Sometime after Google became a verb and Facebook became a thing, someone declared that the digital age has changed business forever.
They added “marketing” to words like search engine, content, social media, pay-per-click, email, video, and viral then declared that the “old rules” no longer apply. They put the word “traditional” in front of advertising and relegated things like radio, newspapers, and billboards too the scrap heap of history.
Now I don’t know who “they” are, but when I find them I’m going to kick their ass. They’re guilty of distracting small business from focusing on business fundamentals with their self serving hot mess they call digital marketing.
That’s not to say there isn’t a role for digital. But none of the tools I listed above will help you if you charge the wrong price, for the wrong product or service, and don’t deliver on the promise your customers think you made them.
Everyone is so busy worshiping at the altar of digital advertising masquerading as marketing that they’ve lost sight of the fundamental questions that have been at the core of business for centuries if not millennia: Customer, Product, Price, and Promotion.
If you’re familiar with the original 4P’s of marketing you’re probably wondering what happened to PLACE.
I’m a bit of a traditionalist and I like to keep things simple. So it’s natural for me to want to gravitate towards the original 4 P’s of marketing: Product, Price, Promotion, and Place.
But I’m also a realist and recognize that the digital age has changed the game a little.
The truth is that the internet has made geography a binary decision for you. You’re either exclusively selling to a local market or you’re not.
I also find that to the extent any of the traditional elements of “Place” are relevant they are usually covered as part of a well developed customer persona. And clearing defining who you are selling to is far more important today than it ever was.
I’ll be diving deeper in to each of these categories in future posts. Plus I’ll be sharing snippets from my upcoming book. So stay tuned.