The Four Pillars of Marketing | Position, Awareness, Demand, Enablement (PADE)

When you think of marketing strategy, most people immediately refer to the Four P’s of Marketing – Product, Price, Promotion and Place. And while that’s a good starting place in theory, the reality of marketing - particularly in a small business or a start-up - is that you need a more action-oriented framework.

On this episode of The Marketing Mix, I discuss a broader model known as PADE, which looks at the four pillars of marketing – Position, Awareness, Demand, and Enablement. By digging in to each of these areas, you can build a sound marketing plan, purposefully based around standard tactics.

I talk about the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and buyer personas; why awareness is important (but tough to measure); the value of building a demand process, not just a set of tactics; and what you’re missing out on if you don’t pay attention to sales enablement.

The PADE model is a solid framework for a Marketing Audit; it’s easy to explain to non-marketers; and it’s a useful communication tool as you roll out your plan across the broader organization.

And since I didn't interview anyone on this episode (and so didn't ask for a favorite drink), below the resources, I've included  a nice summer cocktail recipe that I tried this weekend. Enjoy!

Resources
The Four Pillars of Marketing (Steve's Linkedin article)
Guide to Product Positioning by Qualtrics
Brand Awareness for B2B by Brew Interactive
How to Create an ICP by Cognism
5 Essential Steps in Demand Generation by Gartner
Guide to Sales Enablement by Product Marketing Alliance


The Frenchie, from Shake: a new perspective on cocktails
7.5oz of Rose Wine
3 oz Cointreau
1 cube of cane sugar
Fresh berries

Muddle the berries and sugar cube in a shaker. Add the wine, liquor and ice. 
Shake for 3 seconds
Strain into a glass on the rocks

Time Stamps:
0:45 | Introduction to marketing models and their importance
2:00 | Introduction to the PADE model
2:45 | Explanation of the first pillar: Positioning
4:40 | Importance of understanding ideal customer profile and buyer personas
8:00 | Explanation of the second pillar: Awareness
10:00 | Examples of awareness tactics and their impact
11:30 | Explanation of the third pillar: Demand Generation
13:00 | Importance of managing the lead process
13:30 | Explanation of the fourth pillar: Sales Enablement
15:20 | Overview of how the PADE model is used in practice

Transcript

The Four Pillars of Marketing | Position, Awareness, Demand Gen, Enablement (PADE)

Today on The Marketing Mix, I'm going to be talking about marketing models. And specifically, a model that I think is very useful for small businesses and for startups when they're trying to understand their marketing position and trying to build a marketing strategy. Now, when I talk about marketing models, a lot of people immediately go for the four P’s, which is Product, Price, Promotion, and Place.

A lot of people will talk about the four Cs, which is. I guess an updated version of the four P’s, which is more outward looking. Customer, Cost, Convenience, and Communication. And both of those are great in theory. I think if you're learning the fundamentals of marketing, they're a great place to start.

And if you're a billion-dollar corporation with a strategic planning division, they probably also make sense, but most companies don't have the luxury of going back to fundamentals. For most of us in the real world, particularly with small businesses, we want to make an impact. And the four P's, the four C’s, they're all a bit too theoretical.

The other thing I'll say is if you Google “marketing strategy”, it's not always the four P's. I've seen up to nine P's. There's five Cs out there, so there's variations on these. 

The model that I use is, is called the PADE model, and it focuses in on the four main areas of marketing that every company must touch in some way.

In a recent LinkedIn post, I refer to them as the four pillars of marketing. Positioning, Awareness, Demand generation, and Enablement. And within those four pillars, there's obviously a whole host of tools, tactics, and approaches, but I find that if you talk about these four areas, it captures everything that a growing business should be thinking about in terms of marketing. And it also provides a framework that that's easy to communicate at all levels of an organization. I think it's more intuitive for non-marketers than maybe some of the traditional models. 

Let's start by talking about Positioning, which is really the foundational part of the marketing strategy and the marketing plan. This is looking at things like, do you understand who your best customers are? Not just who your customers are, but who your best customers are. Do you know why they buy your product or service? How do they learn about your offering? These are all things about the positioning. And a lot of it starts with the messaging. Having a very simple, concise explanation of what you do and how it benefits the end user. And some people immediately think of a tagline, right? So your positioning statement, your messaging, is much more than a tagline. Everybody loves taglines. We all know about Nike's, “Just Do It”. But behind that, they have a whole brand story. They have guidelines on how to talk about the brand, how to go to the market. 

