The 4Ps of marketing versus the 4Ps of content marketing

Here’s my favourite definition of marketing.

“Marketing is everything connected to the process of PROFITABILITY by offering the right product or service, to the right person, at the right time, in the right manner, through the right channels, at the right price.”

I picked this definition up during my MBA, and it stuck with me.

The definition is all encompassing.

It addresses the crux of marketing, which is predicated on the 4Ps.

The 4Ps of marketing are product, placement, promotion, and price.

Essentially, the 4Ps help guide your marketing strategy. For example, you wouldn’t sell a Rolex watch (product) in a vending machine (placement).

Doing so would be a bad strategic move.

The 4Ps are the pillars of marketing and they’ll continue to remain that way.

But in our current milieu where data and information reign supreme, we’re seeing greater use of content in marketing strategies.

Companies are taking up inbound marketing—that is, content marketing—to draw in leads rather than using outbound marketing, which consists of targeting customers through advertisements across various channels (radio, print, television, among others).
 
But did you know that content marketing has its own 4Ps?

These help with developing a solid content marketing strategy that, like all marketing endeavours, helps a company with profitability.

Let’s take a look at the 4Ps of content marketing.

Plan

You first have to get to the drawing table to develop a strategy. There’s several questions you want to ask yourself here: what is the end goal with the marketing content you’re creating? Who are you targeting with this content? What will this content look like? How is this content going to be digested by the audience? What are the key performance indicators you’ll use to measure content success? This could by SEO ranking, lead generation, brand awareness or any other metric that work to achieve your revenue targets.

Produce

Now for the part that’ll get your creative juices flowing: create content!

Whether that’s a podcast, a video or a blog post, the best content marketers excel at developing content that hooks audiences. It’s important to develop a tone, or voice, with the content you’re creating. If you’re working in the health-tech space, for example, your content will be slightly more formal than content produced in the fast-food industry. Understanding your audience will be key here.

Promote

At the promotion stage of your content marketing strategy, you’ll use channels that will reach your target audiences. You want to promote using social media channels where your target personas usually hang out. You can figure this out with a little bit of research during the planning phase.

If you’re targeting a c-suite audience, for example, LinkedIn may work as a great channel to promote your content. If your target audience is Gen Z, consider TikTok.

Perform

This is the final stage of your content marketing strategy. This is where you measure how well your content did based on metrics you developed back in the planning phase. It’s important to remember that content marketing is a long-term game.

A study from Hubspot found that companies with more than 400 published blog posts get twice the amount of traffic than those with less than 400 blog posts, according to neilpatel.com.

With content marketing, performance should be viewed with the long term in mind. By remaining consistent in your content production, and looking several months ahead, these 4Ps of content marketing will definitely help the profitability of your business.