When you’re selling products or services, there are about 1,001 ways to market them. From blogging to email lists to old-fashioned mail advertisements, there’s certainly no shortage of promotional methods.
Finding a type of marketing is one thing. But pulling your marketing efforts into a strategy with a mission for continued success is what will ultimately set your marketing on the right track. And much of that strategy comes from the 4 Ps of marketing.
What are the 4 Ps of Marketing?
The 4 Ps of marketing are four pieces of the marketing puzzle that intertwine to give you results. In short, the Ps stand for Product, Price, Place, and Promotion. Together, they work to market your product or service in a way that meets the needs of your customers while generating revenue for your business.
Basically, the four Ps make it clear that there’s more to marketing than just promoting your product or service. Sure, promotion is part of it. But you won’t get very far without pricing and placement, too.
Let’s look into each piece a little closer.
Product
The first P, product, refers to the product or service you’re marketing. This product should be something that aligns with your business and meets your customers’ needs and wants. So, for this piece, you’ll want to focus on developing a product or service that fulfills both prongs.
To do that, you might conduct market research with the audience you want to appeal to. Or, survey current customers to learn what else they’re expecting from your company. Once you have a concept, you can work to refine it into an ideal product or service for your audience.
Price
The price of your product or service will play a significant role in your ability to sell it. Is your price something that your ideal customer can afford? Is it competitive within the market? What does your price say about the audience you’re targeting?
Again, market research comes in handy here. You should gather responses from your ideal market to determine a price point for what you’re offering that your customers will be willing to pay.
Place
Place is all about where you position your product or service to get in front of customers. Maybe that’s mostly through Instagram because you have a photogenic product. Or perhaps it’s events on college campuses because you’re selling academic planning software. Wherever your ideal customers are, that’s where you want to be. Your “place” can be where you’re physically present, solely online, or a blend of both.
Promotion
When we think of marketing, we think of “promotion,” right? But promotion is just one of the four Ps, albeit a big one. The promotion aspect is all about how you choose to promote your product to generate revenue for your business. In today’s digital world, a lot of promotion happens online, but that doesn’t mean you can’t use more traditional modes of advertising.
Using the 4 Ps of Marketing to Your Advantage
We’ve covered what the 4 Ps of marketing are, so let’s look at how you can use them to conceptualize and market your product or service.
Understand What Your Customers Need
Developing a successful product or service starts with your customers’ needs. Without knowing what they need, you won’t be able to formulate your product and marketing to target your ideal customer. Learning about your customer should be something you do right after conceptualizing what you want to sell. The “Product” phase of the Ps will likely be the one that you spend most of your time on.
Develop a Clear Marketing Strategy
The 4 Ps should help you implement a clear marketing strategy. Your strategy should answer the following questions:
- Who is my product for?
- What need does my product fill?
- What pricing appeals to my ideal customer?
- Where do my ideal customers hang out?
- What promotional strategies will work best for this product?
With a marketing strategy in place, you should know the who, what, where, when, and why behind your product and your customers. In turn, you’ll be able to meet the needs of your customers with your product and its promotional methods.
Analyze, Analyze, Analyze
Even with a working marketing strategy, you’ll need to revisit it from time to time to make sure everything is moving along like you intended. Are customers recognizing the value in your product? Are your promotional methods working? Does the product have features that help it stand out against competitors?
These are all points to monitor as you continue to analyze your marketing strategy. In other words, the four Ps isn’t a “set it and forget it” strategy. Keep analyzing and tweaking your marketing strategy to remain updated and relevant in the market.
If you’re selling physical products online, you’ll want to take advantage of every opportunity to make it easier for your visitors to make a purchase. In addition to social media share buttons that make it simple for your visitors to share your content, ShareThis offers many useful tools to help you grow your business. Install our Etsy follow button to promote your Etsy shop and make it easy for your visitors to follow your shop, or install our Amazon follow button to allow visitors to save a product to their wishlist – all with a single click!
