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Marketing as a service refers to an activity a company undertakes to promote the buying or selling of a product or service. Marketing includes advertising, selling, and delivering products to consumers or other businesses.

Understanding Marketing

Marketing as a discipline involves all the actions a company undertakes to draw in customers and maintain relationships with them. Networking with potential or past clients is part of the work too, and may include writing thank you emails, playing golf with prospective clients, returning calls and emails quickly, and meeting with clients for coffee or a meal.

Product, price, place, and promotion are the Four Ps of marketing. The Four Ps collectively make up the essential mix a company needs to market a product or service. Neil Borden popularized the idea of the marketing mix and the concept of the Four Ps in the 1950s.

What Are the 4 Ps?

The four Ps of marketing are the key factors that are involved in the marketing of a good or service. They are the product, price, place, and promotion of a good or service. Often referred to as the marketing mix, the four Ps are constrained by internal and external factors in the overall business environment, and they interact significantly with one another.

Understanding the 4 Ps

Neil Borden popularized the idea of the marketing mix—and the concepts that would later be known primarily as the four Ps—in the 1950s. Borden was an advertising professor at Harvard University. His 1964 article titled "The Concept of the Marketing Mix" demonstrated the ways that companies could use advertising tactics to engage their consumers. Decades later, the concepts that Borden popularized are still being used by companies to advertise their goods and services.

At the time the concept was first coined, the marketing mix helped companies account for the physical barriers that prevented widespread product adoption. Today, the Internet has helped businesses achieve a greater level of integration between businesses and consumers, and also to overcome some of these barriers. People, process, and physical evidence are extensions of the original 4 Ps, and are more relevant to the current trends in marketing.

How the Four Ps Work

Product

Product refers to a good or service that a company offers to customers. Ideally, a product should fulfill an existing consumer demand. Or a product may be so compelling that consumers believe they need to have it and it creates a new demand. To be successful, marketers need to understand the life cycle of a product, and business executives need to have a plan for dealing with products at every stage of their life cycle. The type of product also partially dictates how much businesses can charge for it, where they should place it, and how they should promote it in the marketplace.

Many of the most successful products have been the first in their category. For example, Apple was the first to create a touchscreen smartphone that could play music, browse the Internet, and make phone calls. As of November 2018, Apple stopped providing public sales figures for the iPhone. However, as of November 1, 2018, total sales of the iPhone equaled $2.2 billion. Apple revealed that it had sold its one billionth iOS device on November 22, 2014. And in 2018, the company announced they were approaching selling their two billionth iOS device.12

Price

Price is the cost consumers pay for a product. Marketers must link the price to the product's real and perceived value, but they also must consider supply costs, seasonal discounts, and competitors' prices. In some cases, business executives may raise the price to give the product the appearance of being a luxury. Alternatively, they may lower the price so more consumers can try the product.

Marketers also need to determine when and if discounting is appropriate. A discount can sometimes draw in more customers, but it can also give the impression that the product is less exclusive or less of a luxury compared to when it is was priced higher.

UNIQLO also outsources its production to partner factories; because it doesn't own its own factories, it has the flexibility to change production partners if the best production location changes over time. Finally, the company employs a team of skilled textile artisans that it sends to its partner factories all over the world for quality control. In addition, production managers visit factories once a week to resolve quality problems.

Place 

When a company makes decisions regarding place, they are trying to determine where they should sell a product and how to deliver the product to the market. The goal of business executives is always to get their products in front of the consumers that are the most likely to buy them.

In some cases, this may refer to placing a product in certain stores, but it also refers to the product's placement on a specific store's display. In some cases, placement may refer to the act of including a product on television shows, in films, or on web pages in order to garner attention for the product.

The 1995 movie GoldenEye was the seventeenth installment in the James Bond movie franchise. It was the first Bond movie not to feature an Aston Martin car. Instead, the British actor Pierce Brosnan got into a Z3 by BMW. Although the Z3 was not released until months after the film had left theaters, BMW received 9,000 orders for the car the month after the movie opened.4

Promotion

Promotion includes advertising, public relations, and promotional strategy. The goal of promoting a product is to reveal to consumers why they need it and why they should pay a certain price for it.

