If you were to sit in a college course about 10 years ago to learn about marketing – your professor would have you crack open a text book to review the Four Ps of marketing; Price, Product, Place and Promotion.
Over the next few months in that college course you would dive into each in attempts to understand how to form your product, how to price it, where to place it in the marketplace and what promotions to run to increase sales.
Unfortunately in our highly interconnected society and economy, the 4 P’s only scratch the surface of what you need to consider in your marketing efforts.
The entire fabric of the marketing landscape has changed drastically due to the impact the Internet has had upon our society. We have fundamentally shifted how we connect with others, how we seek out information and how we make purchases.
This new era has forced marketers to adapt to find new and more effective ways to connect with consumers.
If we were to place a name upon this new period it would be the rise of the consumer. The rise of the consumer has placed a vested power in the hands of those making the purchases unparalleled to anything before in history.
We live in a very noisy world. In this world, all of us are constantly bombarded by various messages from the second we wake up to the second we go to sleep at night.
Consider how many things are fighting to get our attention at every waking moment of our day. There is Facebook, Instagram, ads on Pandora, ads that come up before we watch a video on YouTube, TV commercials, radio spots, magazine ads, posters, billboards on the side of the road, bumper stickers, ads painted to the sides of buildings, e-mail, spam e-mail, SMS alerts, movie trailers; the list goes on and on and on.
And what is the result of all of this noise? We literally start to ignore and tune everything out. Our society has and is facing what we call an attention crash. We no longer care to pay attention to most things. Consider how many things noise has killed before they could blossom, innumerable ideas, products, services and non-profit campaigns.
So how is a brand to effectively stand out and market in this new era?
Set the 4 Ps aside and focus on one C… Content.
Content marketing has been the primary tool our clients, as well as countless other entrepreneurs, have been using to grow their brands.
It is about having authentic content that you offer to your audience that educates, inspires or entertains them. It has to be seen as valuable. Content is the new currency in the digital marketing landscape.
This trend to have content as the cornerstone of a marketing strategy will only continue to get stronger, especially as younger generations become more and more savvy at avoiding being marketed towards.
Content marketing is a focus on having consumers find you instead of you always having to find them.
Focus on creating great value-driven content for your audience. That is your new marketing plan.
James Patrick
IG @jpatrickphoto
jamespatrick.com
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