We have all been hearing about the 4 Ps of marketing, haven’t you? No? Well, as a reminder, the 4 Ps are: they are acronyms for Product, Place, Pricing and Promotion.
These terms are referring to the biggest of the business decisions which marketers have to make when they are bringing a new service or a product to market.
These decisions are the real soul of a good marketing plan for any given business.
As an owner of a business who is working on answering such questions, you may tend to feel that the answers primarily revolve around the product that you are offering, your brand or your competitors.
This cannot be further from the truth.
To determine your four Ps, try to imagine your business as a planet and look at your targeted audience as the sun. All your business operations, the decisions you make, and the promotions you run all revolve around how your audience behaves.
And while you have centered the efforts of your marketing around the targeted audience, you have a better opportunity to be heard, to be seen and to be understood.
But how would you ensure that the marketing activities being carried out are really getting noticed and engaged with by your target audience?
Let’s break it down:
Define
To define your targeted audience is perhaps the biggest and the most important step.
While the process of nailing down your targeted audience is important, it is hardly the ultimate step of the whole process, conducting all this research and not applying it to the business will be a huge waste of energy and time.
And, time is the most important resource for us all — and we just cannot afford to waste time.
Align
So you have nailed down your target audience. You now know exactly who you are marketing to and who you are selling to. Great!
Let’s now talk about how you will be applying all this research in the context of your business.
Product
As with most entrepreneurs, their minds are always busy with the ideas and improvements regarding how they can improve their own lives and at the same time, others; lives too.
We bet that such ideas must have worked as a catalyst when you started your present business – or maybe the business that you are looking to start. But in all this clutter, how will your target audience fit in this overall plan?
The audience that you’re targeting should be playing a vital role as part of the business right from the first day. Some business owners tend to think that their targeted audience is not important for their strategy until the service or the product has been conceptualized, but that is not true.
Price
This part of the marketing plan may be found to be the hardest for you to get away from.
As you are dealing with the cost and the market price related to your service or product, it’s important that you ensure that your pricing decisions are inspired by a very deep understanding that you have of your targeted audience and your competition.
Place
The place of your business, in this case, is referring to the physical location. A lot of business owners, when they launch their company, just go ahead and get any property that is available in the market.
You should choose your position in the market by considering narrowed down options and you should be intentional in your choice based on your audience and competition. This is done so so that you end up at a place that resonates with everyone who would be coming to your location to make a purchase. Or, if it’s a service area — make sure your service actually serves a need in that area.
Promotion
Promotion happens to be what most individuals start thinking about whenever they think of any kind of marketing/advertising.
Promotion is the advertising/marketing section of the marketing plan itself — it relates to what, where, and how you will be sharing your business message or your brand with the target audience.
Finally
Just think about it – if you really wanted to start a new business, you will need to know what you are going to sell (product), what its situation in the market would is (place), how much are you going to charge for it (price) and how would you go about promoting it (promotion).
