How to Apply the 7 P’s to your Online Marketing Strategies
Building a new business is an endeavor everyone who dreams to have their own mansion and Ferrari wants to take. With that, people strive to try to pierce the market with their new set of ideas in order to be on top of their chosen niche. However, in order to be successful in any endeavor, one should be armed with his/her strategies, skill set and knowledge on how to go about with his/her business. After all, you can’t go in the battlefield without any ammo.
With a successful marketing strategy should come an evaluation and reevaluation of this strategy through marketing mix. Marketing mix is what brings all the elements needed of successful selling to achieve a company’s business goal. It is also called the 7 P’s of marketing. Marketing mix effectively targets the right group of people with the right products or services and at the right time and place that would eventually lead to increased profits.
The utilization of the 7 P’s of marketing goes back to the time when there was only offline marketing; now, with the demand of online marketing, these 7 P’s of marketing can be applicable, and can even be more effective, with the help of online marketing strategies.
With that said, you may now wonder how these newest trends can be applied to the 7 P’s of marketing. Here are some points why:
Products
If you don’t have a specific product in mind yet but you know what industry you want to be in, you can do a quick research in the internet about what specific products related to your chosen niche are in demand through the utilization of keyword research as well as Google Trends. With Google Trends and Adwords, you can also make use of the “related terms” section in order to determine the other keywords that are searched by your potential clients.
Furthermore, engaging with potential leads in Forums and Social Media Sites can really help you determine what people ask or what people are looking for. Utilizing the hashtag (#) tool of Twitter would help you as people use this when they are in search of something as well. The good thing is that Facebook has also implemented this tool which would make it easier for you to search through this social media site. In addition, there are groups and communities in social media sites as well that people often utilize as they do with forums in terms of looking for specific products or services so joining the groups related to your niche would help you determine what they are looking for as well.
People
With every industry, it is important that you find through research if there are enough people in demand of a certain types of products. With traditional media practitioners, they would survey a group of people in order to do this but there are some people that would be too busy to answer surveys regardless of how long or short it is. But with the utilization of SEO strategies, specifically the keyword research tool in Google Adwords, you would know if your product or service would have a high search result in search engines; if it does, then that means that it may be in demand.
However, you shouldn’t stop with just search engines as your target market may be in social media sites such as Google+, LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. Similar to researching on products, you can also utilize the search bars of these sites in order to find people who are in search of your product or service.
Price
Now that you have an idea on the demand of the product, you most likely have an estimate of how much it costs. Furthermore, you have to consider your production costs as well; from the smallest details such as your internet connection to your manpower and resources. After calculating these costs, you have to then determine the standards of your market since pricing is a very fragile aspect. Pricing your product too low would make it seem inferior why pricing too high would make it seem overrated; which is why you have to know the specific standards of your potential customers. In addition, researching on your competitors’ products/services, positioning and pricing, you would know how you would best fit in the competitive market.
With all these factors carefully calculated and interpreted, you would be ready to price your products and services and compete in your chosen niche.
Promotion
Now that all of the aforementioned is dealt with, you have to figure out how you would want to promote your service. With online marketing, there are various strategies to choose from; from Pay-Per-Click ads, Search Engine Optimization, Content Marketing, Social Media Marketing and Branding.
The most common and probably one of the best effective strategies is content marketing. Content marketing is simply creating contents that would be relevant enough to target customers that they would see you as a trustworthy company and even help you reach a wider market through sharing your content. To achieve this, you must write for your readers by producing a content that would be helpful, trivial, educational, relatable and entertaining to them—in other words, NOT direct selling.
Ultimately, by determining where your target market hangs out (whether in social media sites or solely search engines) through the utilization of keyword research tools as well as search tools in social media sites, you would know which strategies would fit.
Place
The obvious answer to the place is the internet as you, of course, would have a website. However, the internet can be a bit of a maze and utilizing the wrong platform to sell your product or service; which is why it is important to determine where your goods are mostly looked for—whether in social media sites, search engines or maybe even both.
Also, you may want to consider guest blogging in order to put your contents “out there.” Guest blogging is simply representing your company through your relevant content and posting it on an established blog. With that, you should make sure that the blog already has an established “fan base” in order to be successfully seen. A quick research in Google would help you out with this.
Process
Now that you have those figured out, you must put them to action by considering the process on how your products would be delivered and how you would go about your marketing.
Let’s say you decided that SEO through content marketing is the best way for you (for now), you must consider how frequent you are going to post and what you are going to post about. There are tactics that would help you with your content development such as mapping and scheduling. Utilizing keyword generator mapping tools such as WikiMind Map would help you as it shows related terms to your targeted keyword; hence, you would be able to expand your articles or determine other related topics you can discuss in future articles. Furthermore, by downloading the results in Google Trends as a CSV (excel) file, you would be given the days where a specific keyword is mostly searched for and with that you can determine when the best days you can produce your contents are.
With regards to social media sites, before utilizing any platform, you should know the behavior of its users as well as how these social media works. For example, postings in Facebook doesn’t have to be as frequent as those in Twitter as the latter moves faster since this is used mostly for real-time broadcasts, news and updates while people in Facebook would often look for a good read.
After knowing the behavior of your target market, you can now strategize on your process with regards to how you would utilize your chosen online marketing tool.
Positioning
Now, the waiting game comes. After putting your brand out there, of course, there wouldn’t be results in a snap. You have to be patient for it while continuously putting effort on your strategy. Eventually, you would successfully have inquiries and clients. However, after achieving this, your journey still wouldn’t stop as you still have to determine where you are in the hearts and the minds of your customers.
One way to determine this is the classic surveying through email and personal surveys alike. Also, listening to your customers in forums and social media sites can be of help as well and this can be done by simple “Googling” yourself. Afterwards, if you think you have a good reputation, you should manage it by continuously trying to find ways to improve your products and services and keeping in touch with your customers.
Online Reputation Management strategies would help you manage and improve your reputation as well as counter bad ones if they show themselves because eventually there would be—whether if it is a strategy of a competitor or an unsatisfied client.
Taking these marketing mix components into consideration has brought the big businesses to where they are now. As stated previously, you can’t come in battle unarmed with both bullets and strategies which is why being fully researched with where your target market is, what tool to use and how you would compete is very important.
Although the marketing mix is standard, marketers and business owners alike tend to forget that changes happen all the time; just like with marketing strategies where those in the internet are continuously gaining high demands. With that being said, they tend to overlook how they could maximize these strategies such as the aforementioned. Mixing the 7 P’s and the online marketing tools are very effective and successfully utilizing this would give companies an edge over them competitors as they will have a more in-depth strategy.