Marketers tend to tie promotion and placement elements together so they can reach their core audiences. For example, In the digital age, the "place" and "promotion" factors are as much online as they are offline. Specifically, where a product appears on a company's web page or social media, as well as which types of search functions trigger corresponding, targeted ads for the product.

The Swedish vodka brand Absolut sold only 10,000 cases of its vodka in 1980. But by 2000, the company had sold 4.5 million cases, thanks in part to its iconic advertising campaign. The images in the campaign featured the brand's signature bottle styled as a range of surreal images: a bottle with a halo, the bottle made of stone, or as the outline of trees on a ski slope. To date, this Absolut advertising campaign is one of the longest-running continuous ad campaigns of all time, from 1981 to 2005.5

Top 10 Future Trends in Marketing

Read on to discover 42 digital marketing trends that will help your business not just survive, but thrive in this age of innovation.

1) Artificial Intelligence

If you haven’t already realized it, the dominance of artificial intelligence (AI) is here. It’s sure to be at the heart of global business and industry in the future – and it’s already taking over many simple jobs.

For example, Microsoft and Uber use Knightscope K5 robots to “patrol parking lots and large outdoor areas to predict and prevent crime. The robots can read license plates, report suspicious activity, and collect data to report to their owners.” You can rent these R2-D2-like robots for $7 an hour – which is less expensive than a human security guard's wage:

Just a couple years ago, Gartner analysts predicted that by 2020, AI technologies would be pervasive in almost every new software product and service – a prediction that Harvard Business Review seconded.

According to Techgrabyte:

“Artificial intelligence is the biggest commercial opportunity for companies, industries, and nations over the next few decades” and “will increase global GDP by up to 14% between now and 2030,” which means that “AI latecomers will find themselves at a serious competitive disadvantage within the next several years.”

Here are the top reasons why organizations are adopting AI in their business:

AI can analyze consumer behavior and search patterns, and use data from social media platforms and blog posts to help businesses understand how customers find their products and services.

One exciting example of AI in practice is chatbots (more on that later). Mastercard created a Facebook messenger bot – which uses natural language processing software to decipher what the customer wants and respond as if it were a real person – to automate handling payments:

Artificial intelligence will soon be the driving force behind many services and, currently, we already see it implemented in such areas as:

• Basic communication
• Product recommendations
• Email personalization
• E-commerce transactions
• Content creation

When it comes to content creation, for example, instead of guessing what subtopics to cover in an article, top content teams in 2021 are relying on AI, as with Clickflow's Content Editor. Using Artificial Intelligence to serve up subtopics and related keywords will make any article ultra-comprehensive and give it the best possible chance to rank on page one.

Businesses adopting AI in 2021 will be able to cut staffing costs and accelerate growth, getting an edge over their competitors.

2) Programmatic Advertising

Programmatic advertising means using AI to automate ad buying so you can target more specific audiences. Real-time bidding, for example, is a type of programmatic ad buying. This automation is much more efficient and fast, which means higher conversions and lower customer acquisition costs.

It’s changing the face of digital advertising so swiftly that, according to eMarketer, 86.2% of digital display ads in the U.S. will be programmatic by 2020.

According to Irina Kovalenko of SmartyAds:

“Most search-driven manual advertising campaigns (even those performed with professional tools) take into account three or four targets: the keyword, time of day, and location. Such tools like programmatic demand-side platforms can use hundreds of targeting signals to individualize the advertisement and even target according to lifestyle or behavior habits when integrated with customer data platforms.”

Here’s a quick look at how programmatic advertising works:

To learn how to capitalize on this digital marketing trend, check out PPC Hero’s guide to get started.

3) Chatbots

Chatbots will continue to be an important part of digital marketing in 2021. This AI-based technology uses instant messaging to chat in real-time, day or night, with your customers or site visitors.

