More to Internet Marketing than Promotions

There is a terrible tendancy, especially among those who's introduction to Marketing was via web promotions, to think that Internet marketing is just another word for advertising or promotion. Here we'll try to take a step back, and see how the field of Internet Marketing is every bit as broad as offline marketing.

The 4 Ps of Marketing

You don't need to study Marketing long to know of the 4 Ps of marketing. The 4 Ps are: Product, Price, Place, and Promotion. The Internet has a profound effect on all four of these basic points of Marketing, and probably has had the greatest effect of all on Place.

Place in Internet Marketing

I have heard it argued that the Internet made the P-word of Place obsolete in online marketing. Certainly, the whole precept of the Web is that it is global, and that websites from companies in far remote places can compete directly against local web sites for audience or business.

However, just putting a store on the high street has never been all there is to Place in marketing. Look to the massive growth in outsourcing, and in building more remote data centers, warehouses, etc, is to truly understand what Place actually means in marketing online.

Placing your business where it has the best balance of low-cost, high-quality labour, low overheads, and good access to its supply and delivery needs, is precisely what the marketing concept of Place has always been about.

The Internet may have eliminated the high street basis of shops that are online, but mail order business already saw that elimination decades earlier. The Internet has widened choices over placement of business to a global level, but has also brought new infrastructure needs, such as reliable Internet pipelines, and excellent distribution channels.

Sometimes the most important issues of Place for online marketing may be in regards to taxation, labour issues, and to legal issues, especially Intellectual Property laws (e.g. Trademarks and Patents). Where you place a business has significant effect on the political, economic, and social conditions that will apply.

Even getting down to the minute specifics of Search Engine Marketing, Place is still an important issue with regards to country-specific domains. CCTLDs or Country Code Top Level Domains are often dependant on having a business address, and even business registration in the country.

For a company to be able to sell effectively in Germany, for example, it can be essential to online marketing to have a .de domain so that the company website can appear in search results where the user has chosen "results from Germany" in order to get local pricing and delivery options.

The P of Place is still an important consideration in online marketing, just as with broader marketing.

Product in Internet Marketing

There is no such complexity to excuse missing the effects of online marketing with regards to Product. The effects of the web on the Product itself should be obvious.

I'm not even going to waste time writing about the whole new wealth of products, from eBooks to iTunes, and from commercial firewalls to security software that only exist because of the Internet. That the Internet has created new Product demands should be too obvious to require mention.

I am instead going to point out how the Internet can benefit the Product factor of marketing for any company. The ability to perform market research, consumer reviews, and feedback on the Product through the internet is unprecedented. There are many huge online companies that do nothing but market surveys, all for the sake of testing and improving the marketable Product.

Thousands of consumers freely speak about the products they use, the strengths and weaknesses, allowing for huge benefits to the Product factor of marketing.

Any company that is unable to find what product is in hottest demand, and what would be good improvements to existing products, simply isn't using the Internet. The P of Product is a massive consideration online, with all the extra information the consumer has available in product reviews and comparison.

Price in Internet Marketing

The effect of Internet Marketing in regards to Price has created the term "Internet Prices". The ability to do so much to manipulate the P of Place to have unbeatable overheads in supply and distribution, the far lower costs of online Promotion, and the increased profitability from superior Product have made that impact on Price in online marketing.

Of course, a lot of the Internet's impact on the Price factor in Marketing has been due to shaving profit margins for volume, and reduced overheads, rather than through increasing demand for more profitable products, so far.

Even outsourcing has barely begun to make the difference to Price it should, because as yet, most businesses are not making enough use of Place. Most companies outsource to a lower-quality producer, rather than moving their own quality control operations to the cheaper places to take fuller advantage.

To look at my own industry, it is very rare to see online marketers move to places where they can live like kings on half the costs, with no drop in quality of work, yet it should be an obvious development.

Instead, the majority of SEO companies who outsource are simply creating future competition that can cut them out as unnecessary middlemen once they've learned how to market the service, based on the demonstrable experience in delivering the product.

That said, plenty of smaller SEO companies and consultants have been able to reduce costs by discarding the traditional need for an office, much of their travel and delivery costs, etc. There are also a growing number of SEOs starting up in smaller towns and more rural or remote locations, using those reduced overheads to have greater control over Price.

Sadly, far too many still focus on undercutting competitors, producing bottom-dollar, lowest value product, rather than being more profitable without lowering the market value or producing better Product for the Price.

The ability to make larger profit margins while simultaneously reducing costs will make Price one of the easiest of low-hanging fruit to pluck for online marketing in future.

Promotion in Internet Marketing

Now, finally, we come to the area of marketing that many, even those involved in the field, think is all there is to online marketing: Promotion.

Promotion online covers a wide variety of activities, from Advertising through to Public Relations, and, as we have covered above, influences and is influenced by strategies of Place, Product and Price.

Promotion is often the most over-utilized part of the marketing mix. Many companies with poor understanding of modern marketing have already made their decisions about Place and Product long before even thinking about what there is actually the most lucrative market demand for, and where. Such companies rely on Promotion alone to plug all the other weaknesses in their marketing strategy.

There is no shadow of doubt that Promotion is far easier and more cost-effective when the rest of the marketing mix is right. Pushing the right Product at the right Price from the right Place is always the most efficient and joyful of Promotion activities. When any aspect of Product, Price or Place are simply not right, Promotion becomes an uphill struggle, and is far less efficient.

Weaknesses in Product or Price will stand out a mile, and much of the energy of Promotion will thus be going into damage control and cheap tricks. The nature of the web means that companies who've paid more attention to Place can outbid, (through higher margins), or undercut, (through lower costs), the companies without those advantages.

Despite this, with enough resources and money to throw into Promotions, it is not at all unknown for a weaker product to become the more successful.

One of the more interesting aspects of the Internet for marketing, and especially in regard to Promotion, is that so much more has become trackable and accountable. Companies can often track referrals that in the offline world would never have been noticed, for example. This in turn has created a huge upsurge in viral marketing awareness.

The ability to far more effectively measure and manage the performance of many promotions strategies has certainly, I feel, been a key contributing factor to the rise of online promotion, and the switching of large amounts of budget from offline to online promotion.

Internet Marketing is still Marketing

Hopefully, we can over time get away from the misconception that Internet Marketing is limited to promotions alone. This is still Marketing, and the Internet is merely the medium, and the reality, we have chosen to work with.

Further Resources:

The Cluetrain Manifesto

This book boldly announced how the connected market of the Internet was changing marketing forever. It is still recommended by me as fundamental reading for anyone who will be involved in online marketing.

Marketing 101 at Cre8asite

A multi-author treatise on Marketing well worth a read. The Cre8asite Forums are a free community resource where valuable advice is freely given on a daily basis.

How to Market a Copy Writing Service

A regular contributor at the Cre8asite Forums wants to market her copywriting services, and is soon guided that getting the right mix of product and price is the most powerful way to optimise promotion.