BitcoinLife

16/03/2021

The Marketing Mix in the Digital Age

The “marketing mix”, also known as “the 4 Ps” of marketing are considered to be the foundation of your marketing plan. They represent the main decisions you will have to make when marketing your products or services:

Product – what will your product or service actually be and how does it meet the needs of your customer?
Pricing – what price will you set your product at? This is not always a monetary figure as customers may exchange their time or information for a “free” product.
Place – how do you deliver the product to the customer? Do they come into a physical store or do you sell online? Are you targeting a particular geographic region?
Promotion – what marketing methods will you use to tell the world about your product?

Getting the marketing mix right means you’ll be able to align with your customers’ wants and needs, strengthen your brand presence, and maximize your ROI.

The concept of the 4Ps marketing mix was thought up well before the internet became a part of normal everyday life, but it can be adapted pretty easily to form the basis for developing a marketing strategy in today’s digital world.

In the digital marketing mix, the 4 Ps are the same, but the approach is different.

Product – The internet means that you can have a business with no physical inventory. Instead, you can sell digital products such as e-books and courses. Even if you do sell tangible products, the process of product development has been forever changed. It’s now possible to order and create products on-demand to test out the market first, and the ability to survey your customers quickly and easily means you’re less likely to make mistakes when it comes to product development.
Price – Digital marketing technology means that you don’t have to decide on a single price for your product or service – you can dynamically adjust the price depending on who’s viewing it. There’s also more flexibility when it comes to pricing models, with subscriptions and recurring payments made more accessible to businesses and customers of all kinds.
Place – Clearly the main difference here is you’re selling online instead of in a bricks-and-mortar store. But there are also many different channels to explore when it comes to selling online. Your own website, online market places, email, and social media are all avenues to consider.
Promotion – Again, you’ll still promote your product but the methods are different than what you would have used 30 years ago. Instead of direct mail and print advertising, your strategy might include email marketing and social media marketing instead.

09/03/2021

09/03/2021

Types of Marketing

For those who think that marketing is the same thing as advertising, nothing could be further from the truth. Advertising can certainly be one small part of a marketing plan but it’s only one piece of the puzzle. Indeed, it’s possible to work from a marketing strategy that doesn’t utilize advertising at all.

Marketing can roughly be split into offline and online or digital methods. Offline marketing consists of “traditional” advertising in print, radio, and television marketing, as well as attending events like trade shows, fairs and conferences. It can also include word-of-mouth marketing.

Most businesses will use a combination of online and offline marketing methods. However, these days the balance is shifting more towards online marketing. This is because consumers are increasingly spending more time online and digital marketing offers various advantages in terms of speed, efficiency, and ROI.

So let’s look at some of the different types of online marketing that are available to today’s businesses:

Content marketing – Publishing content in different forms to build brand awareness and nurture relationships with customers. Content marketing is usually thought of as a type of digital marketing but it can also take place offline. Examples of content marketing include blogs, posts on social media, infographics, and video.
Search engine optimization – Commonly known as SEO, this is the process of optimizing the content on your website to make it more visible to search engines and attract more traffic from searches.
Search engine marketing – Also known as pay-per-click or PPC, with this type of marketing businesses pay to have a link to their site placed in a prominent position on search engine result pages
Social media marketing – Using social networks like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter to build relationships with existing customers and reach a wider audience through digital word-of-mouth.
Email marketing – Sending regular email communications to users who have signed up to your list to build relationships and drive sales.
Retargeting – Contacting existing or potential customers after they have already had an interaction with your brand to get them to come back or convert into a sale. For example, placing an advert on their Facebook feed of a particular product they’ve looked at on your site.
Influencer marketing – Using individuals with a high profile and many followers on social network channels to promote your product or service.

These are just a few examples of the most popular types of digital marketing in play today. Each of these methods can be broken down into several other types of marketing and there are indeed hundreds or thousands of different types of marketing covering both online and offline channels.

No business relies on just one form of marketing. On the other hand, unless you’re a multinational corporation with a practically unlimited budget and resources, it’s not possible to tackle all different forms of marketing either.

To form an effective marketing strategy for your individual business, you must select the types of marketing that will be most effective for you, and form a plan in which they are integrated into a master strategy.

02/03/2021

Halving and the Stock-To-Flow Model

Perhaps the most important reasons for the rise in Bitcoin's price are two attributes that are inherent in its design.

The first: there is only 21 million Bitcoin that will ever exist. There will be no more and no less and this number will always stay static. This makes bitcoin more scarce than anything that has come before it. Other scarce assets are not 100% finite and in some cases, they can be synthetically manufactured.

The second is a process coded into Bitcoin called the halving. Essentially, Bitcoin has its own built-in escrow mechanism where Bitcoin is released and given to miners as a reward for processing transactions. This reward is cut in half every four years.

By doing so, Bitcoin's rate of inflation is reduced by half each halving and its stock-to-flow ratio is doubled each halving. This process continues every four years until all Bitcoin in this escrow mechanism is released and in circulation. From that point on Bitcoin in circulation will be capped at 21 million. As of the time of writing, there are 18,534,818 in circulation.

So far, Bitcoin's price has followed its stock-to-flow ratio very closely and if it were to continue on this trajectory Bitcoin's value could be somewhere around $100,000 in late 2021.

01/03/2021