The four Ps of advertising. Marketing mix. Marketing foundations. Call them what you will, but these factors influence your chances of success in the high-stakes game of e-commerce:
- Product
- Price
- Place
- Promotion
If you do them well, you’ll build a devoted following that you can rely on for high lifetime value, repeat business, and customer advocacy.
If you ignore or underestimate them, your entire process will be derailed, sales and margin will suffer, and competitors will be able to pass you by.
Here’s how each of these ideas should be taken into account when thinking about sponsored media and e-commerce.
Product
Like any other business, the success of your e-commerce depends on your goods. A flawed product or a poor fit between the product and the market cannot be made up for by the best marketing initiatives. Take companies that, over the course of a year, switch between a number of advertising agencies.
They probably tend to point the finger at inadequate planning, shoddy campaign execution, or some other weakness shared by all those organizations. The most likely explanation is that customers aren’t drawn to their product.
It is highly improbable from a statistical perspective that a brand will work with several agencies and that each one will perform poorly. In most cases, the agency evaluation process needs improvement when this occurs.
Product-market fit is a topic that marketers frequently discuss for a reason.
Core components that function like gears in a complex system are a product that solves a problem and marketing that gets it in front of the right people.
Remove one, and everything will come to a complete stop.
Pricing
E-commerce and paid media in general are so dependent on pricing.
If you believe that individuals who view your advertisement aren’t also looking up rival businesses and comparing prices, your performance statistics will prove you wrong.
Therefore, your merchandising play needs to be as precise as possible before you start chasing clicks or even setting budgets.
In order to ensure that your product is profitable in relation to your production and procurement processes, take into account both absolute pricing and competitiveness.
A feature for price benchmarks is available in Google Merchant Center. It analyzes the products in your feed to provide you with a comparison of your products with those of similar brands, products, and categories.
Whether you’ve priced your products right or even if they fit the market, you can use this very helpful data.
Experiencing that you overshot or undershot your margin is the last thing you want to happen after spending thousands on advertisements.
Moreover, you may view the companies that are competing with you in Search and Shopping auctions using Google AdWords auction insights once your campaign has begun.
Compare your prices to theirs using this data, make necessary adjustments, and launch strategic marketing campaigns.
Place
Although launching an e-commerce company is difficult, digital advertising enables companies to get around the constraints of traditional distribution for those who can secure funding and establish product-market fit.
When you can sell to customers directly, geography and the ability to work with specific distributors become meaningless.
But this also brings with it a number of fresh difficulties:
Platform management: When it comes to choosing where to advertise, e-commerce marketers have a lot of possibilities. This covers both new and niche platforms like TikTok and YouTube as well as established networks like Google, Meta, and Amazon. But it’s better to avoid overextending yourself before you’re ready or picking the wrong platforms.
Media mix: Although some organizations are inclined to allocate the majority of their spending to a primary platform, advertising across numerous channels can be beneficial provided you have the resources and know-how to do so. However, if you start off doing all of this, you won’t have as much money to spend on marketing, which will spread your efforts too thin and reduce the amount of data you can collect. To get the most out of your investment, you’ll also need additional personnel or organizations with experience in handling those many channels.
Performance measurement: This was more non-linear in advertising and in-store promotions, and brick-and-mortar commerce was very simple. Our desire to keep track of every dollar spent, every product sold, and every performance statistic has increased due to online advertising. However, as ad networks get more automated, they become more susceptible to error and fluctuation, and even excellent conversion tracking is never flawless.
Attribution measurement: To ensure that your investments are going where they should be, you need to know which platforms are generating the most sales. This becomes more difficult if your media mix consists of several platforms, none of which fully and openly share data with other platforms. Because of privacy problems, attribution will only get worse over time as tracking capabilities deteriorate. Although you should still give credit for this imperfection, view it more as a point of reference than as a reliable source of information.
Promotion
A good product can make marketing more effective, simpler, and less expensive, but excellent marketing cannot remedy a bad product.
Two factors need to be taken into account for e-commerce that primarily depends on paid media for promotion:
- Account management
The ad account is the third gear in paid media that assists with marketing and product.
Your income and margin will be impacted by decisions about which campaign types to run, how to set up your advertising account, how to run effective ad copy and creatives, and how to use audiences and first-party data to target the proper people.
Too many times, organizations make the mistake of putting their product, pricing, placements, and customer journey last in favor of improving their ad accounts and campaign data.
If you follow that proper sequence, the majority of your ad account difficulties should be related to ad platform problems, such as automation and disapprovals.
- Client journey
In my opinion, advertisements are really one element of a larger marketing strategy, like one ingredient in a tasty dish.
To succeed, you must have all the components, and no hook or campaign can help you if you’re ignoring everything that occurs both before and after the ad click.
Approximately $2.2 trillion worth of e-commerce was conducted in 2023 primarily through mobile devices. You may not be converting visitors to customers as much as you could if your pages are difficult for them to access on smartphones. Have you optimized your pages for mobile? How fast do they load? Do they provide positive checkout, cross-selling, upselling, and other experiences? Fix this if it’s not working.
Reviews provide a strong case for your credibility, which is an important factor to overcome in any sales pitch. Not only may certifications and ratings demonstrate the worth of your goods, but reviews also help to reassure customers. So that customers believe that others just like them have profited from your goods, your social proof should represent your target market.
Due to the increase in fraud and scams, online buyers are becoming more cautious while providing their payment information. If you want their money, you’ll need to demonstrate your credibility. Verification of security and third-party payment logos (such as PayPal and Apple Pay) are important indicators that your company is legitimate and has good intentions.
The trip doesn’t end when the advertisement clicks; it starts much earlier. Prospective buyers are more likely to feel the same way when they see others using your product and are positioned as the hero in user-generated content. Email marketing can handle abandoned carts, let customers know how their orders are being shipped, and generally improve the experience.
Are the challenges you creatively solve mentioned in your advertisement copy? As an alternative to characteristics like “x milligrams of caffeine”, you may concentrate on results like “the energy burst you need to be productive until late afternoon”. Encourage customers to visualize their lives after purchasing your product by using your imagination.
A complete funnel is necessary for the future of e-commerce
Although it might be glamorous and financially rewarding, e-commerce is not simple.
The days of starting a direct-to-consumer brand with little fuss and expense are long gone thanks to frictionless global supply chains and low-cost manufacturing.
Ad platforms are getting more automated, which means that less campaign management is needed. As a result, in order for companies to remain profitable, they must pay closer attention to the pre- and post-click experiences.
Shopify is the only aspect that is becoming simpler!
It’s critical to shift your perspective from viewing paid media as the total package to seeing it as a single component of a larger marketing plan.
(Tashia Bernardus)