The 4 P’s of Global Content Marketing

Everyone who has studied marketing has been introduced to the 4 P’s of the Marketing Mix, which are Product, Promotion, Place and Price. These 4 P’s were presented by E. Jerome McCarthy, an American marketing professor and the author of the influential textbook Basic Marketing: A Managerial Approach.

The 4P’s have served as the cornerstone of modern marketing for the past century. In a nutshell, the 4 P’s are the core concepts for creating the right product at the right price in the right place with effective promotion.

Inspired by the 4 P’s, I create a new set of 4 P’s for global content marketing for my book, Global Content Marketing: Plan, Produce, Promote and Perfect.

The 4 P’s of Global Content Marketing

Plan: Strategy before execution

Collaborate with relevant stakeholders on regional and country teams to create a global content marketing strategy that aligns target audiences, key success metrics, priority coun­tries, and strategic editorial topics with your business objectives.

Alignment of objectives and strategy is vital because it dictates con­tent creation, promotion and measurement.

Produce: Create content that matters

Develop relevant stories that meet identified countries’ needs with different formats based on strategic editorial topics that address the target audience’s pain points, desires, and chal­lenges.

Promote: Distribute content in the digital era

Establish a market-driven content distribution process with paid and social media. Publish the appropriate formats of content with the optimal frequency in targeted channels. Use tools and data to optimize the media buy and social media content distribution.

Perfect: Measure and optimize to drive the maximum impact.

Continuously optimize and measure the impact of content marketing as part of an ongoing feedback loop. Define goals and use tools and processes to maximize the effectiveness of content production and content syndication. This step’s goal is to improve the previous 3 P’s: Plan, Produce and Promote.

Global = Headquarters & Local Working Together

When we add the word ‘Global’ in front of ‘Content Marketing,’ it feels like extra weight is put on our shoulders, but ‘Global’ doesn’t mean that we have to market to all countries.

Let’s break down ‘Global’ and ‘Content Marketing’ into two elements:

Global in this context simply means headquarters working together with local teams to prioritize target countries, audiences and allocate budget and resource accordingly.

By the way, ‘headquarters’ isn’t necessarily the main office. It’s a group of people with organization-wide respon­sibilities who are not focusing on specific local markets. Corporate persons can also reside in the local markets, but they are responsible for organization-wide activities. In smaller companies, marketing may wear both hats of manag­ing organization-wide and local market responsibilities.

‘Local’ refers to regions or countries where the company has a local presence. Local presence does not necessarily mean the company has a physical office in a coun­try. To be efficient and save money, some companies choose to handle an entire region out of a single central office, but regional marketing will assess each local market differently.

Think and act both globally and locally

In today’s world, it’s no longer efficient to “Think globally, act locally.”

For content marketing to scale to different countries effectively, we need to think and act both globally and locally.

During the “Plan” stage, corporate sets up objectives and strategies, yet the local teams should weigh in and offer feedback. In other words, local isn’t responsible for just “act­ing” and corporate can’t do all the “thinking.” The local teams must contribute to the overall global content plan­ning or “thinking.”

During the “Produce” stage, there is active thinking and acting on what content should be created, localized, and translated from both the corporate and local teams.

During the “Promote” stage, the local teams are vigorously acting to implement region or country-specific promotional tactics to align with the overall content marketing objectives and goals.

During the “Perfect” stage, the corporate and local teams may think and act collectively by determining the right measurement tools and metrics to use. In order to perfect local execution, the regional and country teams share promo­tional results and content measurements with corporate and other local teams.

In general, each company addresses global content marketing differently based on their organizational structures, budget allocations, corporate cultures, products and services. Yet the 4 P’s of Global Content Marketing do not change. Global marketing requires close collaboration between the headquarters and local teams to achieve corporate goals. Once we understand what “global” means in this context, the weight on our shoulders doesn’t feel quite so heavy and we can see a clear path to globalize our content marketing efforts.

If you’re interested in deeper reading on global content marketing, pick up a copy of my book, Global Content Marketing. In it, I discuss each of the 4 Ps in detail and share my thoughts on the future of content marketing. I also launched globalcontent.marketing (yes, marketing is a top-level domain name now) to offer free supplemental tools and templates.

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