The 4 P’s of Marketing

The 4 P’s of marketing is a crucial concept. It is also vital that you understand that this is not just something that impacts large companies. Even small businesses need to use the four P’s. So, here we look at what the four P’s of marketing are and how you use them to build your brand and increase your revenue?

What are the 4 P’s of marketing?

You may often hear them referred to as the four basic pillars of marketing. The 4 P’s are:

• Product
• Price
• Place
• Promotion

It is important to implement these, but you should also remember that the four P’s of marketing aren’t a magical solution; there is still work to be done.

Product

In short, this is what you sell, whether this is a physical product like a can of drink or an online service such as SEO marketing. When relating your product to the 4 P’s, you need to be considering how to offer it in such a way that you are going to be seen over the crowd of competitors. You want to be the company that gets the customers. This means you need to consider why your product is unique and how it is going to stand out.

You will need to have a look at what is on offer from the competition and see what they are doing. Sadly, in the modern world, there is rarely such a thing as a unique idea, so you need to figure out how to stand out. Some questions that you can ask yourself to help determine the best way to market your product are – what is the biggest problem you are helping your customer solve? What don’t you like about your competitors?

Price

The second in the 4 P’s of marketing is the Price. Clearly, how much you are charging for your product or service. But, how can you ensure that you have the right price? Is it something that people are prepared to pay that still ensures you are making a profit? If you pitch your price too cheaply, you risk distrust in your product.  Customers will want to know what’s wrong with it, and, of course, you are undercutting your own profits.

So, you need to look at the current market and see how saturated it is, and whether you have arrived first or last in the space. Again, this means doing a competitor analysis to see what they are selling their products for. Key questions when it comes to pricing includes:

• What is your lowest price?
• What is the highest price you think customers would pay?
• Are your customers sensitive to price?

Place

The third P stands for Place, or as they say, location, location, location. Now, it is understandable that you might think place is irrelevant if you are selling on the internet as this is a virtual global platform. However, it is entirely relevant and actually refers to where you are looking to get your product noticed. For example, Snapchat is known to be a very young person’s platform. Therefore, if this is not the target market, you are likely to be wasting your time and energy by pushing on Snapchat. Your website may be your best sales channel, or you might find a lot of your business on Facebook. Perhaps you should be attending conferences.

In order to define your best location, you need to understand your customer. Where are they? Are you a B2B business or a B2C business? Where do your competitors sell? Do you have online and offline outlets, or are you just online? The most successful companies have learned to go where their customers are and not tried to drag their customers to them.

Promotion

The last of the P’s of marketing is Promotion. Just because you have a product and optimized the other three P’s, you will still not sell anything unless you promote yourself. Promotion is more than just getting yourself known. It is about generating that all-important revenue. Again, we’re going to start with what your competitors are doing. Smart marketing is about not having to reinvent the wheel. There are some great tools out there that enable you to monitor the competition.

These tools will return all sorts of information about the traffic they generate, how they use keywords to rank on Google, which sites talk about them and linked to them, and information about how they are generating social media shares. The only problem is they often need to be a larger competitor, as smaller ones may not be listed.