Dave ChaffeyMarketers are familiar with the Marketing Mix of the 4Ps or 7Ps, which provides a great framework for reviewing tactics to offer products and services to a company. It’s a universal framework which can be usefully applied to businesses of all sizes. As explained in our free Smart Insights guide to marketing models, it was developed by Jerome McCarthy in 1960, but can still be used as a simple review of strategic marketing options.
The advent of the Internet and digital marketing offers new opportunities to ‘re-mix’ the mix as part of E-marketing strategy development which is known as the ‘E-marketing mix’.
This visual from my book Digital Marketing: Strategy, Implementation and Practice summarises the options:
In summary, digital marketing affects all aspects of the traditional and services marketing mix including:
- Product – looking at opportunities for modifying the core or extended product for digital environments. For example, offering digital products.
- Price – focusing on the implications for setting prices in digital markets; new pricing models and strategies including online discounts.
- Place – considering the implications for distribution for digital marketing. For example affiliate or co-marketing.
- Promotion – exploring inbound marketing techniques such as search, email and social media marketing.
- People, process and physical evidence – the extended mix of improving customer service via Livechat and online knowledge bases.
In this explainer, we see how the six main digital media channels used for Promotion can be broken down further by paid owned and earned media.
