The Marketing Mix, also referred to as the 4P’s of Marketing, has been a staple for business leaders over the years. But is this”traditional approach” out dated? In this video, I’ll share how you can leverage the marketing mix in our digital era to produce a higher ROI for your business.
Video Transcript:
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As we said in the intro, we’re going to be talking about the marketing mix today. And specifically how does this apply to the digital economy that we’re in? So the marketing mix is also known as the 4P’s, and it’s a foundational model for many businesses. It allows a business to set some objectives and then the tools that they’re going to need to help them meet those objectives and really get their target market. Now, it’s been around quite some time and the reason why is because it works.
I’m a big believer, not trying to reinvent the wheel, but using what works and adapting it to our current situation. So we’re talking about the 4P’s of marketing. These are the P’s we’re addressing. Product, Plays, Promotion, and Price. Product obviously refers to what you’re, you’re selling. It’s something that satisfies the consumer’s needs or their wants. Place is how you provide access to that product. How you engage, where you engage with your users. Price, it’s going to obviously refer to the cost. This is something that has direct impact on revenue, and is very important when we’re looking at marketing because if we don’t understand pricing, then we can’t make sure that we’re using our marketing budget effectively. And then promotion, this is all of the elements like advertising, PR, what you would normally consider digital marketing or marketing activities. But the reality is all four of these has a significant role to play in marketing.
So let’s get into product. Products can either be a tangible good or it can be a service that fulfills a need or want. So traditionally you had things like product design, product of sorts. Branding, you had packaging and label. Now you do see that today and a lot of different places. There’s still obviously physical goods being sold. But even in the digital arena, so today’s digital marketing instead of really product design, we have more user experience and these are where we have to think about the look and the feel of the product itself, how people interact with it digitally, product assortment. We still have that today. Uh, you can have, you know, different tiers of a product if it’s a SAS product, if you have something that you’re selling physically on a site like Amazon or you have your own eCommerce site, you can obviously do a number of assortments.
You can actually go even further today than what was available. You can even do things like on-demand customization in digital marketing today. Branding is still really important. The brand story is extremely important and allowing somebody to engage with your brand and buy into the values of that brand, but also having a brand that’s going to help them solve their problems and not just pitch them features a brand still matters. I don’t think we see as many new and upcoming iconic brands, but the brands that we do see in those areas typically tend to be SAS, product, social media products. You know, think about Google and Facebook and what they’ve become over the last few years. And then lastly, packaging and labeling. It’s a little bit different, but this could be your platform design, it could be your website design. Uh, if you are shipping things to people, how is that product being shipped?
Different groups are going to react to things differently, whether it’s a cool look at packaging or maybe it’s an eco-friendly packaging. Those still play a role today. Uh, and they’re obviously tied to digital marketing. The next is price. Now, price impacts your profit margins, supply and demand, and your marketing strategy. And as you can see, a lot of pricing are still the same. Uh, your pricing strategy back in the day, you know, you might’ve had a couple different pricing models or maybe one pricing strategy that you, you went on today. Brands like to play around with the pricing model. A, it can be a good thing or a bad thing, a bad a sense of this would be what Adobe has been doing lately or they’ve changed pricing to some users and not the others. Haven’t been extremely transparent about the pricing, which has caused issues for a lot of people.
So when you think about your pricing strategy you’ve got, I firmly believe in trying to be transparent and showing people what they’re paying for and why it’s going to cost, what it costs a price setting. You know, how much a certain thing’s going to cost. Today. We also have things like dynamic pricing where you can change pricing based on time or location. A lot of hotel travel sites do this, discounts, still offering discounts and the traditional way, you know, he may give a referral discount, things of that nature. Today we’ve got sites like Retail-Me-Not where on demand discounts on demand couponing and payment terms. Obviously payments have made a huge shift where, you know, maybe it was credit card or 30 day net or 15 day. But now you can do one click payment, like through Amazon, you can pay with Apple pay or these other alternative payment methods that weren’t necessarily available before.
And these are important to think about when you think about who you’re selling to and what’s going to be the most convenient type of pain where you can lower the barrier of entry for, uh, your, your new customer’s place.
So Places that got getting the right product at the right place, the right time, right?Traditionally things like marketing, market coverage, location decisions where you have put your shop, your franchising, transport warehouses. Today we do have market coverage, but we’ve also have things like platform coverage. Are you covered across all the digital platforms? Do you have a presence there? Location decisions? Well, a lot of businesses it’s not as important about where you are physically, but where you are or where your customers are physically, right? So you may have a box, you may have a location that you want to drive people to, but now you can do Geo-targeting or Geo-fencing with your advertising.
You can do mobile and making sure that you have good placement in mobile, that your site is easily accessible on a mobile device. Instead of franchising, a lot of people turned to affiliates today where they can lease out their products or have their products marketed through third party vendors on exchange for a net, a portion of the profits. And instead of transport, warehousing, logistics. A lot of people if they get into drop shipping through Amazon or really when I see even more of a cloud storage when you have these training programs and platforms where you have to store on your information instead of actual physical product. So there’s been a lot of shift in place over the last couple of years, especially as it pertains to the way that the people are engaging with brands online promotion. Now this is what a lot of marketers think about when they think about marketing and it looks at the many ways that you can disseminate relevant product information to consumers.
Now you add the Promotional mix, traditionally, and this is, more of your print media, your traditional marketing mix, your messaging strategy, the channels and your media strategy and the marketing frequency. Now, promotional mix and channels. I really feel like they’ve condensed into what I call the digital mix. Your message strategy goes a little bit. And then with your brand, your brand story and the clarity of your message, are you telling people who you are, what you do and why it’s important for them to engage? And then the frequency, you know, this may be the frequency of social posts or news posts or blog posts, but the reality is we have a 24, seven media today. There’s so much content being flooded and inundated. You have to really understand where your buyers are and what’s going to influence them at what time.
You know, you can target people. I have clients that do really well late at night. That’s not the case for all businesses. So it’s important to understand the message frequency as it’s shifted today. You don’t have these limited time frames, you have 24/7 access to your customer basis. So when we talk about the digital mix, we have the traditional media, but the digital mix today is a little more like this. You’ve got search marketing and this could be search ads. It can also be search engine optimization where you’re driving people to your site. You’ve got advertisement and display advertising, banner advertising where you’re driving people to your sites, social media, you have digital PR channels where you’re still leveraging credible news sources and anchors and publicists. We are trying to show the things that your brand is doing and how it’s engaging with people outside of your company’s walls and bringing them in and collaborating and connecting people.
And then you’ve got mobile marketing and really all of these are working at one time, driving traffic, driving users, driving awareness to your brand and to your website. So today’s world is shifting, but we still have the 4P’s of marketing and they’re still extremely important. So as you’re developing your strategy, you need to understand your product. You need to understand why it’s important to your users. You need to think about how you’re charging for your product, which pricing methods are you using, and then you want to understand where you’re placing that product. Is it a mobile product? Is it a digital product? Does it have some of both in it? And then when you’re promoting, are you leveraging all of these different channels that we have available to us in the digital mix in order to make sure that we’re amplifying our message effectively online.
If you have any questions about what we’ve discussed here today, please comment below. I’d love to continue the conversation with you. And until next time, Happy Marketing.