Online Marketing Mix

We will go through the 7 P’s online marketing that

ultimately models and expects every aspect of a marketing
mix to be online and to apply digital technologies to create
a marketing mix for modern business.

A benefit of an online marketing mix in your business

model is that understanding every element of your
marketing process enables us to create better, highly
functioning, and profitable businesses online.

To create and execute a proper digital marketing strategy,

understanding how different elements of an online
marketing mix connect to your business is essential.
How do you use this information? Every business model
has different requirements; while others can benefit
directly from complete online methods, others require a
more mixed strategy to succeed.

In this article, we hope to give insight into how to build a

business model only through online methods. With a bit of
modification, you can utilise and implement it into your
business model as well, even if it’s not a 100% online
business.

First, we’ll go through what the traditional marketing mix

is. Then, we will go through each of the Ps individually
through the lens of online marketing to benefit an online
business model.
What Is A Marketing Mix
The marketing mix traditionally consists of four marketing
decisions to drive business goals into a specific target
market. These four marketing decisions are Product, Price,
Place, and Promotion (Also called the four P’s)

Since the inception of the marketing mix (coined by

McCarthy in the 1960 book Basic Marketing: A Managerial
Approach), the marketing mix has grown to include more
core marketing decisions to make it a better tool for
business.
The extended marketing mix, also called the 7Ps (Booms
and Bitner, 1981), includes the original four with people,
process, and physical evidence. The 8 P’s means adding
performance as a core decision too. The extended
marketing mix is more suitable for services marketing,
therefore, for online services as well.

In the 1990s a set of more customer-driven marketing

decision, shorten as the C’s were added to enhance the
overall marketing mix: consumer, cost, convenience,
communication (by Lauterborn), or commodity, cost,
channel, communication (by Shimizu)

Using the marketing mix as a framework for business and

marketing decisions creates appropriate strategies that
are:

 Effective
 Develops business’s strengths while minimizing
weaknesses
 Improves competitiveness in the marketplace
 Flexibility and innovation of a business
 Improve team collaboration
we explore the 7 P’s through the opportunities that online
marketing presents.

Product
In an online marketing mix, the product has to be 100%
online, meaning the product has no physical features. For
example, selling traditional products in an online store
won’t be good enough.

We have to look at the online product as something

scalable in nature, which processes all revolve around
being online, such as:

 The creation and management of the product

  The pricing of the product
 Distribution of the product
You have achieved a genuinely scalable online product if
every step is online.

When creating an online product in an online marketing

mix, we need to think about all the aspects that surround
the product itself. Let’s think about the subject through
questions that potentially helps us deliver a better online
product.

 What is the online brand of the created product?

 Does the online product have a product line or a set
of products in a range?
 What are the extra services related to the product?
 How would the end cycle of the online product look?
Is it upgradeable, or is it update-based, for example?
 What are the guarantees of the said online product?
 How do you design your online delivery?
 How to design an online product?
 What features to include?
 The quality of the online product?
By answering all the questions above, you’re closer to
producing a high-quality online product to modify your
business model.

Online product Ideas

When looking at what types of online product ideas we
could include in the product section of our marketing mix.
There are a couple of choices we can explore.

A prominent place to start is producing software with online

distribution. Then there are product ideas that revolve
around content: such as building downloadables (eBook,
online courses) or creating high-quality content that
functions as the product itself like a set of articles and
blogs.

Digitalization of services also enables them to some extent

being an entirely online experience for your customers, for
example, online consulting services. At the same time,
while distribution is online, it still would require the physical
presence of the personnel as of now, making scale harder
to achieve.

One way of innovating new online products and business

models is by redefining existing physical products into a
digital space. For instance, music and video streaming
changed from a physical experience into a completely
digital product.

When transforming into new online products, the

combination of the decisions in the online marketing mix
helps you develop for better outcomes. A critical defining
factor of your online products would be its place of
distribution or a pricing strategy.

Price
Price in an online marketing mix refers to the cost of a
product your customer will pay. In the price, we need to
include secondary factors, for example, what is the
customer’s perceived value of an online product and
consider how much time it takes for a customer to acquire
a product.

