As long as you’re running a business, there’s no avoiding using digital marketing. Majority of the world’s population is dependent on the internet, and there’s just no better place to improve your reach and attract potential customers.
Digital marketing is best done with carefully planned strategies—think of them as your compass and map to help you navigate your business through the ocean that is the digital world. The procedure includes so many options and elements, you’ll end up lost without a proper plan.
To learn in details about the importance of Digital Marketing Strategies, their components and how to build one, feel free to check out our article on How to Build Your Digital Marketing Strategy (Step-by-Step).
Why spend time learning Digital Marketing Strategy Frameworks?
To make the process of of coming up with Digital Marketing Strategies easier, certain structured methods have been developed. Tried and tested, they are called Digital Marketing Strategy Frameworks.
A well-defined digital marketing strategy framework is a blueprint that outlines your business goals, audience, channels, messaging, content and metrics. Effectively, it provides structure, clarity, and direction to achieve business goals in a saturated marketplace.
Frameworks reside at the intersection of two essential components of your digital program: the audience you’re targeting and the medium through which you’re reaching them. The importance of this bridge is not to be underestimated.
So yes. Anyone with a running business intending to get into digital marketing definitely should dive deep into digital marketing strategy frameworks. Since you’ve read this far, I assume you’re one of us, and I welcome you to stay for the rest of the trip.
Traits of a proper Digital Marketing Strategy Framework
A good framework helps ensure that every digital marketing effort is cohesive, consistent, and aligned with your company’s objectives. The characteristics good digital marketing strategy frameworks share can be pointed out as:
- Clear Direction: A standard framework provides a roadmap, helping you focus on your goals and how to achieve them. This ensures that your marketing efforts are cohesive and directed towards a specific outcome.
- Resource Optimization: By outlining the necessary steps and tools, frameworks helps you allocate resources—both budget and personnel—more effectively.
- Consistency: A well-thought-out framework ensures that your messaging and branding remain consistent across all digital channels.
- Performance Measurement: A competent framework helps you monitor and measure success with clear KPIs, allowing you to optimize your approach over time.
- Adaptability: Good strategies always leave room for change and adjustment. They advocate adapting to new trends, customer behaviours, and emerging platforms.
- Accessibility: Digital marketing strategy frameworks with a template or visual elements that lay out everything they’re trying to accomplish are easy to understand.
The cream of the crop Digital Marketing Strategy Frameworks
A multitude of such frameworks have been developed in the previous decades. Some share similarities, some are unique. Knowing about their different takes on building strategies is necessary to decide which one is the best for you. Let’s take a look at the most popular digital marketing strategy frameworks out there, shall we?
The RACE Framework
The RACE Framework was developed by Smart Insights. It stands for Reach, Act, Convert, Engage. The RACE Framework is focused on the customer lifecycle to ensure that your marketing efforts match each stage of your customer’s journey.
The components of the RACE framework are as follows:
- Reach: Initially, the goal is to build awareness. Try to increase brand visibility and attract new visitors. This is done through channels like SEO, social media, PPC, etc.
- Act: This stage is geared towards engaging audience. Encouraging interactions with your brand is essential for this. Creative interactive contents like polls, quizzes, blog posts, newsletters are viable mediums.
- Convert: The focus here is on converting your engaged audience into paying customers through optimized landing pages, calls-to-actions (CTAs), and streamlined checkout processes. Think of free trials or discount coupons as examples.
- Engage: The toughest part is to keep your customers loyal. After conversion, it’s vital to keep customers engaged through follow-up emails, customer support, customer feedbacks etc. Loyaltry programs that give benefits to recurring customers are great for this.
The RACE framework is very customer-friendly, ensuring that content marketing efforts cater to customer needs at each phase. It can be measured at every stage with KPIs and metrics to allow for continuous improvement. The method is very practical and easy to implement.
SOSTAC® Framework
The SOSTAC® framework was created by P.R. Smith. It stands for Situation, Objectives, Strategy, Tactics, and Control. The SOSTAC frameworks is quite simple, but as comprehensive as a framework can get.
The SOSTAC Framework consists of:
- Situation Analysis: Initially, you are supposed to assess your current situation. This includes everything like market position, target audience, competitors, digital presence, etc. Tools like SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) and Competitor Analysis are often used in this stage.