Apple is often held up as a prime example of great positioning. They own a very specific niche in people's psyche. And it's evolved over time. They started out as being sort of the cool creative product company and in fact, creative people really identified with the brand. If you went into a typical company, the creative team, the marketing team would all be using MacBooks; the Finance team, the business side would all be using PCs. Apple then sort of built more on this idea of it being an aspirational product, particularly with the iPhone, and the accessories with it.

A lot of people would aspire to have an iPhone. And then more recently they've also added this whole idea of privacy around it. But it's an evolution of their position. Part of positioning is really understanding your potential audience, and one of the key concepts behind this is the idea of an ideal customer profile or an ICP, which is a definition of the perfect company you'd like to do business with.

This is not a case of looking at your current customer base and seeing that, ‘70% of my customers are printing companies’. That's your current customer base. What we're looking at here is who do you think would be the perfect company for you to do business with? Somebody that your particular offerings or your differentiation really makes a difference to?

I'll give you an example. I worked with an audio visual company and they had a new video conferencing product that allowed you, among other things, to use any conferencing platform on the same hardware. So you walk into a conference room and whether you want to get on a Teams call, a Zoom call, a Skype meeting, the hardware in there was set up the same, which is unusual.

Most companies are set up for just one of those. So when we looked at the ICP, the thing that we wanted was to find companies primarily that would really appreciate this availability to switch between these different platforms. So we defined the ideal customer profile as a small or mid-sized business with multiple locations who often host visitors in their office, and who did not have a dedicated AV person on staff.

The basis behind this was we wanted them to have multiple locations. Because for a perfect customer, they needed to buy more than one, ideally five plus units, and they're only going to do that if they have multiple locations. We wanted them to host visitors in their offices because some companies will tell you, ‘we only use Teams’, therefore we don't need that ability to switch between different platforms. But if you're constantly having customers, contractors, other types of visitors or guests, they may want to be able to use Zoom or Skype and want it to be simple. And then we didn't want them to have a dedicated AV person on staff because a lot of our push here was about simplicity. And if you have somebody whose job is to manage the AV, that's what they're going to do. We were appealing to a company where, you know, it was the IT guy, it was the facilities person or whoever was doing it in their spare time. 

So that's the ideal customer profile, the type of company that is going to be very receptive to your offering. Then the next part of it - and you will all have heard a lot about this - is the idea of buyer personas. These are the typical people you deal with in the buying process. So for the AV company, we identified a persona for an IT manager in a small or midsize business. We had a persona for an AV integrator, someone who builds out offices and commercial spaces, and so would be specifying this equipment and then facility staff, particularly in a larger, mid-size business because they are going to influence that decision as well.

When you're looking at positioning, you're understanding ‘who's the perfect customer for us?’ Who are the people that are involved in that decision process? And then what's our messaging to appeal to that particular group? There is more to it than messaging, but I focus in on messaging because that's really the foundational part.

The second pillar of marketing is Awareness. This category covers a lot of things, but in reality, this is what most people think about, first of all, when they think about marketing. But in a lot of ways, it's another way of thinking about Branding. Now awareness is a lot of typical tactics like social media, content creation, public relations, the visual look of your brand.

It's everything you do to make people familiar with you, with your brand, with your offering before they're ready to buy. If you're familiar with the marketing funnel concept, awareness is basically everything you do at the top of the funnel. It's your LinkedIn posts. It's having your CEO appear on a podcast. It could be the front page of your website because maybe people get to your website didn't really mean to get there. So they bounce. They don't dig into any of the detail, but they've had that impression of your website. It could be deciding to go big at that trade show in Pittsburgh where maybe you're not expecting to get a lot of purchases, but you want to be seen there; you want everybody at that show to see you. To see this bigger than expected presence from you so that they start to think of you as one of the players in in the industry or in that category. It's all the things you do that tell people you exist, that you're a serious player, and that when they are ready you can help them.

I would say for a lot of startups, particularly VC-backed startups, this is where most of the time and investment goes. It's a bit of a ‘build it and they will come’ approach to marketing. The flip side of that is it can be difficult to prove ROI on this because this is much more about getting people ready to buy. And so getting the attribution on it is difficult. 

I'll give you a simple example of this. I was in a town over the weekend, somewhere where I hadn't spent much time before, I knew nothing about local food options. But at lunchtime someone suggested getting a Primo’s hoagie and I agreed instantly. And then my marketing brain kicked in and I thought, ‘I've never had a primo hoagie.’ Why did I think that was such a good idea? And it took me a while, but I realized that they sponsored the concessions at a local sports stadium. So I was very familiar with the brand and also had a positive association because I'm happy when I'm watching the sports team and. So now I'm thinking good things about them, even though I'd never had it. So we all agreed, yep, we're going to have a Primo Hoagie. So that is awareness in action. Unfortunately, it turns out they had a 90 minute wait, so we actually went somewhere else for a sandwich. But that's not the marketing team's fault. Another example, this is very extreme, but it's in the news at the moment, is the Barbie movie.