Including customers and time spent on acquiring your

products in the pricing strategy helps you develop more
accurate pricing for your products. We associate online
products with being instant in the acquisition, but in most
cases, there are multiple steps involved for the customer.

For example:

 Pre-registration and registration

 Onboarding
 Checkout and purchase process length
 Download times
A long acquisition time increases the cost for the
customers, which leads to a loss of sales.
Pricing online products the right way is the method of
increasing revenues with scale. Inefficient pricing
strategies will, in the end, become the end of the product.
As with more scale, the smaller issues scale too.

An excellent pricing strategy includes the use of discounts,

payment terms, and has opportunities for allowances.

Pricing Strategies of Online

Marketing
If we look at the price with three typical pricing strategies
like:

 The SaaS (Software as a Service, model, where a

subscription gives access to an online product)
 Single purchase model (One price for one product
for a one-time purchase)
 The free model (The product itself is free, and the
monetization is through other means) both have
their pros and cons to consider in your pricing
strategy.
A subscription model for an online product is beneficial if
the product itself is not static, meaning it has updates,
levels of complexity of using it, or its upgradeability.

A one-time purchase is beneficial for finished products.

When using a one-time purchase pricing strategy, you will
have to include that even a finished product requires levels
of customer support and onboarding.

A free model is beneficial when the product offers a precise

problem-solving capability as free products that don’t have
real purposes won’t work. The most common way of
monetizing free products is through advertising.

Place
Place in the online marketing mix means where and how
you provide your customers access to your products. In
online marketing, there are many options for you to sell on
a wide range of platforms and methods.

The best place for your customer comes down to what is

the best place to reach and is convenient for your target
audience. If we look strictly at online products, what
solutions for selling you have? Many such as:

 Social media platforms (Either by selling directly

(Facebook Shop) or by referring traffic to another
owned channel)
 Dedicated online store (Shopify,
WooCommerce), landing pages with purchase
features.
 Online marketplaces (Amazon, eBay, Etsy, other
niche marketplaces)
The goal of a place in the online marketing mix is to
consider the convenience factors for your customers.
Enabling the most convenient places for your customers to
access your online products is crucial for the overall
experience.

Your target audience should guide your decisions on your

places, and the product’s online distribution comes down to
what is the best distribution model within your chosen
place.

When deciding place opportunities in your online marketing

mix, the need for figuring out how much market coverage
you’re able to reach within that place.

For example, marketplaces (like Amazon or eBay) have

more initial coverage due to organic views, although
lacking control otherwise. An online store can potentially
have broader coverage if there’s a budget available for
reaching your audience.

All in all, an owned channel (website, online store) will

come necessary for every online business, and the need to
expand for other platforms increases the more global your
reach and how targeted audiences are.

Promotion
Promotion in the online marketing mix is using online
marketing communication tools to reach your target
audiences. Promotion includes using online advertising,
public relations, direct communication, and sales
promotions to reach and influence an audience.

Online marketing offers many effective strategies to

choose from to include in your marketing mix. Every
business and its online products require different
approaches when reaching their customers.

Some methods revolve around directly advertising on a

variety of platforms, while other strategies revolve around
building authority with the content or gaining a following
on social media.
You can’t invest in every channel out there, just because it
exists, the need to understand your audience first is crucial
for producing and executing an effective marketing
strategy online.

Are you restricted by budget, time, locations, technology,

or something else, every business can find and utilize
effective methods of online marketing to boost their
results.

Your initial marketing strategy will have to include your

restrictions to avoid plans that you can’t implement
properly.

For example, investing in website content to boost your

search engine positions takes time, when your business
requires revenue today, the strategy won’t help you keep
on the lights.

An excellent online marketing strategy includes your

business goals with practical methods of gaining them.
Innovation in your marketing decisions is essential for
keeping growth achievable.
If we look again at the example of search engine positions,
while not increasing your business today, it will in the
future, by combining it into your online advertising flow is
beneficial in the long run.

