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The 4 P’s of Marketing – Not Your Grandpa’s Version

DialogTech

The first day of Marketing 101 is almost guaranteed to cover the 4 P’s of marketing: product, place, price, and promotion. These are no doubt powerful, battle-tested tools in the marketer’s arsenal that have stood the test of time for generations. However, there are some key areas of marketing they fail to address. Here is an alternative view of the four P’s for today’s modern marketer:

People

It all starts with people. You absolutely must get the right people in the right seats to reach your goals. Does your team have both right brain and left brain skills? Do they have the ability to understand your products, competition and markets at a deep enough level to create real thought leadership content? Are they capable of leveraging data and technology to accelerate sales? Do you have the right organizational structure in place to take full advantage of these skill sets? The team itself is marketing’s top asset, and it requires constant care and attention.

Process

Speaking of grandpas, mine always said, “failing to plan is planning to fail.” At DialogTech, we produce quarterly plans for each of the core elements of our marketing strategy that tie back to the annual plans we put in place at the start of the year: thought leadership, media, demand gen, analytics, etc. We then take a page out of the agile software development playbook and use two-week sprints and daily scrums to work towards achieving these quarterly plans. This may not be the right approach for every business, but the point is it’s critical to have clearly defined goals and processes if you aim to create a well-oiled marketing machine.

Product

Not the one you sell, but the one your marketing team produces. Your output. Ask yourself the following questions as a basic litmus test to gauge the quality of your content:

Is it something you would want to read or engage with? It sounds simple, and it is. But in today’s world of distractions, to-do lists, and deadlines, it can be tempting to push something out the door for the sake of being done. Take an extra moment and make sure your content is great, not good. Otherwise it will just get lost in the noise instead of helping you grow your business.

Proof

If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it—and you can’t get credit for it either. This is no small task. The number of customer touchpoints across media sources and devices is exploding. More and more of the sales cycle is happening before customers engage with the sales organization. All of this makes tracking marketing’s impact on leads, revenue, and ROI challenging. Fortunately there are tools that can help. Business software review site G2Crowd is a great source for evaluating products such as marketing automation, CRM, call tracking, cross-channel advertising, web analytics and many others. What ultimately makes it into your marketing technology stack depends on the needs of your business, but there are platforms you can leverage to begin piecing together the puzzle.