Most people think of “marketing” as “sending fancy fliers in the mail or making banners for trade shows.” But that’s “Marcom,” or “marketing communications.” Real marketing is the art of building the right product for the right audience and getting them to buy it.
First, you need to think about who might want to buy a particular product; this means you need to think like your customer, and it also means that you need to either a) make changes to your product until it matches their needs, or b) find a different set of customers who do need your product in its current form, or c) do a little of both.
Then it gets harder. This set of customers can be thought of as the wide end of a funnel, your “sales funnel”. Of your entire target audience, who is going to agree with your assessment that they need it? The funnel gets narrower. Of those, how many of them are going to be aware that your product exists? Narrower still. Of those, who are going to be in the right place, at the right time, credit card in hand, with the ability to make a purchase? Getting really narrow now. Finally, who is going to look at how much it costs, decide that it’s a good idea, and fork over the cash?
That’s where you need to get to.
Funnels can be all different shapes and sizes. If you advertise during the Super Bowl, your funnel is going to start by being really, really wide. And if your product happens to be sold at grocery stores around the country for about a buck, your funnel may just look more like a tunnel.
Now suppose your product is a bed and breakfast you run in a small town in Massachusetts. Not much point in that Super Bowl ad; most people who see it aren’t going to need or want your product. Maybe your funnel is a lot narrower. Now your problem is different: how do you get people who vacation in Massachusetts to know about your B&B, how do you figure out the sorts of things they want to see in their vacation property, and how do you set a price for a weekend stay that matches their expectations? That’s a thin funnel indeed.
This is where the concept of “levers” comes in. If literally everybody in the world can use your product, you need to figure out a way to let them know it exists. If only a few can use it, you need to figure out how to get the message to those specific people. Maybe they know about it, but can’t buy it–like running an ad for a New Jersey restaurant in Maine. Maybe they can buy it, but it’s too expensive. All these levers can be adjusted.
Levers have costs. Getting a really wide funnel (broad advertising) or a really narrow funnel (targeted advertising) are both expensive. Figuring out what price people are willing to pay means doing market research, or setting multiple prices at different places, or both. You might discover that your amazing product isn’t amazing to anybody but you and have to radically change it, or dump it altogether.
Those are the 4 Ps of Marketing: Product, Promotion, Place, and Price.