Methods Of Online Marketing

Promotion For Consideration:
 Search Engine Marketing (Google, Bing)
 Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
 Content Marketing
 Online PR
 Social Media Advertising
 Youtube
 Pinterest
 LinkedIn
 Facebook
 Email Marketing
 Partnerships
 Learn more marketing channels
The benefits of online marketing are the ability to track the
results used strategies in real-time with the use of web
analytics. Web analytics in online marketing allows for
constant optimization of strategy.
Online marketing develops fast, and new ideas on how to
improve your tactics arise often, and improved methods of
collecting data helps you find new opportunities all the
time.

In promotion, it’s essential to have clear strategies on how

your brand and its messaging display across platforms. A
wide range of platforms can lead to ununified experiences
for the customers, and that leads to worsened brand
awareness.
Controlling your brand and its communication in online
marketing promotion is essential.
People
People are crucial in making a marketing decision in the
online marketing mix. Great products and businesses
require people who are involved in online distribution and
personnel who are in direct contact with customers.

To accurately answer the question of people in your

marketing mix, measure and evaluate the interactions
between a business and its customers and the interactions
between personnel and customers.

In the end, it’s the people involved in the company that

represents the values of a brand.

How we do, customer service is vital in an online setting

when interactions are not physical. Designing better
customer support systems where your customers and your
employees can interact with each other seamlessly and
scalably, enables us to produce a more consistent
experience for both.

There are many options and combinations of online support

you can introduce into your business workflow. For
example, at the most basic, you can integrate social media
as a channel for customer support or utilize online reviews
(like Google My Business) as well.
Depending on the place in your marketing mix, you need to
get the most appropriate way of support that functions
effectively in that place. For example, an online store or
online consulting firm can use chat software to connect
support personnel with customers directly on the website.

How we plan our responses and our strategy of keeping our

customers happy at all times is a critical marketing
decision that, when unanswered will seriously harm any
business when they reach a critical mass.

Process
The process as a marketing decision in the online
marketing mix defines the needed procedures and its
optimisation of delivering online products and the core
experiences it. What tasks are necessary for a product to
provide its core experience for its users?

Process optimisation relies on collected data and

measuring the data with key performance indicators (KPIs)
in mind. To have an optimised process, a constant need for
tracking the success of your operations in your marketing
mix is essential.

The better the process we have in place, the more ready

we are at scale, and documenting every step we take
increases our chances of understanding the health of a
business through the online marketing perspective.

Tracking processes and the overall system's performance

enables us to find critical errors at best before they happen
or, at the very least, find them very early before any
significant failures have occurred.

Contextualising online marketing processes in everything

we do in our strategies helps us understand the core
principles that make our approach viable at any given time.

Physical Evidence (Online

Evidence)
In the extended marketing mix, physical evidence refers to
the different elements of service experience, such as
facilities, interior designs, livery, and post-purchase
artefacts (souvenirs).

In an online setting, these pieces of evidence will not have

a physical element. However, digitalising this physical
evidence is still possible and a critical marketing decision.

Online brand awareness across multiple channels is an

excellent example of online evidence. How well these
channels expand service experiences, for instance, through
the number of followers, likes, and other social
engagement metrics.

A website’s design is essential online evidence as, in most

cases, it’s the most important channel for an online
business. The elements of your website’s design crucially
impact the non-human service experiences your customers
will face when interacting with your online business.

A controlled and complete multi-channel online experience

enables us to enhance our online evidence to significantly
improve our marketing decisions.

Conclusion
Including the model of the 7 P’s of online marketing into a
company’s marketing decision flow will develop a better
marketing strategy for your business.

The benefits of marketing decisions around product, price,

place, promotion, people, process, and physical evidence
are vast. Businesses that understand how to connect all
the pieces can improve their competitiveness in the
marketplace through marketing.

While the article centres around using an online marketing

mix with only online methods, the reality is that many
companies are a combination of physical and online. The
goal here is to, through an extreme example, showcase the
opportunity that online marketing can have on modern
business.

Showing what is possible enables us to think about our

businesses in a different light to maximize their potential
performance.