releases, over and alongside traditional PR, is that the impact of your digital marketing tactics is more easily measured and will stay on the search engines for a long time to come.

Information On Demand

The Internet is all about information on-demand. For businesses, that means the cost effective marketing and PR content you post online is consumed immediately, delivering instant benefits to your company.

Digital PR includes increasing great backlinks from sites (beneficial for SEO) and online productions as well as client surveys which enable you to reach to that section of people that are hard to target in person.

Social Networking

Social Media Marketing simply means using social media platforms and networks to promote and market a company’s products and services and increase its market share.

Social media marketing requires both strategy and creativity. While it may seem overwhelming, its importance cannot be overstated.

The goal of social marketing is always to change or maintain how people behave – not what they think or how aware they are about an issue.

Social media for business is no longer optional. It's an essential way to reach your customers, gain valuable insights, and grow your brand.

E mail Marketing

Email marketing is used by thousands of businesses of all sizes across the globe. Email is the currency of the web, and anybody who’s online has an active email address.

Marketing your products or services by email can be a fast, flexible and cost-effective way of reaching new customers and retaining existing customers by encouraging repeat website visits.

One of the most obvious advantages of email marketing is its lower cost compared to mainstream marketing channels.

Most digital marketing specialists are laser focused on driving conversions and when it comes to conversions, there isn’t a more powerful channel than email.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

Business is all about relationships, especially relationships with customers. The better your business can manage customer relationships, the more it will grow.

CRM software has become a near-vital tool for businesses of all sizes. They keep all historical data in one place, making it easier to manage customer relationships.

When you run digital marketing campaigns, your team is often bogged down by simple tasks that are time-consuming. A CRM system can take on some of simple tasks, such as customer incentive schemes, and perform them quickly.

Digital technology makes developing an enduring connection with your customers more
straightforward and effective than ever before.

4Ps Digital Marketing

Product Price Place Promotion.

Digital Marketing is much more than communication. Whilst the ‘promotion’ P is important, so are the other 3 Ps and marketers must consider all four of the marketing mix as part of their digital marketing plan.

Focusing on price, product, promotion, and place still makes perfect sense in digital marketing, even as consumers’ online behaviors change the ways in which we deliver our messages and communicate with our audience in this digital era.

Even though the marketing world has evolved over the years, certain time-tested strategies and marketing basics such as the marketing mix have remained relevant and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.