In 1960, E. Jerome McCarthy introduced the 4 P's of Marketing as a way to describe the mix of factors required to successfully market a product. McCarthy labeled the 4 P's as Product, Price, Place (distribution), and Promotion. The idea was that if you could identify the right combination of these elements, your marketing would succeed. Since then, many have proposed that there are really 5 P's, suggesting Positioning, Packaging, or People as additions to the mix.

Maybe it should be replaced by the 4 B's of Marketing?

1. BE Real: Your marketplace is crowded with competitors, and your prospects are besieged with marketing messages. For your message to find its way through all this noise, it must be exactly on target. In any field, it's not y how your work helps them solve problems and reach goals, and the benefits and results they can expect to see from it. What this targeted messaging requires is that you become very specific about not only who your offer is for, but what it will help them do, and why your solution is the right one for them.

2. Be Pulling vs. Pushing: In the classic marketing formula, the emphasis was on promotion - pushing your message out to the world at large. You need to pull toward you exactly those clients you want. Push-style marketing includes cold calling, unsolicited mail or email, paid advertising (online and off), promotional events like trade shows, and some forms of PR, like blasting out press releases. Pull marketing, on the other hand, is focused on building affinity and connections. To attract clients in your niche, you might develop referral partnerships, become visible at networking events, get booked as a public speaker, have articles published or build a content-rich website. You'll find it much easier to make a sale when clients contact you as the result of hearing about you from someone else, or after sampling your expertise for free.

3. Be interesting: You must position your business in the mind of your prospective clients as the best possible choice for exactly what they need. Broadcasting a muddy or generic marketing message won't be enough. Your clients need to understand "what's in it for me?" Be the place they go when they need something. 4. Be there: Clients are wary - and justifiably so - of committing to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on something they haven't been able to experience in advance. Without tangible evidence to go by, they base their decision on how much they trust you. A significant portion of your marketing activities should be aimed at increasing your credibility. But one of the best ways to build trust is also the simplest. Allow clients to get to know you, be part of their everyday life. Use of your website, services, ideas and advice that you can offer are all important mixes.

4. Be Fast: In today's world, the most important. The key is hitting the right client at the right time with the right product in the right way, the first time, because you may not get a second time. You have to identify their need or problem, provide the solution, understand the resources needed and the decision process they will use. You have to have a process in place for doing this or the process itself will lead to slow and inaccurate decisions. Effective companies have processes that drive decisions, not delay them.

And this is all marketing!