The 4 Ps of SEO & digital marketing - It is a strange time to be a marketer. Many people from the SEO world, myself included, aren't traditionally trained as marketers.
My advertising profession was a fortunate accident -- a situation of being in the right place at the ideal moment. I had been working developing e-commerce websites, and if that job was done, the question soon became, How do we get more visitors and more customers? This led me to the new and fascinating world of SEO circa 1999.
 |
| The 4 Ps of SEO & digital marketing |
Obviously, there is more to marketing than simply becoming highly ranked on search engines, and it took me some time to figure out this. But over the years working as an SEO, I have learned the significance of more traditional advertising and marketing procedures and the way they relate to SEO.
Search engines want to connect people with the greatest possible outcomes -- thus user engagement and satisfaction is probably an SEO rank variable. Certainly, on-page signals and links continue to be super-important, but these won't help if users do not participate in your site. SEO is now firmly a part of the overall marketing process, and also great marketing is only going to help improve rankings and drive more traffic.
And so it follows that the SEOs I respect and admire are all highly savvy entrepreneurs. It is not sufficient to focus on delivering more visitors. To perform good SEO in 2017 and beyond, you have to be an excellent marketer.
In the following article, I will have a look at the advertising mix and a timeless marketing tool known as "the 4 Ps of marketing." I will discuss how you can use this tool to increase your marketing and SEO.
The Four Ps of marketing
The classic definition of marketing is simply "putting the right product in the right place, at the right price, at the right time."
Stripping away the sophistication can be powerful. The Four Ps of marketing helps us here by focusing on these four key areas:
As it happens, SEO does a lot right by default. However, we also have to ensure the product and the price will be right too -- after all, there'll be a whole lot of competition on that search engine results page.
Let us take a look at each of these four Important areas:
Product/service
Who are your clients? What are their targets? What jobs do they need to do that you could do better? Do you know their pains? Ultimately, how can your product help your customer?
In my agency, for example, we provide a digital marketing service. This helps our clients achieve their business goals and takes away the work and pain involved with attempting to stay abreast of the electronic advertising and marketing landscape.
Your service or product is the basis of your marketing strategy. You need absolute clarity here. Price and marketing will all be influenced by your goods.
Getting found is just half the battle -- you need to convince your potential customers that your service or product can deliver.
Price
Cost is intrinsically tied to value. But the price must also consider established price points on your industry. If you're just too pricey, your product will not sell, no matter how desirable.
There is something of a pendulum with price, where a lesser price will generally create more sales, but a greater cost will generate more earnings. You need to find what your ideal equilibrium is here, and that will depend on your marketplace and lead generation strategies.
SEO is a fantastic example of how difficult pricing could be. Typical wisdom will say that SEO prices around $100 an hour. However, when we spent some time analyzing SEO packs and SEO prices, we found some very different perspectives on what people were prepared to pay -- particularly when it came to small business SEO services.
Pricing is fundamental, and you need to carefully consider cost points to make sure you can deliver the support but still earn a profit. Brand and online reputation will play right into this, naturally, but a lot of us are not Apple -- so you may be able to pull off being 10 percent more costly than a rival if your merchandise is right, but push too hard on the pricing and you will typically lose work.
Place
Where will customers start looking for your product? Will your customers search for you? Does your advertising mix include a combination of offline and online marketing channels?
If you are an emergency electrician, then people will catch their phone and go directly to Google, so that one is fairly obvious. However, for many services, different individuals will buy in various ways: networking, referrals, search engines and so forth. Determine where your customers are and where you need to be to market to them.
Promotion
Where are you going to get your marketing messages in front of your prospective customers?
Search engines? Search ads? Social networking? Online banner advertisements? Press? TV? Direct mail? Billboards? Can you use advertisements or top-of-the-funnel approaches like content advertising? Can you try to market, or can you use lead generation and marketing approaches?
Is time of day a factor? Is there any seasonality on your marketplace? Are there other outside factors that can be leveraged to increase your own marketing?
Are several stations exceptionally aggressive? Where are the opportunities? A SWOT analysis can be helpful here (another traditional advertising and marketing tool).
This really depends on the customer, and often the best approaches strategically integrate marketing channels to optimize results.
In our organization, we discover that higher-funnel actions like content marketing work best for individuals compared to ads. As an example, we have a piece of content which details 30 small business SEO tips. This generates some good exposure and prospects for us. But if we run search ads, we will get prospects, but we're often in competition with other agencies. In addition, it tends to return to price, and while we aren't expensive, there is always someone cheaper.
You have to figure out how your advertising, lead generation, and sales work together to fine-tune your strategy. If you can find some method to provide similar quality while being measurably the least expensive service, you may probably be competitive on most channels.
You're able to tackle product, price, place, and advertising in any purchase. And in all honesty, I tend to merge promotion and place when we do this to ourselves and our clients. Merchandise informs price. Cost points inform the item. No point adding a few radical new features should they push up the price too high.
You must think about the marketplace you run in and your competitors. Scalable marketing success will very much depend upon acquiring each one of these factors aligned. If you quantify the success of your SEO by how many conversions you generate from organic visitors, then you can better your SEO by tweaking your product pricing.
It is part of a wider marketing framework. As entrepreneurs and SEOs, we must consider these other aspects to make sure we can keep on enhancing the work that we do.
When you've got an item that isn't selling, try considering all of these factors. Can it be the product itself? Can it be the pricing? Use the easy 4 Ps frame to interrogate your advertising, and your results will only improve.
I certainly hope this helps, and I'm always happy to answer any questions via the author contact form -- or you may reach me on Twitter or LinkedIn, where I am pleased to connect with other entrepreneurs.
0 komentar:
Post a Comment