How The 4 Ps of Marketing Can Help You Grow Your Online Business

In the online marketing space, not enough people talk about the four Ps of marketing.

Now, you might be wondering, what are these four Ps, and why are they important? 

The 4 Ps of marketing are product, price, promotion, and place. These four aspects are the fundamental principles of traditional marketing. But for various reasons, we don’t hear much about them in the online space.

Instead, when you hear online marketers talk and use the word “marketing,” they’re usually only talking about the promotion p. But marketing is so much more. Let’s dive a little bit into each concept.

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Product

The concept of product is pretty self-explanatory, but there’s a key thing here.

Part of marketing is finding and developing the right product. It’s about satisfying the customer’s needs with the right product.

Marketing is about knowing your customers so well that you can create the right product and offer for them. You find an existing demand and create a product to meet that demand instead of trying to create demand for a product that you create.

It’s a subtle distinction but it’s an important one. You shouldn’t create a product and then try to sell it.

You should find what people want and create a solution for that problem.

Price

Price isn’t as simple as how much you charge. It’s incredibly complicated and goes beyond saying “charge what you’re worth.”

You have to consider a lot of factors in determining the price of your products or services. These include competition, the value of producing them, constraints, discounts, payment plans, etc.

Sometimes you’ll recognize that you can’t make money if you sell a product for less than a certain amount, but that doesn’t mean you can sell it for that amount.

You have to go through a process of doing pricing the right way, and that’s an important part of marketing too.

Promotion

Promotion is best described as the communication between you and your buyers. This is what most people in the online marketing space mean when they say the word “marketing.”

They’re talking about social media marketing, spreading the word, advertising, and all that stuff. It’s your sales promotions, direct marketing, and all those pieces of communications.

Place

Place is about the means of delivering your product to your customer. You might simply say it’s online, but this is an important consideration.

Some of the discussions you hear quite frequently about this are about which particular platform you choose. But that’s not the big choice.

The big choice might be thinking through how you’re going to deliver your products or services. Is it audio only, video only, or a combination? Are you going to have a community? If so, where does that community live?

This determination of place isn’t ultimately about you but your audience. What is the place where they want to be?

You have to decide based on what’s right for your audience and how you can best serve them.

What’s Next

It’s important to understand and think about these 4 core concepts of marketing because each of these is a lever that you can pull and adjust in your marketing.

You need to make sure that all 4 are part of your marketing plan. Don’t simply think about the communication piece but think about each one of them and understand their importance.

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