Looking back to the time of your undergraduate years, you might remember learning about the 4 P’s: price, product, promotion and placement. The marketing mix was originated by Neil Borden and later shortened to the 4 P’s by Jerome E. McCarthy. The marketing mix is essential when planning your digital marketing campaign. Like a ceiling can’t stand without walls, a marketing campaign can’t stand without the right marketing mix.
Price
You’ve heard it – price is all about psychology. In regards to consumer’s preferences to pay for rounded numbers and odd numbers, it might depend on what the price feels like. There are many studies out there that show how consumers react to pricing. For example, this is why companies price a pair of jeans for $39 rather than $35 – it’s pricing psychology.
This is extremely important when trying to capture new leads or sales. Particularly for a new product that needs to build awareness and trust with consumers, discounts are a good way of lowering a consumer’s barrier to entry and encourage trial! Discounts create a “hook” that convert consumers that are on the fence on purchase.
Great brands can call for a higher price than commodities. It’s important to be realistic with your branding strategy and how price plays into it.
Product
We’ve heard it a million times “you need a good product to have a good business”. There are a few things you need to know about your product. What sets it apart from competitors? What are the pain points your product will satisfy or resolve? Can your product produce long term growth?
Great products focus on meeting specific consumer wants and needs. Focus in to what your product ‘solves’ and hold onto that messaging. Your product messaging should be portrayed into the ad copy and any other brand communication.
Promotion
Promotion is a pretty broad area and encompasses a lot. Where and how you advertise is super important. Today, companies are moving more and more away from traditional marketing tactics like TV, print, radio and trade shows and moving toward digital marketing tactics like SEO, performance advertising, and social medial. To learn more about differences between digital and traditional marketing tactics, and to see which tactics may be best for your business, read this.
What promotional tactic makes most sense for your product or service? You’ll want to consider where your prospective consumers live and the best way to reach them. One misconception is that your leads might be on one medium and not the other. Take Facebook for example. Is it appropriate for you to advertising a B2B service there? It may – remember that Facebook has 2.23 billion monthly users and hundreds of targeted criteria. You may also consider reaching prospective clients through another channel as well like Google Ads or LinkedIn.
You’ll want to assess and test which channel is best for your business.
Placement
When we think about ‘place’ we think of two things – geography and distribution. Is your product being distributed in person, a retailer, or on an ecommerce site?
An advantage of digital marketing is that the world is literally at your fingertips. You can set up your campaigns to target specific zip codes or cities/states. This hyper-targeting helps focus in on the prospects that are most likely to contact you, learn more and buy.
Too busy to market yourself?
Here at Bear Fox Marketing, we can take a look at your company, it’s marketing mix and make some suggestions on building the best marketing strategy. To see how, give us a call or shoot us an email!