Surveys show that:

• Chatbots will power 85% of customer service by 2020
• Top benefits of chatbots are 24-hour service (64%), instant responses to inquiries (55%), and answers to simple questions (55%)

Many customers prefer interacting with chatbots as they are responsive 24/7, give answers promptly, accurately recall your entire buying history, and never lose patience. These virtual assistants offer outstanding customer service by meeting customers’ expectations and automating repetitive tasks – which means that you can focus on more important work.

Many brands already use chatbot technology, including rideshare brand Lyft. You can request a ride from Lyft via chat (Facebook Messenger and Slack) or voice (Amazon Echo), and their chatbot will let you know the current location of your driver:

Passengers can use the app to choose the type of ride, make a request, track the location of the car, send friends a time estimate of their arrival, and make payment.

Other brands that are successfully using chatbot technology include Whole Foods Market, Fandango, Sephora, Staples, The Wall Street Journal and Pizza Hut.

4) Conversational Marketing

With all that talk about chatbots, the reality of modern marketing becomes clear: it’s more conversational. People want it that way, and so brands are reacting. When consumers have a question, 82% want an “immediate” response.

Conversational marketing facilitates a one-to-one, real-time connection between marketers and customers:

Unlike traditional strategies, this form of marketing is now available across multiple channels, allowing brands to meet customers on their terms: on the devices, platforms and time schedules that suit the customer best.

As per David Cancel, founder and CEO of Drift:

“Today’s buyers expect to find what they’re looking for now, not later. As we prepare for the future, it will be more important than ever for businesses to be available across a broad spectrum of channels, and to make sure you’re communicating the way people prefer to communicate.”

Ultimately, the primary goal of conversational marketing is to enhance the user experience through a feedback-driven model that fosters higher engagement and greater loyalty.

5) Personalization

If you want to stand out in 2021, you need to personalize your marketing – and that means personalized content, products, emails and more.

Consider these personalization stats:

• 63% of consumers are highly annoyed with generic advertising blasts
• 80% say they are more likely to do business with a company if it offers personalized experiences
• 90% claim they find personalization appealing

Kevin George from EmailMonks asserts that “personalized, triggered emails based on behavior are 3x better than batch-and-blast emails.”

When you want to study examples of the power of personalization, it’s hard to overlook Netflix and Amazon, with their tailored recommended products or movie titles. Here are a few other companies that are successfully using personalization today:

• EasyJet launched a data-driven email campaign that uses customers’ travel history with the airline to build personalized stories, which then suggest where they might like to travel next. About 12.5 million unique emails have been sent, which had a 25% higher click-through rate than non-personalized emails.
• Cadbury’s created a personalized video campaign that matches a Dairy Milk flavor with users based on data from their Facebook profile, including age, interest and location. The campaign generated a 65% click-through rate and a 33.6% conversion rate, proving that the personal touch works.
• Starbucks uses a gamified mobile app that draws on data like purchase history and location to get as personal as possible, allows customers to customize their drinks, and encourages further use with its rewards system – which skyrocketed their revenue to $2.56 billion:

6) Video Marketing

Video marketing is one of, if not the, most important marketing trend today and likely for the next 5-10 years. These numbers show the importance of incorporating video into your digital marketing strategy in 2021:

• 70% of consumers say that they have shared a brand’s video
• 72% of businesses say that video has improved their conversion rate
• 52% of consumers say that watching product videos makes them more confident in online purchase decisions
• 65% of executives visit the marketer’s website and 39% call a vendor after viewing a video

Video is by far the most popular way customers want to learn about new products:

And don’t just think YouTube. There are plenty of ways to drive higher engagement with your video marketing, as you can make a video post or start a live broadcast on Facebook, Instagram or LinkedIn.

One of the issues that marketers have faced in recent years is the growing shift to mobile devices. Those long-form sales pages and emails of yesteryear are fading fast because they’re simply too difficult to read on small mobile screens. However, video can present the same information in a format that works perfectly regardless of the device.

If your site includes video, it’s 50X more likely (50 times!) to drive organic search results compared to text. Why? Because people find video content more compelling, so Google pushes pages that include videos higher in the rankings.

