Google Advertising Tools, 2nd Edition

Basics of Marketing

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.

Note

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”:

Product

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.

Price

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 ...