The 4S Web Marketing Mix

© iStockphoto
tunart

The right web marketing strategy will help you to cast your net further.

Imagine that your boss has just given your department a huge project: you must completely update the company's website and online store to improve customer retention and increase sales.

To make sure you're positioning your message correctly, you turn to a well-known tool, the 4P marketing mix   . You've used this model successfully in the past to market your company's products.

But will it work for online marketing?

You quickly realize that the 4P model is only tangentially relevant for this project, because it focuses on traditional business-to-consumer marketing in a bricks-and-mortar store. Some of these principles and strategies just don't seem to transfer effectively to an online environment.

This is where the 4S Web Marketing Mix can help. The 4S tool was created specifically for online marketing. It can be used when designing or redesigning a website, or creating an online marketing campaign, and it helps you ensure that your campaign is properly thought-through, and is aligned with the other parts of your organization.

In this article, we'll examine the 4S Web Marketing Mix, and look at how you can apply it to your website or online project.

Elements of the 4S Web Marketing Mix

Developed by Dr Efthymios Constantinides, a professor at the University of Twente, Netherlands, the 4S Web Marketing Mix identifies four important elements, or steps, that you need to think about when introducing a new website or improving an existing one. It's easy to forget many of these issues when you're immersed in a big project, so using this framework can help you improve your planning.

The four elements of the 4S Web Marketing Mix are shown below. (We'll look into each step in more detail later in this article.)...