One of the best things about video marketing is that it makes it easy to reformat your content. Imagine that you’ve recorded a video for your YouTube channel. Instead of just publishing it on YouTube, you could also:

• Get it transcribed so you have a text version of the video
• Publish the transcription on your blog under an embedded YouTube video for better rankings
• Upload the raw video with the transcription as subtitles to Facebook (native Facebook videos get a much higher impression share and engagement than shared YouTube videos)
• Turn the transcription into a standalone blog article with a short rewrite and addition of relevant stats and images
• Rip the audio alone and use it as a podcast episode
• Use video thumbnails in your email marketing campaigns and the word “video” in subject lines to increase open rates by 19%

Here are some other video marketing trends that are gaining more and more traction:

• Live video is particularly popular with a large number of businesses who use it for interviews, product demos and behind-the-scenes glimpses of the brand, such as life in the office, how products are made, company events, etc.
• 1:1 video is when businesses or marketers create personalized video messages rather than make phone calls or send emails. With the decreasing cost of film equipment and increasingly high-quality smartphone cameras, this is easier than ever.
• Video SEO. YouTube and other videos are displayed in the SERPs, so video optimization is becoming much more important – like using text overlays and closed captions, in addition to your description, title and file names. Check out this guide to learn more about YouTube SEO.
• 360-degree video content. This trend towards a more interactive experience is on the rise – just look for the circular symbol in the top left corner to start sliding the moving image left or right as it’s playing, like this 360˚ video from Hong Kong Airlines (香港航空):

7) Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing is a type of word-of-mouth marketing that focuses on using key leaders to amplify your brand message to a larger market. Influencers can be well-known celebrities, but more often they are Instagram or YouTube personalities with a huge niche following who can help spread the word about your business or product through their social channels.

Because influencer marketing is generally more authentic than corporate advertising:

• 63% of consumers trust influencers’ opinions of products much more than what brands say about themselves
• 58% of people have bought a new product in the past six months because of an influencer’s recommendation

For this reason, Iceland, a popular British supermarket chain, switched from ads with celebrities to a campaign that features real-life moms. Teaming up with YouTube community Channel Mum, it now works with a number of vloggers to promote its products in a more “authentic” fashion.

And research shows that 35% of moms trust online videos more than traditional ads.

Influencer marketing is not just a trend: A mediakix study predicts that the ad spend for influencer marketing could reach $10 billion by next year:

Influencer marketing is also going to be affected by artificial intelligence. With each year, AI is making the process of finding the right influencers to partner with easier and faster. It’s helping identify those with better engagement, fewer fake followers, and a higher chance of generating a positive return on investment (ROI). In addition, artificial intelligence is transforming influencer marketing in the following ways:

• Image recognition with ANN (Artificial Neural Networks)
• Determining influencer performance with NLP (Natural Language Processing)
• Predicting incentives with ANN
• Determining an influencer's influence
• Flagging posts that don’t follow disclosure guidelines
• Elimination of fake engagements and spam bots

8) Social Messaging Apps

If you think social messaging apps are just for sending emojis to your friends, take a look at these numbers:

• 1.3 billion monthly users are active on Facebook Messenger:

• 10 billion messages are sent between people and businesses on Facebook Messenger every month
• WhatsApp has 1.6 billion active users and 55 billion messages are sent via every day
• The top three social messaging apps – WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and WeChat – have more combined users than Facebook or YouTube

These statistics show the popularity of social messaging apps, and since people are spending more time messaging each other, it makes sense to market your company’s products and services where your potential customers are hanging out.

Social messaging apps can be very useful in sending messages to customers directly, as they allow personalization and add value to the user experience. In addition, people expect businesses to have a presence on messaging apps because it’s a direct and easy way to interact with them. In fact:

63% of customers are more likely to return to a company website that has live chat.CLICK TO TWEET

Reasons for your brand to use messaging apps include:

• Cultivate contact
• Deliver information
• Boost sales
• Involve people in events
• Regain potential customers
• Provide support and assistance

9) Visual Search

Visual search can take the user experience to a totally new level: People can upload an image to conduct a search and get more specific results.

A) Pinterest Lens

Not surprisingly, Pinterest has jumped on the visual search bandwagon. They came out with Lens, a visual search tool that allows users to take a photo of an item to find out where to buy it online, search for similar products or view pinboards of related items.

