4P’s of Marketing are Dead — Here’s What to Focus on Instead


If you’ve ever taken any formal marketing education, you have likely been taught the 4P’s of Marketing: Product, Place, Promotion, and Price. In this day and age, you likely never used it in the real world.

The reality is that this framework is a confusing, distracting, and siloed way of thinking. Only focusing on these four areas doesn’t account for your customer journey itself and how they may be progressing across your value chain. Moreover, the framework focuses you on what you can do for your customer as opposed to the value they gain from you.

Here’s a marketing mix you should be focusing your efforts on instead

Lead Generation

This is collecting contact information, such as an email address, to start your prospect’s journey with your business. How do you that? Well, that’s for another article, but you know how businesses send you a freebie (e.g., checklist pdf, free webinar, or audio files)? You are entering their lead gen engine. This is a key insight in this phase:

You need to provide value first for anyone to be willing to provide their contact information to you.

It’s important to actually get an email address or contact information in this phase as opposed to just relying on social platforms. For one, you have no control over social media platforms, and in any case, they shut down or completely shut your business off, you lose your leads.

I like to think of leads you capture through social media platforms as rented audience vs. when you actually capture an email contact, they become your owned audience — just like in renting and owning a home, owning is an investment as opposed to renting is just pouring money into something with no return in the future.

That’s the key in the phase, you need to create an engine that turns your rented audience into your owned audience so that you can start building a relationship with your prospects from here.

Nurturing Leads

Next, just as humans, growing up, we are nurtured by our environment into the person we are now. The next step is then to nurture your leads into clients. Here, you let them get to know you more and what you’re about, you walk them through the transformation your solution could offer, and you drive demand for your unique value proposition.

This could look like an email sequence that does precisely that, or an email sequence that drips some of the value your solution could offer and leaves them wanting more.

Conversion

Then, you turn your leads into customers, clients, or users. You talk about the journey they could take with you and the transformation they could have. Maybe you add success stories of your past clients that have gone through that transformation.

Most importantly, you answer any common objections and de-myth limiting beliefs they may have about your offer and the transformation you are offering.

You sort of like you push them to make the jump — in this phase, they’re still on the edge and you have to help them overcome any doubts they may have.

Delivery

Here, the key is to over-deliver on your promise. You’ve hyped them up to your offering and have convinced your prospects that your offering is the right choice to solve their problems.

You have to provide greater value than what they would have expected and for the price they paid.

You not only have to ensure they receive the product or service you offer smoothly, but you also have to ensure that they are delighted with the experience.

Retention, Upsell, and Advocacy

Finally, you turn your clients into your raving fans. Here, you ask for testimonials that you can then turn into social proof for the next prospects. You develop virality engines that make it so easy to let your customers tell their friends about you and the transformation they’ve had with your offer.

Then, you look to extending their customer lifetime value by keeping you top of mind (retention) and introducing higher ticket offers that would expand their transformation (upsell).

That’s it!

In addition to a shift in focus on your customer’s journey, this framework focuses you on extending the customer’s lifetime value with your business and it doesn’t silo your offering to just a one-time offer.

Moreover, it focuses your efforts on customer relationship building as opposed to simply pushing products out in the market.

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