Now of course they have built all of this on decades of brand equity. This wouldn't apply to 99% of companies, but rather than just using the standard channels that we would think of in terms of social media and advertising for awareness, they've leveraged partnerships in a big way with some of their, what they would call brand activation. But it's really awareness. And they've used events in a way to make sure that everybody is talking about it. So, Awareness can be a lot of different things depending on your company size, your location, and the industry that you are in. 

The third part of the model is Demand Generation. I would say this is probably the other half of what most people think marketing is.

This is Search Engine Optimization. It's Google Ads, it's the lead capture forms on your website. It's having a strategy to actually get value, to get leads out of that trade show in Pittsburgh that you just put all this money into, and it's a dozen other tactics depending on your industry and your offering.

I've had situations where I've paid a third party for access to their audience, so that could be sponsoring a co-hosted webinar, sending out emails to their list and so on. If you work with channel partners, it could be optimizing your presence on their website. So there's a lot of different tactics around this.

This is what used to be called lead generation, but it's more encompassing than that. It's sort of earlier in the process than lead generation. It's all the things that you would do to get people ready to consider you when they want to buy. It's educating them, it's being in the right place. It's making it easy for them to learn about you. So it's not just about capturing the lead, it's about all the things you do as the prospect is moving down the funnel and as they're getting ready to buy. And some people talk about it as creating demand. Honestly. It's not really creating demand. It's about making sure that you are able to capture that demand when it comes.

And then the other part of demand generation, Is, what do you do once you've generated that demand? And in many companies, that's a very leaky process. Leads come in. Some of them get passed from marketing to sales. Some of them drop through the cracks, some of them get to sales and don't get acted upon, they go cold.

That in itself is, is an entire strategic initiative. I can't do justice to it here, but it does lead us very nicely into the fourth pillar of marketing, which is Sales Enablement. And enablement, I think is the area in marketing and possibly in sales that gets the least attention. It's obviously a joint activity between marketing and sales.

From a marketing perspective, it's about providing the right tools for the sales team to close leads. It's creating good processes to ensure a smooth handover and good communication between marketing and sales. And it's ensuring that we're keeping our sales professionals up to date on the current methods and techniques and giving them the right tools.

From a marketing perspective, a lot of this is based around marketing collateral. Making sure you have the white papers, the videos, maybe webinars that speak to specific objections. But it is also about having a system that makes it easy for the sales professional to find that perfect piece of content that they need when they need it. Because obviously you can have a great deep library of material, but if nobody can find the right thing, it's pretty useless. And sales enablement also includes the tools or the tech stack needed for an effective sales process. This, again, could be a very large subject. In a lot of companies, unfortunately, the groups run sales and marketing are run as separate silos.

There can be a big disconnect between them, which is a very expensive mistake in any company. I'm a big proponent of building strong relationships between the sales and marketing teams to really generate that growth. And sales enablement is a great way to bring those two teams closer together. Because you can only do this if you have constant communication between the marketing team and the sales team.

That's an outline of the PADE model - Position, Awareness, Demand, and Enablement. So how does it get used? Well, when I first engage with a small business, the first step is typically to do a marketing audit to understand what the current situation is. I dig into their current marketing activities, I look at their messaging, their marketing tactics. I see where they're doing well and where they're lacking, and identify the areas where we can have the most impact, both in the short term and for the longer term. And the PADE model gives a really solid framework to look at it.

I can go in and assess the foundational work in terms of positioning and messaging. I can see how they're talking to the potential market who aren't yet ready to buy. So that's the awareness part. I can see how effective they are at finding new clients. So that's demand generation. And then the sales enablement piece gives me a good idea of how well sales and marketing teams are collaborating and how effectively they are supporting their sales team.

Another advantage of the PADE model is that it's more intuitive to non-marketers than some of those more theoretical marketing models. It's based around a lot of concepts they're already familiar with, so it's easy to talk through the findings from that audit and decide on an action plan. And I think it's a really good basis for communication across the organization when it comes to implementing that new strategy.

And then finally, I really feel it has a stronger bias to action than the standard marketing models. Everything you do here is a about ‘How do you move things forward’? Now there's a ton of detail behind each of these marketing pillars, more than enough for each of them to fill a podcast episode on their own. So I'm not going to dive in any deeper now. We'll save that for another time. I will post a few articles in the show notes on each of these four pillars in case you want to do your own research while you wait for those future podcasts. 

I hope this has been useful for you. If there is a particular topic that you would like me to dig into further, please let me know. I'll see you next time on The Marketing Mix.