A little while ago I started writing a series of blogs about the 4Ps of Marketing. So far I’ve covered Price – how to decide what to charge and how to use pricing in your marketing; and Product – getting clear on what you actually sell.

As this is the third blog in the series, we’ll look at the third P – Place.

Number 3 = Place

In traditional marketing, Place was about the channels through which you could sell your products. This meant routes like shops – online and offline – directly to customers or via distributors or associates.

All well and good, but where do you sell your wares if you provide a service? When a potential client can’t actually see what you’re selling them, how can you put it into a shop, of any kind? When what you’re selling is intangible, how can you take a photo of it for Amazon or put it on a shelf?

When you provide a service, such as coaching, consultancy or training, you need think about how to turn your service into a product. You need to work out how to ‘package’ what you do. Let me give you an example. Many years ago, in the early days of Appletree, one of my clients asked me to write an article for her and have it placed in a particular business magazine. Once this was done, I would normally have had to go off and find another client, or think of something else to sell to this client. Instead, she asked me if I could write an article for her every month and have them all placed, to give her ongoing coverage. The idea of a ‘retainer’ service was born. Instead of charging individual fees for single pieces of work, I started to charge clients a regular monthly fee, for a certain amount of work each month.

I actually came up with a number of ‘packages’ that new clients could buy, depending on what they wanted to achieve with their marketing and how much they wanted to spend on it. That was a turning point for my business. From then on, I knew how much marketing work was needed for each client, each month – how many hours I would have to work. I also knew how much money I would be earning every month, as all my clients paid monthly by standing order for their marketing packages. That was 13 years ago and it’s the model I’ve used for the business ever since. It’s also a model I’ve helped many of my clients to develop, giving them more far more stable businesses with regular cash flows.

So, when you provide a service to your clients, think about how you can turn that service into something more tangible – a range of products or packages that show more clearly what your potential clients can buy from you. Your prospects will be able to ‘see’ what they will get from you, for the money. This will make your marketing much easier, as you’ll have something to describe to them – something to put on the shelves of your ‘shop’.

In the final part of this series, we’ll look at the last of the 4Ps – Promotion: how to tie it all together and get the best of the 4Ps of Marketing.