Omniture Articles

EMarketers: The Six P's

Practically the first things students learn in Marketing 101 are the four major areas a marketer must control in order to meet consumers' needs and influence buying decisions: Product, Placement, Pricing, and Promotion. These, we are told, make up the most important elements of marketing.

For the sake of online selling, we'd like to add two more essential "P's" to the marketing mix: Privacy and Process.

Remember, the original Four P's are not something a marketer should simply think about. They are things a marketer actually needs to control. Lose control of those, and the ability to effectively market a product goes down the drain.

We believe the same principal applies to Privacy and Process:

Privacy

As marketers, we're all beginning to understand the extent to which people worry about privacy. With increasing press about identity theft, the cookie confusion (is it a privacy issue or not?), and spyware issues, it's no wonder consumers are concerned. In fact, it's such a hot-button issue that marketers need to face it head-on.

Slapping a privacy statement link on the site is no longer enough. Only when marketers can actually control and test the effectiveness of elements such as the placement and wording of the privacy policy (i.e.: businesslike legalese vs. reassuring informal tone), third-party endorsements ("BizRate.com customer certified" or "VeriSign secured"), press releases about steps taken to ensure better privacy, and more, can they be certain visitors will bestow their trust on the company.

Process

This is perhaps the single most important element in online marketing today. Here's why:

You've got a Product, you've worked hard to Price it correctly, you've Placed it in the perfect market, and are running a Promotion to drive traffic online. However, once traffic reaches the appropriate page featuring your product, your involvement comes to an end.

In other words, marketing often comes to a screeching halt when a visitor gets to a site. The four P's have driven him there; now the "site" takes over.

This is bad news for marketers. Offline, a Promotion continues straight through to the sale. Online, this rarely happens.

That's because the process by which a website is run involves two separate kingdoms: the "site people" (who typically focus on usability, merchandising, brand issues, analytics, etc.), and the marketers (who typically focus on driving people to the site). Marketers have a vested interest in what goes into the pages, but little or no control over making it happen.

When you consider that Web content is the means by which a message reaches consumers, it doesn't make sense that marketers have little control of that content. They're creating the campaigns, feeding different messages to different groups of consumers, and they need the ability to reinforce the message all the way through to the sale.

Only when marketers can truly control their online campaigns from start to finish -- that is, through every page until the sale is closed -- will ROI begin to rise and search begin to resemble the king of the realm it once was.