- Objectives: Based on the situation analysis, define clear and measurable objectives that align with your business goals. It’s encouraged to follow SMART criteria for these goals – Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound.
- Strategy: Strategy outlines the broad approach for achieving your objectives. This includes determining target audiences, key messaging, value propositions, and selecting appropriate digital channels.
- Tactics: This refers to the available tools you will use to implement your strategy. SEO, PPC, Social media marketing, email campaigns, and content marketing are examples. The choice of tactics depends upon the nature of your business.
- Action: This is basically work distribution. You are supposed to define the responsibilities and timelines for your team – who does what, and when. This assignment of clear roles helps in efficiently executing the strategy.
- Control: Finally, progress monitoring and adjustment fall within this. Established KPIs and metrics are used for this purpose. Regular reviews and performance tracking are critical to ensure the strategy stays on course.
As a method, SOSTAC is comprehensible yet flexible. It has a clear structure to break down complex marketing strategies into simple steps. And it covers everything from analysis to execution. But for some, it may be too detailed and rigorous with too many steps to follow.
MARKETING FUNNEL
Marketing Funnel is one of the most common digital marketing strategy frameworks. The framework illustrates the customer journey from when potential customers come across a company’s products, all the way to their final purchase. The marketing funnel is divided into four stages:
- Awareness: This is when a prospective customer discovers a brand through direct digital marketing channels such as targeted online ads or indirect digital marketing channels such as search engine optimization (SEO).
- Interest: In this stage, the customer’s interest is sufficiently piqued by visiting the company’s owned media channels to learn more about their product. This is to be done through informative and engaging content, like blog posts or videos.
- Consideration: This is the stage when a potential customer begins considering a product as something they need or want. The audience should be attracted by demonstrating how your product solves their problems or improves their lives.
- Action: And the final stage is this, where the customer decides to patronize the company and purchase a product. Call-to-actions (CTA) such as “Buy Now” or “Get a Free Trial” are good examples of action promts.
For businesses looking to increase their customer base through guiding them, the marketing funnel framework is quite helpful.
INBOUND MARKETING
The Inbound Marketing Framework was created by HubSpot. It focuses on attracting customers through content and interactions which are relevant and helpful. The model essentially focuses on the customer: how to maximize their satisfaction to keep them coming back to you. Unlike outbound marketing which pushes products or services onto customers, inbound marketing tries to hold onto customers by providing the best value for price.
The framework can be summed up into three principles:
- Attract: First of all, draw the right people through creative content. This could be blog posts, social media updates, SEO, whatever you wish to use. Attracting organ traffic is essential.
- Engage: Engaging your audience involves building meaningful relationships through personalized interactions. Lead generation forms, personalized emails, buyer feedback, review polls etc. are good examples.
- Delight: The most important bit of it all: always aim to exceed customer expectations. Delight your customers through excellent support, maximum value and positive buying experiences. This will turn them into recurring customers and potentially have them recommend your product or service to others.
The Inbound Marketing Framework is the most customer-friendly marketing strategy framework out there. It’s highly recommended for products or services a customer can repeatedly use. Though, it makes you sacrifice some of your profits in the process of maximizing value for price.
7Ps
The 7P’s Marketing Mix was developed by E.J. McCarthy. It is a thorough checklist to maximize your business’s reach. It began with four P’s back in the 1960’s (Product, Price, Place and Promotion), but eventually developed to include People, Process and Physical Evidence in time.
This method covers all possible grounds of a complex market and business situation, effectively becoming a popular marketing strategy framework. The components are explained as follows:
- Product (What you offer): Simply put, whatever good or service a business provides to its customers is a product. It’s the core component of the marketing mix since it represents what you’re selling. Products should be manufactured according to the needs and wants of its target customers. Products go through lifecycle stages which your marketing strategy to adapt to. And you should make it clear to your customer how your products stands out from your competitors’.
- Price (What you charge): Pricing stategial are crucial for marketing strategies since they impact profitability, competitiveness and customer attraction way more than anything else. You should aim to set a price which balances business objective, that is, profitability with customer’s value. You can choose from options like penetration pricing (low to gain market share), premium pricing (high to reflect quality), or cost-plus pricing (adding a markup to costs). Look up how much the customers are willing to pay for the benefits your product or service provides, and research your competitors’ prices to keep up.
