The 4Ps: The Fundamentals of Marketing for Site Care Consultant

What is your dream job? This question often arises once in a while, especially in a group setting. 

My answer is always to be a writer for Professional Wrestling. Yup, I would love to write the storylines for professional wrestling. 

I am promotional by nature. I loved creating flyers when I was a kid for various reasons. I love to be a cheerleader for friends in business and entertainment. 

Dream jobs? What is yours?

Like a lot of you, I backed into digital marketing through WordPress. I started building websites using WordPress back when very few people could do that. It almost felt like a superpower, kind of like I was the local version of Homelander.

These days it seems there are tons of people who can push a button on a big hosting provider and install a WordPress theme and launch a site for someone. The barrier of entry has gotten lower.

The industry has definitely changed.

Decline in Attribution Marketing

Rand Fishkin’s most recent 5-Minute Whiteboard gives a rundown of why attribution marketing has suffered in recent years.

Issues include cookie changes by Apple and the Anti tracking & privacy laws, adoption of ad-blockers, zero click search and consumption, multi device journeys and apps, as well as missing referral data. 

Additionally, we have experienced a saturation of content on the internet, making it harder to gain attention, making content marketing tougher. These are all challenges we face in 2024 as marketers. 

All these issues, and there are more (see Rand above), have caused me to step back and see how I can be better. It started several years ago when I started learning copywriting. I have learned more about marketing from copywriting than in any other industry.

One thing we might be missing is failing to create brand awareness. We have relied on the power of SEO, Content Marketing and other hacks to get quick traction only to neglect building brand awareness.

All of that brings me back to Marketing 101, something you learned if you took a marketing class in college. I did not, so I have learned and really thought about this much more recently. 

The 4Ps of Marketing

Undoubtedly, you know about the 4 Ps of the marketing mix. You may have read about it in an article, learned about it on a podcast, or maybe you took a marketing class in college. 

In some sense, in this world, we are back to where we were before the advent of the internet. We have to balance our marketing efforts.

The marketing experts call them the 4Ps of Marketing or the “marketing mix.” 

The American Marketing Association explains:

“Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, or processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large. The four Ps of marketing is a marketing concept that summarizes the four key factors of any marketing strategy. The four Ps are: product, price, place, and promotion.” Source AMA

According to Coursera, the idea was first conceptualized by E. Jerome McCarthy, in a book called “Basic Marketing, A Managerial Approach.” So the 4Ps have been around a while.

Read 4 Ps of Marketing: What They Are & How to Use Them Successfully

Product

Product refers to your product or your service. There are many things to consider, such as the product marketing fit. 

Your product as a site care consultant is taking care of your WordPress websites, keeping them secure, running optimally, and helping the site generate business for your client. 

Price

Pricing is a strategy that people wrestle with all the time. The fact is, most of us here are probably charging too little for what we do.

Take at our past Site Care Consultant Surveys to see the average price of Site Care services. 

Place

Place is where we sell our product or service. Traditionally, it was all about location for brick and mortar stores and delivery. In the digital world, it is as much about where to find our target customers as the latter.

Place might be one of the most difficult parts of the marketing mix, especially if you are just getting started. Where are these unicorn customers who will fork over a decent amount of money to have me take care of their website? 

Promotion

Promotion is the distribution of your message. How do you get your message to the ones who want to buy your product and what distribution methods should you use?

Promotion is the area where digital marketers excel the most. We have abilities to use SEM, SEO, and content marketing to drive the message to potential buyers.

A new framework?

The 4 Ps of Marketing was introduced in the late 1960 by Harvard Business professor Jerome McCarthy. Is business and marketing the same? Of course not. Perhaps we use the 4Ps to remind us of some very important elements of business, a foundation, if you will.

Gregory Ciotti wrote a very good recap and recast of the idea on HelpScout’s blog in 2022.

He outlines some of the issues and criticisms of using the 4Ps. They are worth taking a look at. 

He counters with a framework proposed by Eduaro Conrado, Chief Marketing Officer for Motorola. The framework is called S.A.V.E.

S is for Solution instead of using Product.

A is for Access instead of using Place.

V is for Value instead of using Price.

E is for Education instead of using Promotion.

No doubt, the original 4Ps focused heavily on a product industry and we, as site care consultants, are in the service industry. We do, however, use tools like MainWP to help us service our customers. 

Place, in an era where many services are digital, can definitely be a problematic term. Our customers do not see our service, only the results of our service. That is one reason MainWP provides reporting options for its customers. I challenge you to add an email newsletter to that regularly communicating with your customers.

I am in full support of using value instead of price. In a product world, pricing comes down to the cost of labor, materials plus whatever profit you add. Service is more of a value, although we often use time to help calculate. It isn’t easy to put a price on experience and expertise.

We have adopted education over the past 15 years, choosing to create articles, webinars, office hours, eBook downloads, and other manner of education to help get our prospects to the buyer stage. In doing so, it helps us create awareness of our brand and service. But, without resources and expertise, it can be a daunting task. After all, site care consultants aren’t able to create a publishing arm of their business like HubSpot.

Wrapping it up

As with any topic, it is best to go back to the basics to learn foundations in order to apply to the present day.

The 4Ps have stood the test of time, although there is a need to reinterpret for a new age of business. We are continually learning. 

What are your thoughts about the 4Ps? Let us know in the MainWP Users Facebook Group.