Part 2 of Marketing Planning for 2021: The 4 Ps
Hey There!
Next to last non-holiday version of the newsletter of 2020!
Did y’all find the first part of this valuable? Useful?
In this week’s ‘Talking Tickets’ newsletter, I shared a bit about Brian Morrissey’s newsletter and the framework he uses to think through editorial and business focuses.
I like Brian’s framework and did a little run through in ‘Talking Tickets’ about how I’ll focus my attention on the recovery of live entertainment, but since more of my attention has been on the practice of marketing and strategy, generally, I wanted to do the same thing here very quickly before I get to the 4 Ps.
Figure out a simple editorial vision you will repeat 100x: My vision here is to cover the ways that folks can use marketing and strategy to win more business, produce security for themselves, and recover from the pandemic. In looking at Brian’s concept for Digiday, that calling out bullshit sticks with me too.
Find your lens: My lens here is that marketing is a process and strategy is a focus that far too many people misunderstand or misuse. And, if I can help someone see through the crap, we can all be more successful.
Run to the complicated: There is a lot to play with here since folks throw around strategy, marketing, sales, and revenue in ways that are meaningless or misleading. I’ll continue to work to separate the BS from the real and to make the complex simple.
Run a playbook: This is where 2020 has been a kick in the shins since at the end of 2019, I’d started to hit a formula that let me do my best work, have a good impact on folks, and have fun with the podcast, newsletter, workshops, and talks. I’ve had to change and this is something I’m going to spend the rest of the year thinking through because doing video is fine, but we are mostly video’d out and I want to still be able to share my ideas with folks.
Does that make sense or is that overly indulgent?
BTW, I’m going to really focus on growing these lists for the next year.
So I’m doing a quick 3-question survey, should take you about 60 seconds to fill out. (There’s also a lesson on NPS Scores and surveys that I’ll share in a few or two once I’ve given folks a chance to respond.)
And, if you can share the newsletter…that’d be awesome!
Now, to the 4Ps.
If you are unfamiliar with the basics of marketing, the 4 Ps are product, price, place, and promotion.
In too many places, they are the only things that get attention these days and they lead us astray.
To recap last week’s conversation, strategy before tactics is key because you have your pizza, slice it up, pick a slice, and make sure folks pick pizza over tacos.
This week, the 4 Ps are the tools you use to make a pizza that folks want to eat and will pick over tacos.
Am I destroying this metaphor or does it still make sense?
I like to decide on the 4 Ps in order, but, in theory, you could do them in whatever order you want to.
Product:
Simple.
What’s the product or service you are going to offer to share your value with the world?
Use me as an example, in the before times, I would have ad revenue from the podcast, newsletter, and other promotions. I had the workshops, talks, and consulting.
The thing on product is that by being market oriented, you should have a pretty good idea about what your market needs and wants from you. So coming up with ways to deliver that value should become much easier.
Here’s one thing I would challenge y’all on: Be careful about the number of products and services you offer up to your market. You can overwhelm your market and you may end up having too many things going on to be able to support your efforts to sell this value.
Price:
Crazy story: I found out that one of the most famous marketing professors in the world uses an article I wrote on discounts in his pricing section.
The core idea of that piece: discounts are for dummies. More to the point, don’t discount.
But back to price, price is the most important word in marketing because it bridges the value gap between you and your customer so you can capture some of the value you’ve created for your customers.
Most pricing is done in a haphazard manner, even in supposedly “sophisticated” pricing formulas.
I’ll do an entire post on pricing after the new year because I’ve been studying it a bit lately.
But here’s the important things to keep in mind:
If you can increase your prices 1%, on average that will lead to a 12% increase in your profits.
If you discount 1%, that has been shown to knock your profits down around 40%.
As you can see, getting the price right is important and the discounting things is deadly.
In my world, I use a value based pricing method which is built on perception and a pricing model that is not perfect, but does a pretty good job of teaching you a range of prices for anything you are doing.
Like I promised, I’ll cover pricing in a future post.
Place:
This one is interesting to me because people get precious about distribution in a lot of the industries I touch.
In thinking about distribution, there are two words to know:
Direct
Indirect
Direct is the folks buy straight from you.
Indirect is that you have retailers and other people selling for you. Think about Priceline, StubHub, or Booking.com.
There are pluses and minuses to both routes.
Direct distribution can work but it requires a set of skills that can be outside of your primary value proposition, especially if you are selling something that is mass market.
Indirect distribution can be a good choice because a lot of times retailers and sellers have specialized knowledge of the market, know the customer better, and can get you in places you might not otherwise have reached.
One thing to consider is that you can have too many points of distribution and that can devalue the product and can lower your sales.
In most cases, you probably want to see if there is a mix of the two that allows you to maximize sales. There isn’t an exact science to this and I know that some folks only want direct and some only want indirect.
So you have to consider your own business, be market oriented, and make your decisions based on the research and understanding you have.
Promotion:
This is the one that folks seem to feel like is the only one that matters in a lot of places these days.
Getting the word out!
The reality is that in the way that I was taught marketing, promotions make up about 9% of the marketing process.
Why?
Because there are a bunch of important pieces that lead you to making the most of your promotional efforts like advertising, sales force, PR, and everything else.
The key point of promotion is that when all is said and done, you should be focusing on the ends and not the means.
I teach my clients and folks that come to my workshops that you should be platform agnostic. That means, I follow the data and make a decision on where I deploy my tactics based upon the goal that I’m trying to achieve.
As an example, instead of saying, “I have to have a TikTok strategy.”
I ask myself what my goal is and figure out whether or not TikTok will get me to that point of success.
I think I’ve used the point of saying that in the past if you saw something business related from me on Pinterest, you’d know I’d lost my way.
I know this is a huge, high-level look at the 4 Ps, but I wanted to give y’all a comprehensive view of the world of marketing heading into the holidays so as you maybe take some time to formulate what you do in 2021, you have a framework that might be useful in guiding your thinking.
See you next week!
Dave