- Place (Where you sell): Place is the term used to refer to where your product is distributed. It also include how it is made available to that location. All channels for your product distribution is considered under this. Choose your distribution channel depending on business model: whether it should be a physical retail store, an e-commerce website, or a combination of both. Make sure your customers can easily find and purchase your product. For example, you can supplement your website with a mobile app for better accessibility.
- Promotion (How you communicate): The marketing communication and activities you used to familiarize your customers with your product is promotion. It includes content marketing methods like advertising, public relations, social media, sales promotions etc. Make sure your branding is consistent across all channels and resonate with your audience. Research which media channel your audience primarily uses, and focus on it. Multi channel promotional strategies are often the most successful. Think of innovative campaigns to impact your audience.
- People (Who delivers the experience): Your employees involved in the delivery of your product like customer service representatives or the sales team interact with your customers. So, they play a big role in the customer experience, whether it is positive or negative. Consider training your employees in communication and proper customer service, and promote empathy and professionalism in your company culture. Good customer experience is vital to keep your customers coming back to you.
- Process (How it’s delivered): Process refers to the systems and procedures that are in place to deliver your product or service. It includes everything from the efficiency of your operations to the user experience (UX) on your website or mobile app. You should take care to streamline processes to reduce inefficiency and improve delivery time. Automation using programs or AI can be hugely helpful for this. Email marketing, customer onboarding, order processing can be automated to cut your costs and keep deliveries fast.
- Physical Evidence (What your customer associates you with): Physical Evidence includes the tangible elements that support the delivery of a service or product. It includes the physical environment in which your business operates, as well as any visual cues that reinforce your brand and product quality. Physical evidence plays a key role in shaping customer perceptions. So make your touchpoints like storefront, website, packaging etc. are aligned with your brand identity and ensure a pleasant environment in your stores and websites.
The 7P’s is a marketing strategy that covers a lot of grounds, but it isn’t tailored especially for digital marketing, so you might need to think for yourself in setting some aspects of the strategy. It also doesn’t tell you to adjust your strategy with time, an oversight, but it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t.
PORTER’S 5
Porter’s Five Forces is a strategic framework designed to analyze the competitive forces within an industry and assess its profitability. Developed by Michael E. Porter, it identifies five key forces that shape every industry and can help businesses understand the competitive intensity and market dynamics.
The Five Forces are as follows:
- Threat of New Entrants: This force examines how easy or difficult it is for new competitors to enter the market. When entry barriers are low, new players can easily come in, intensifying competition. High entry barriers, such as strong brand loyalty, high capital requirements, and government regulations, protect existing players from new competition.
- Bargaining Power of Suppliers: Suppliers can influence an industry by driving up prices or reducing the quality of materials. The fewer suppliers in an industry, or the more unique their products, the more power they hold over buyers.
- Bargaining Power of Buyers: Buyers have power when they can easily switch between competitors or demand better prices and quality. When buyers are few and buy in large quantities, they can exert significant influence over businesses.
- Threat of Substitute Products or Services: These are alternatives that can replace a business’s offerings. If substitutes are available and affordable, customers may switch, reducing demand for existing products.
- Industry Rivalry: The intensity of competition among existing firms in the industry. If rivalry is high, companies may engage in price wars, heavy advertising, or innovation battles, reducing overall profitability.
Porter’s 5 can be used as a baseline to create your digital marketing strategy. While you can’t solely rely on it, it give you an amazing outlook into how to assess the market itself which is vital.
Ways You Can Make The Best Use of Digital Marketing Frameworks
Tailoring strategy to fit your business goals is a must. You can customize your marketing campaigns to address your unique challenges, build on your strengths, and adapt to industry trends. Frameworks help analyze your business environment, audience, competitors, and resources, guiding you through a complete strategy.
Choosing the right framework based on your goals and resources is crucial for the success of your digital marketing campaign. You can adjust these frameworks to match your brand’s identity and your audience’s preferences, ensuring consistency, building connections, and staying flexible in changing markets.
Using multiple frameworks together creates a more well-rounded strategy. For example, combining SWOT analysis, Porter’s Five Forces, and the RACE model gives you insights into your strengths, competitive landscape, customer journeys, and long-term planning. The key is to make sure everything aligns and works toward a clear, unified direction.
And now, with that, you’re equipped with all the weapons in our arsenal. Good luck, and happy marketing!
