Four Point Marketing Strategy
A good way to visualize marketing strategy is to picture a pyramid. A pyramid has four points–a triangular base plus a peak–so we can call this approach “Four Point Marketing.”
At the top of the pyramid is your product or service. This connects with the three points of the base, which represent you, your customers, and your competition. Each of these three lines of connection represents a different key to marketing strategy.
A successful marketing strategy addresses all three keys to cover all four points of the pyramid. Let’s look at each of the three keys in turn.
Marketing Key 1: Expertise
The line connecting you with your product or service represents your expertise. Your expertise defines your relationship to the field of knowledge or skill your business represents. Your education, your experience, your publications in your field, and testimonials from other experts and consumers all help establish your expertise.
You can also think of expertise in terms of credibility or trust, which is something all four points of the pyramid aim to build. Your expertise helps give you credibility, and gives your customers one reason to trust you and buy from you.
Marketing Key 2: Benefits
The next line of the pyramid, connecting your product or service to your customers, represents the benefits you offer your customers. It relates your product or service to your customers’ needs and desires by defining what problems you can solve for them, what you can do for them, what value you offer them.
The issue of credibility or trust also comes into play here. Customers want to see some evidence that the benefits you offer are real and not just sales hype. Testimonials, case studies, statistics, and quotes can help make your case here. Guarantees, free trial offers, and other risk reducers can also help ease consumer concerns.
Marketing Key 3: Positioning
The third line of the pyramid, connecting your product or service to your competition, represents positioning, which is also sometimes called branding. This defines your relationship to your competition, identifying where you stand out in your market niche, what is unique about your brand, what you have to offer that no one else can offer.
Credibility and trust on this front are strongly influenced by consumer reviews. Collecting testimonials from satisfied customers and monitoring online reputation management are two tools for covering this base.
A comprehensive marketing strategy should cover all the points discussed above, including other angles besides those highlighted here. The marketing pyramid is merely a visual aid to help represent the complex set of relationships between your business and the market forces that affect your sales. Use this image as a tool to stimulate your thoughts as you reflect on how to optimize your marketing strategy.
