Jumping From Traditional to Digital Marketing: The 4Ps become the 4Es
Have you ever wondered how professionals imagine and develop a marketing campaign?
Personal talent and experience aside, the answer is they know how to expand the 4Ps. We’ll shortly see better what are these life — saving letters and why are they so vital for whoever needs to promote a product. In short, we can say that they are a map. Every point checked on this map means a logic marketing strategy is being created. The result is of course that a customer’s product is going to be promoted among the right audience — where the right audience is the group of customers who have more probability of needing and therefore buying that specific product. In the end, the Four Ps are the tool which well used can help to sell more.
Developed by Jerome McCarthy, an American Marketing professor, the Four Ps have been for a long time the pillars of marketing. They became famous thanks to the work of Philip Kotler, an American Marketing Consultant, and they have been employed to develop every successful marketing campaign since. The reason is pretty simple: the Four Ps are — or were, we’ll talk about it later — the list which helped the professionals working in marketing to track a strategy. Once that every point represented by a P was checked the professionals were a step closer helping their customer to sell their products.
In the era of digital marketing, however, marketers started to consider if the Four Ps are still a valid method to organise and develop a marketing plan.
Is online marketing so very different from a traditional one that this model has to be put aside or does it just need to adapt to the online era?
Let’s start clarifying what concept every one of the Four Ps explains.
1) P as Product: the fundamental idea of any business. What product are we selling? Even more important, why our brand is unique compared to others in the same field? Without an in-depth knowledge of all its aspects, nothing can be sold effectively. Let alone if the owner themselves hasn’t clear what type of service they’re going to offer. If you want people to buy your product, you must know why it’s worth their money and time.
2) P as Price: how much we want to earn and how much are we effectively going to gain is the second step to take. Considering this point will impact profit margins and marketing strategy, as well as the price range to pick for the product. How are you willing to spend for advertisement? Do you know how channels are more worthy of your money? It’s also important to remember that different services/products require a different placement in the price range. A team of marketers will help you to understand how your invested money can be used to generate traffic and business towards your product.
3) P as Promotion: doing a fruitful marketing campaign means enlightening the significant product information and let the audience — our potential customers — know that our specific product exists and it’s ready to offer its unique services. To promote it a marketer uses all the instruments at their disposal, such as fliers, social media, emails and so on. It’s essential to position well the brand which is being promoted to make a profit for this investment. You ideally know who your typical client is and professionals will organize a promotion with the idea of reaching even more potential customers.
4) P as Place: if nowadays the majority of the contact with potential customers happens online, it would be dismissive to say without uncertainty that the Internet is the only place where positioning a brand matters. The truth is that there isn’t any perfect formula for what are the right place, time and price for a product. Every single case must be studied and evaluated by a team of experts who will decide the best positioning.
In the light of all of this, it becomes clear that dismissing the Four Ps would be a mistake.
Even in a market as new as the digital one is, their value stays in helping marketers focusing on the right campaign for a product.
At the same time, this new type of market requires an adjustment. If it were too simplistic believing the Four Ps is an obsolete model, it would be equally naive not consider how the online presence for entrepreneurs and companies impacts their business.
First of all, making a campaign nowadays requires thinking about how potential customers view the business we want to promote on different devices. Being online almost every hour means that people can search for information via PC, smartphone, Smart Speakers, tablets. A good Media Buying Agency like Targeto knows well that it’s important to think from a different point of views to ensure a quality experience. The final goals are to transform a user into a customer and to build your online presence for being the most pleasant and the simplest that an audience can ask.
How Targeto does this?
The answer lays on following a model based on the Four Ps but adapted for online strategies.
1) Product becomes Experience: the product is still the core of a business and the subject of the campaign. You always want to promote whatever you’re selling, after all. However, now the future customer has access to a significant amount of information about what you sell. It becomes crucial to answer the question: what experience we want to offer to a customer? What can we show them to make them see how unique advantages a product can bring into their lives? Around these two questions, the professionals are going to build the proper campaign.
2) Price becomes Exchange: as we said above, the product must be reinforced by the experience a marketer offers to potential customers. To do that effectively, they are going to engage with the audience, searching the right way to appeal to them. A goal will be set up, and the focus of the campaign will be to reach that target. To do that, a smart marketer wants to earn (and maintain) the trust of potential customers. This will be important when it will come the time to sign up a newsletter or give their contacts. Moreover, a competent team of marketers will help you to take care properly of the customers who gave you their trust. The possibilities are endless: customized emails, special sales, exclusive content. The important thing is that you give your customer a strong reason to follow you. So this leads us to the third E.
3) Promotion becomes Evangelism: the main focus isn’t anymore what you as an entrepreneur/company do. Customers are going to find out that information quite easily. They are more interested in why do you do whatever your business does. Marketers and professionals who follow your campaign not only will be able to answer that question and all the ones related (why are you special? Why should someone buy from you?), but they will also take care of making people talk about you. In a good way, of course! Customers need to know why should they invest time and money interacting with a specific business. A business shouldn’t only want customers. It should put an effort to create followers. People willing to talk about them with our people, to follow their business online. In return, a company nowadays has to show the passion behind the work, the focus that identifies them. Making a connection with the audience that will evolve in a sale is a matter that professionals know how to do.
4) Place becomes Everyplace: being accessible from everywhere and from any device means that a business needs to place their advertisement everywhere. Saying this we don’t want to suggest that you have to bombard people with endless ads or omnipresent banners. The receipt for an effective campaign is to pick the right way to post on all the social channels, as well as your website. Be omnipresent, why not, but with proper content, thought and wrote and published by a team of professional. They will also help you to find out what channels your customers prefer and how you can reach for potential ones effectively.
As seen above, marketing and online marketing have the same core (selling your product and make you have a return from your investments), but they target slightly different goals. If traditional marketing wants to sell, the online one wants to sell and engage. It’s not wrong to say the most significant revolution is the relationship that now a company or an entrepreneur can establish with their audience in the hope to convert it both in followers and customers.
It’s not an easy task, and for this reason, you are going to need a Media Buying Agency such as Targeto. Our professionals’ primary goal is to boost your business and your impact online through a careful strategy built to push your paid content in the right online spots. We want people to see you, and your business and we want they to buy your products.
Just trusting a professional team to do the job you will be able to obtain concrete results and avoid that your product and all the related messages will be enlightened in the ocean of possibilities the Internet is.
You can find us at www.targeto.com
