The “4 P’s of Marketing” – Part 4

Tweet

So far we’ve covered defining your goals, determining your product(s) and researching how you should price your product(s).

This post is all about place.

Some places may be obvious, and some not so obvious. It’s up to you to determine where the best place for your products may be, whether that be existing for free online, or in a store on a shelf.

When you determined what you could sell, you answered the following questions:

What do I pay money for now, music-wise?

What do I want to buy, but currently can’t, from my favorite bands?

How can I add value to my fan’s lives?

What makes me different?

How can I make money off of what makes me different?

Then, you took those answers and dug a bit deeper by asking these questions:

What do these products or services cost me to produce?

What are the typical market rates for similar products or services?

Now, your challenge is to take those answers and again, do something more with them.

How?

Since you did a bit of research when figuring out how much items typically cost, go back and figure out where you went to look for that information.

I’ll again use the example of our live hip hop band.

They first went to MySpace to look at the profiles of bands in their local area, as well as similar types of bands across the nation. From there, they went to iTunes and to see how much they were selling their songs for, and they also visited their websites to see what they put up on their sites content-wise, and how (and what) they were selling on their sites.

They ended up with a lot of information.

It seems like most of their counterparts don’t sell merchandise on their websites, but they do use their sites to direct people to their new songs (and places they can buy them), as well as their shows and other in-person appearances.

That was an interesting find, as place is both about where to place your products, as well as where to place yourself.

This brings me to the questions for this post:

1. Where does your audience exist?
2. Where does your audience go for information?
3. How does your audience prefer to connect with each other (and with you)?

For our hip hop band, they found that:

Q: Where does your audience exist?

A: Our audience exists on MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and on our website.  We get quite a few hits to our site, especially to our “upcoming gigs” section, and our new songs that we post on MySpace have a lot of people listening to them when they’re new, and then we start seeing Tweets and Facebook Status Updates about them.

Q: Where does your audience go for information?

A: Our audience seems to go to our MySpace page and our website for information about us, though we know that at lot of our fans also post on popular hip hop message boards and also use Twitter to keep up with news and information.

Q: How does your audience prefer to connect with each other (and with you)?

A: Our fans are a fan of MySpace, message boards and Twitter, in that order.  We also get quite a few emails and notice a lot of our fans arranging pre-show meetups whenever we go on tour.

Photo provided under a Creative Commons License by slworking2

Where Do I Go?

First, you have to understand where your audience exists.

You can have a great product and a reasonable price point with a lot of people willing to buy, but if you’re not going and selling to them where they’re looking, you’ll never make a sale.

From the answers above our hip hop band should certainly keep up their presence on MySpace and Twitter. It doesn’t seem that Facebook is a huge place for them to be at the moment, but perhaps if they developed their Fan Page they may see more activity.  Their website seems to be quite popular, especially the section about their upcoming shows.

Also, if they don’t participate in the hip hop message boards already, they probably should, since they said that their fans go there for information.

Now, so far all of this is online.

I’m assuming that if they make a CD, they’re going to contact their local record shops (or have the company doing their P&D do it for them) to talk about selling their CD in stores. If they don’t, they should.

As I said above, place is both about where you place your products, as well as where you place yourself.

Make sure to go where your audience exists and pay attention to trends, it’s hard, but see if you can try to go where they’ll also be going tomorrow, not just today (or yesterday).

Tagged as: place, planning, strategy