The 4 Ps of marketing. Marketing mix. Marketing fundamentals.
Whatever you call them, these elements determine your luck at the high-stakes table of e-commerce:
Product.
Price.
Place.
Promotion.
Get these right, and you’ll create a loyal fanbase that you can count on for repeat orders, high lifetime value, and customer advocacy.
Neglect or miscalculate them, and they’ll derail your entire process, have an adverse effect on revenue and margin, and allow competitors to overtake you.
Here’s how to consider each of these principles in the context of ecommerce and paid media.
Product
As in every business, your product is fundamental to ecommerce success. Even the most amazing marketing campaigns can’t compensate for a broken product or lack of product-market fit.
Think of brands that cycle through many advertising agencies over the course of a year.
Chances are they tend to blame poor planning, subpar campaign execution, or some other deficiency common to all those agencies. The most likely solution is that their product just doesn’t resonate with consumers.
Statistically, it’s extremely unlikely for a brand to go through multiple agencies and for all of them to be poor at their craft. When this does happen, it’s usually the agency evaluation process that needs work.
There’s a reason marketers talk about product-market fit over and over.
A product that solves a problem and marketing that puts it in front of the right people are core fundamentals and work like gears in a complex system. Take one out, and the whole process will grind to a halt.
Pricing
Pricing is such an intrinsic part of ecommerce and paid media in general.
If you think people who see your ad aren’t also searching for competitors and doing comparison shopping, your performance numbers will confirm otherwise.
So before you start chasing clicks or even setting budgets, your merchandising play needs to be as accurate as possible.
Consider both absolute pricing and competitiveness to make sure that your product is positioned where you want it to be while still capable of being profitable against your manufacturing and procurement processes.
Google Merchant Center has a price benchmarks feature. It looks at your product feed and shows you how your products compare to other products, brands, and categories of similar natures.
This is highly useful data that can help determine if you’ve priced your products correctly or whether they even fit in the market.
The last thing you want to do is spend thousands on ads only to realize that you got too ambitious or too conservative with your margin.
Additionally, once you’ve started running a campaign in Google Ads, auction insights allow you to see which brands are coming up against you in Search and Shopping auctions.
Use this data to see how your pricing compares to theirs, fine-tune accordingly, and run tactical promotions.