It’s likely that you think of marketing as selling and promoting. In fact, these activities are part of marketing. But the real goal of marketing is to have a product or service that sells itself. For example, no one really needs to sell YouTube; users just flock to the site for the service it offers. At its highest level, a good marketing campaign understands the markets and the potential buyers so well that the offering can be positioned in such a way that it sells itself.
You may be saying to yourself, “Why should I care about this stuff? I’m just trying to draw traffic to a website.”
While classic marketing theory predates the Web, and much of it is, in any case, common sense, the more marketing principles you understand and use, the more likely you are to succeed in marketing your website.
The essential concepts in the theory of marketing are often remembered using the mnemonic “5Ps”:
The product, or offering, is the thing or service that is being marketed. The product is not always what meets the eye. For example, a popular music group that sells CDs may actually be using the recordings as a promotional tool for live concerts, which is where the group really makes money. In a similar fashion, there are many websites where the real money-making offering is cloaked in content intended to draw traffic.
The price is the amount that is charged for the product or service. Price bears an intriguing relationship to positioning because a high price often denotes value. You’ve surely heard the phrase, “You get what you pay for.” It’s often (although not always) true—and leads purchasers to assume that low-priced goods or services are inferior (as well as the converse).
On the Web, a pricing problem for content owners is the ideological position (and belief of many consumers) that “content wants to be free.” The usual end-run around this entrenched position is to take advantage of the belief of many that there is no cost to viewing advertisements. Affiliate programs (Chapter 5), hosted advertising (Chapter 6), and the Google AdSense program (Part II) are the primary mechanism for monetizing web traffic with advertising.
The place refers to the distribution channels that the product will go through to reach the consumer. In the physical world, placing and distributing products can involve complex issues of warehousing, financing, and negotiating price. From the viewpoint of a web content provider, issues of place fundamentally come down to the strategies employed to draw traffic. The two leading strategies are Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Search Engine Optimization (SEO), explained later in this chapter.
Promotion means the methods used to raise awareness about the product with the target market.
Positioning is understanding how to place the product in the mind of the purchaser, and how that placement relates to the structure of the marketplace.