As Marketing Land puts it, it turns your phone’s camera into a search bar:

Since the launch of the beta version, Pinterest's Lens now recognizes 2.5 billion home and fashion objects, has inspired over 600 million searches on Pinterest’s mobile apps and browser extensions, and has seen a 140% uptick from launch day.

Pinterest has continued to update its functionality:

• They introduced Pincodes, a QR code-type technology that enables you to find inspiration while you're out shopping or flipping through your favorite magazines.
• They launched Lens Your Look to take the guesswork out of outfit planning.
• They partnered with brands like Samsung to bring visual search to its latest smartphones and Target to allow customers to search their catalog using related products they see in the real world.
• They've fully automated Shop the Look, a feature that helps users buy products from companies that work with Pinterest, so you can, for example, buy a pair of jeans you see in a picture.
• They launched a bunch of new tools to help merchants sell their products, including Catalogs, which lets anyone upload and convert their entire product catalog into shoppable Pins.

Make sure you are optimizing for visual search, because (not surprisingly) the top search categories for Lens are:

• Fashion
• Home decor
• Art
• Food
• Products
• Animals
• Outfits
• Beauty
• Vehicles
• Travel

B) Google Lens

And Pinterest is not the only one with visual search. Google Lens is a visual search engine by Google, which recognizes objects and landmarks through a camera app. Here's what you can do when you take a photo of the following items:

• Apparel and home goods: Find similar products and where to buy them.
• Barcodes: Use a barcode to find info about a product, like where to buy it.
• Business card: Save the phone number or address to a contact.
• Book: Get a summary and read reviews.
• Event flyer or billboard: Add the event to your calendar.
• Landmark or building: See historical facts, hours of operation, and more.
• Painting in a museum: Read about the artist and learn more.
• Plant or animal: Learn about species and breeds.

As CNet says, “Google Lens is turning into what Google Glass never was” when it comes to real-time augmented reality.

C) CamFind

CamFind is another visual search mobile app which enables you to search for anything from your phone simply by snapping a picture.

Instead of typing queries into a search engine, you can directly search via images to find similar images, price comparisons, local shopping results, etc. You can also take a picture of a movie poster and CamFind will show you movie information, trailers, showtimes and local theaters.

D) Bing Visual Search

And with Bing Visual Search, you can search for a specific element within an image without having to go through all the current hoops.

For example, say you’re looking for kitchen decoration inspiration and an image attracts your attention. You click on a thumbnail result to get to the “Detail View.” The overall décor is great, but you’re particularly interested in that nice-looking chandelier. Wouldn’t you love to know where you can get one just like it? With Bing Visual Search, now you can.

As per Social Media Today:

• 62% of Millennials are more interested in visual search capabilities than any other new technology
• Images are returned for 19% of search queries on Google
• There are over 600 million visual searches on Pinterest each month

Marketers can get the edge on competitors by jumping on the visual search trend in 2021 to draw customers and serve them the perfect product.

10) Micro-Moments

A micro-moment is “An intent-rich moment when a person turns to a device to act on a need – to know, go, do or buy.”

People generally make instant decisions within these four Micro-Moments:

To take advantage of micro-moments in 2021, you need to be where consumers are searching for information in the moment – or, as Google puts it, marketers have to “be there, be useful, be quick.”

The growing popularity of micro-moments means that marketers must rethink the linear marketing funnel that follows a set path: awareness, consideration and decision.

In 2021 and beyond, the customer journey will be more dynamic and unpredictable, as it needs to respond to rapid changes in consumer desires. After all, in the mobile age, people have become accustomed to instant gratification. If they think or talk about something, they want to learn more, see more and buy more of it with just a few clicks of a button.

According to Mention:

“When we act on our needs in the moment, our expectations are high and our patience is low. This makes the quality, relevance and usefulness of marketing more important than ever.”

To get the most out of micro-moments in 2021, you should:

• Identify your consumers’ “I want to buy” moments
• Be there in these moments of need
• Deliver relevant content
• Make it easy for them to make a purchase
• Measure every moment that matters

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