What is the difference and does it matter?!

Before Digital marketing became the de-facto term, I've been asked this question a lot across the years... does the difference in scope between these terms matter? So, as we enter 2023, I thought it was time for another quick look. Here is the latest comparison from Google Trends between 2004 and present Does the difference in these terms and their definitions matter? No, of course not, it's semantics! But it is interesting to see how the scope of Internet marketing vs Digital marketing has changed over time. In my books, when discussing alternative definitions, I explain that, no it doesn't really matter, but the scope and responsibility is important to make the most of managing the opportunities. So the scope of digital marketing activities should be agreed within a business and/or between a company and its agencies. The…

Chart of the Day: How OTAs reach online vacation buyers?

With the rise of online price comparison sites and review sites now offering hotels and flights for purchase, the competition for the ecommerce travel industry has never been so fierce. So what are the top channels for reaching online vacation buyers? Well, new research by Global Web Index shows that there is no one dominant channel that vacation buyers use to research and discover brands online. Therefore a holistic marketing mix of different channels is necessary to reach potential customers at different touch points of the research stage. 46% of respondents stated they discover brands via search engines, this yet only 34% discover vacations via brand/product websites. This shows that your keyword strategy needs to be based on user search queries "cheapest holidays to France" "best places to visit in Australia", rather than branded keywords, in order to rank your site and persuade them to buy.…

How the 4Ps still work for product marketing

This article focuses in on the 4Ps, which are the core of the Marketing mix, applied to the product launch. Read our article on the 7Ps of the Marketing mix, if you want to explore the full 7Ps, which also includes customer service. [si_guide_block id="100244" title="Download Premium Resource – Product launch Playbook" description="Launch a product using RACE planning to structure your marketing activities. A marketing playbook defines the key messages, types of communications, best practices and optimisation techniques that should be used to maximise return-on-investment for different marketing objectives."/] Some have said that ‘the Internet and digital marketing change everything’, but the marketing mix – widely referred to as the 4Ps of Product, Price, Place and Promotion – was originally proposed by Jerome McCarthy in 1960 as explained in the Smart Insights free guide to Marketing models and frameworks and is still used…

Creating Pricing Strategies for Different Objectives

How much does it cost? This is one of the first questions that customers have when they see something they like, whether 'on the high street' or in an e-commerce store. That is why if there is a key decision a business has to make, it is pricing strategy. Price will define a great proportion of your attractiveness in the eyes of the customers, your revenue, and eventually your profits.

As with other marketing areas, pricing strategies have developed considerably lately. In this article we are going to give you an overview about them and in addition, some valuable insights for applying them to accomplish your objectives.

What to think about when making pricing decisions?

As an essential marketing decision, pricing affects…

A new whitepaper proposes the Customer Mix as a replacement for the 7 P's marketing mix

Global eCommerce and Multichannel consultancy, Practicology have released a new paper for 2016 putting forward their case that the classic 7 P’s marketing mix needs a fundamental overhaul and in its place, the Customer Mix, or the 6 W’s, should be welcomed which is a more fit for a modern marketing, customer-centric framework. You can download the paper here (no registration required). Let us know your views. Do you think the time is ripe for change, or does the 7Ps still have it's place. Source: Practicology The traditional marketing mix framework was created in the 1960’s, a bygone era when organisations held the power based on the size of the marketing spend and how they controlled the limited range of…

SMS is not just for promotion. Have you fully considered the possibilities of text marketing to grow your business?

What is the Marketing Mix?

For those unfamiliar with the 7Ps of the marketing mix, imagine your business represented in the form of a cake – yummy. All businesses will have different ingredients that make up their cake Some cakes (businesses) will be different sizes. The marketing mix studies 7 ingredients to your business: product, price, promotion, place, process, people and physical evidence, assessing how each of them perform. Despite primarily being a communications tool, SMS can add value in all areas of the marketing mix. This post illustrates how SMS can be used to make your cake taste better and make customers want more of it!

7 ingredients for SMS

1. Product/Service

SMS is a great way of adding a personal touch to your product or service;…

Boo hoo: “ Learning from the largest European dot-com failure

This in-depth case study of Boo.com features in the last few editions of my book Digital marketing: Strategy, Implementation and Practice  - it's based is based on story of Boo.com failure from the excellent book "Boo Hoo - a dotcom story" "Unless we raise $20 million by midnight, boo.com is dead" So said boo.com CEO Ernst Malmsten, on May 18th 2000. Half the investment was raised, but this was too little, too late, and at midnight, less than a year after its launch, Boo.com closed. The headlines in the Financial Times, the next day read: "Boo.com collapses as Investors refuse funds; Online Sports retailer becomes Europe's first big Internet casualty". The boo.com case remains a valuable case study for all types of businesses, since it doesn't only illustrate the challenges of managing E-commerce for a clothes retailer, but rather highlights failings in E-commerce strategy and management…

How price, type size, position on page and the colour of prices can all impact on whether people click the buy now button

The ultimate goal of marketing, of course, is to get people to buy. That means, that in an online context, actions that marketers can take to influence the pressing of a “buy now” button are desirable. 

But how often do we focus on what seem like trivial things, such as the size of the type used to show the price? Psychological research shows some interesting factors about the way prices are displayed. Get the display of prices right on a web page and you can affect the chances of that “buy now” button being pressed.

There are several factors which I shall cover in this article:

Should prices end in an odd numbered digit?It is not the last…

Out with the Old, In with the…Old.  Why Dynamic pricing is even more relevant today

Dynamic pricing is a price-setting approach relying on data analysis and flexibility. It allows to shape and control price changes on the fly, depending on customer’s previous interactions with the website and his general profile. Items like past searches and purchases, location, time and date of previous searches and purchases are taken into account to generate a personalised offer. Dynamic pricing has been around for nearly 15 years when retailers like Amazon started testing this. So, this isn’t a new practice but each year that technology advances, so does the way we use dynamic pricing. As a business owner, the opportunities for delivering more relevant propositions has improved. From search history to previous purchases, customer location to general tastes, it allows a business owner to personalise its offer on a user…

How to apply the marketing mix to develop online marketing strategies

We often hear that the concept of the marketing mix isn’t so useful any longer in this era of customer-first. But I believe it is still highly relevant today as a framework to develop digital marketing strategies. In this post I’ll take a look at situations where I have found it useful to develop and refine customer propositions.

Why the online marketing mix still matters

The marketing mix is a conceptual framework, and as such it is useful since it enables a common language to be used in the planning, execution and measurement of a number of coordinated activities that deliver the desired marketing outcomes. Customer centricity demands that organisations becomes a lot better at collecting and reacting to customer insight and adapt their offering to best suit an ever growing number of narrowing customer segments – ever approaching the ideal of…