Online Marketing strategy : 4Ps
February 17, 2010 | Posted by LUV | 4 CommentsIf you are working in marketing field or if your degree is about marketing, I am sure that you know 4Ps, which are Product, Price, Place and Promotion since 4Ps is a basic marketing strategy used by most businesses. However, when you turn your business to online business, you should also change your 4Ps strategy. Therefore, today I would like to talk about 4Ps strategy that is applied for online marketing like what you have to do with your Product, Price, Place and Promotion when you do business via Internet.
Product : When you sell your products via your website, your customers cannot view, touch or try your products. Therefore, the most important thing is information. What you have to do is providing all necessary information about your products in the website such as price, image, size, weight, materials, instructions, etc. Without any of this information, your customers may not be able to make decision to buy or they may go to other websites since what they need to do is just type the new URL in an address bar of the browser. Therefore, please keep in your mind that ‘Information’ is the most important thing.
Moreover, you should check if your physical products can be converted to online or digital products. For example, think about music CDs. In the past, people normally buy CDs form the shops but currently people love to download mp3 files from the website because people nowadays like to use the products immediately. They do not want to wait. Therefore, if you sell something like music CDs, movie DVDs, books, etc. you may allow your customers to download them via your website.
In addition, you may allow your customers to customize their products. I will use the case of music CDs again in that music CDs normally contain 10-20 songs, that are not selected by the customers but nowadays when people can download songs from the Internet, they can choose which songs they want to download. Then, they may write their selected songs into CDs. Customization can be also applied to other products like
Place : The place or channel you use to promote your products to your customers has to be changed as well since when we talk about online, we mainly focus on Internet so it means you should make your products available on the Internet, not groceries, brick and mortar stores, sale people, vending machines, etc. These following places / channels can be used to distribute your products on the Internet.
Search Engines – As mentioned in my previous articles that search engines have been increasingly used by Internet users when they are looking for anything.
Customers’ Mailboxes – Instead of sending product brochures to customers’ houses, you may try email blast to send information about your new products, promotion, news, etc to your customers.
Other websites relevant to your products – Placing banners or Text Ads in other websites related to your products can draw significant visitors to your website.
Social Media / Network – Currently, people love to connect with other people as we can see that Social Media and Network are more and more popular like Hi5, Facebook or Twitter.
For another 2Ps, which are Price and Promotion, I will talk about them in the next article.


