In digital marketing, there are so many tools, channels, and methods that you can use to get great results. It's frustrating when the methods we try don’t work, and it’s even more frustrating when we don’t know why they aren’t working.
Even for digital marketing gurus, sometimes we're just not able to make the adjustments that would cause an ad to generate sales. It’s more complicated than just setting up an ad and clicking the right options. If marketing and advertising were as simple as following a set of rules, then everybody would be successful at it, and as we all know, that's not the case.
Good marketing has, at minimum, several components. One of the common marketing concepts that I teach my grad students is about the Four P's of Marketing: product, price, promotion, and place. This is a great framework to help you tweak other key parts of your marketing, beyond just the ad itself.
The Four Ps of Marketing
Price: Does your price match the value your customer places on your brand? The proper pricing of your product is extremely important. If the value of your product to your target audience doesn't match the value you're assigning it, people won’t pay for it. You could be promoting your product to an audience that doesn’t want to pay that much for it, or maybe you’re promoting to people looking for something more expensive. Pricing your product or service in a way that reflects its value and resonates with your target audience takes experience, often gained through frequent tweaking over time. You may have the wrong price—or be targeting the wrong customer!
Product: Does your product offer the benefits your customer wants in a product or service of that type? Consider the different elements of your product. What is it about your product that your customers will be willing to pay for? What sets your product apart from other products on the market? Do your customers value that? Value can be found in many things—usefulness, durability, style, packaging, self-expression, and, of course, pricing. Make sure what you're offering has VALUE to your target customers. If it doesn't, then even the best Facebook ad campaign in the world won't get you many sales.
Place: How difficult is it for your customer to actually purchase your product or service? Place refers to the actual place that the customer receives their valuable product or service. This is a hugely overlooked factor in online marketing. You cannot assume that your stuff is so amazing that masses of people will jump through whatever hoops they need to in order to get it. Now, if you're Apple, you probably aren't reading this, so you don't count. But, for everyone else, how easy is it for your customers to actually get the value they're paying you for? If you offer online products, remove all friction in your ordering process. If you're a retail store, make sure the customer journey–from clicking on your ad to walking out of your store with a purchase–is optimized. (Pssst...are your hours updated on Google??)
Promotion: Does your advertising promote the values your customer is seeking? The final element of the four P's is what we most commonly think of as "marketing." Ads, press releases, sales, signage, social media, websites – everything we use to promote our products. You must promote your product in a way that your customers can relate to. They should be able to identify themselves in your ad. Think about the problem that they need a solution to and point that out in your ad. Use images that are appropriate for your audience. Use quality photos or an engaging video. Write attention-grabbing copy that clearly expresses the value of your product to your audience. Go beyond simply stating that “there’s a great new event happening this weekend. Here’s the location and the date. Hope to see you there.” You can’t expect floods of people to attend your event just because you put it out there. You have to do the hard work of getting them to visualize themselves at your event.
Achieving Balance in Marketing
If you’ve been trying to figure out how to break through and finally see real results with your Facebook ads, pay close attention to these four P's. You may not be advertising the right thing to the right people. Marketing isn’t just about all the fun stuff that Facebook allows you to target like location data and interests. It's really about making sure that each part of your marketing strategy adds up to what your audience truly wants, and that takes diligence, patience, and time.
You can...do it!
Elizabeth Collins
Stay committed to your decisions, but stay flexible in your approach.
Tony Robbins