When you really get down to it, you will end up with two types of marketing: The type designed to get your name out there or build your brand, and the type designed to encourage prospects to take action or respond. Marketing is either branding or direct! The type you need all depends on the industry your business is in, where your business is in terms of life cycle and your business’s position in the marketplace.
Branding, or brand building, would work well with older more established companies, who already have their piece of the market share set in terms of revenue. They are mostly trying to keep their name out there to protect market share against equally big and established brands.
Smaller companies should focus more on marketing practices that would point to high-quality leads, sales opportunities and eventually new customers. Direct marketing should garner direct results! Potential consumers need to be connected to your company, usually through some offer or content that helps them along in their journey. Then they have to engage, be interested and helped by your messages, stories, content and offers. The longer your potential consumers don’t hear from you, the more likely they will be engaged or connected with your competition. You need to be working hard to educate them all throughout their journey, and this almost always means providing a wide variety of content delivered in context to their journey stage, role, industry and specific challenge they’re facing.
To achieve all this a company needs to develop a marketing framework, one that directly complements that company's chosen marketing plan. By definition, a marketing framework is a visual representation or a logical flow of a company's marketing plan. It contains several components that work together as a whole to bring your marketing vision to reality. Listening to voices like Kevin Miller with his podcasts and other media could help to guide the average company owner towards the right way to construct at least a template for their marketing framework. Using analysis, companies would then develop long-term business goals. Nested within those core goals are shorter-term goals. Then the marketing framework would organize those long and short term goals into a well-defined set of stages and processes. So what is the actionable methodology behind the creation of a marketing framework?
- First, companies should create their main objective. This is the ultimate goal that a company should want to accomplish through their marketing efforts. If companies have several objectives, such as social media marketing, traditional marketing, and online advertising, then different frameworks should be created for each objective.
- Next, companies should decide what their measures would be. The next component in a marketing framework are the measures -- how will these companies undertake their marketing efforts to meet their goals. They should come up with as many measures as they can. For example, if the marketing framework is focusing on social media, creating a Twitter account, posting on Facebook, using social bookmarking to promote articles and blogging would all be considered different measures to be handled differently, possibly assigned to more than one person.
- Companies should make sure to plan out their methods. These methods are the interpretation of how a company is going to carry out its measures. Using the social media example again, companies should decide how they will use Twitter to help market their company. They should plan out how often they will post, what those posts will contain and how they plan to build their audience of followers. It is advised for companies to do this for every method they have.
- It would make sense for companies to define how their framework will be carried out. This is typically referred to as operations. This component involves which departments or employees will be responsible for implementing the methods on the framework. If the company has a small staff, then the owners should decide how much time will be spent on each of the measures and how much they, themselves, would try to accomplish them all.
There happens to be many different types of marketing frameworks. These include but are not limited to: STP Marketing Model, Pirate Metrics, The Hook Model, 7Ps Marketing Mix and Porter’s Five Forces.There are a number of factors that will influence which framework works best for a company. The following aspects of a company's business should be examined in order to determine which marketing framework should be chosen: What are the top priorities of the business? What is the role of marketing within the organization? How is success defined and measured within the marketing? What is the marketing department capable of, and what improvements would the company like to make? Where would the company like to see the most impact due to marketing efforts and what’s the easiest way to ensure that impact?
An actionable marketing framework is said to be akin to a compass. It helps direct the steps companies take on their marketing journey and helps companies to deal with what is happening in the real world. With a proven marketing strategy framework, companies will never be at a loss for actions to take to overcome hurdles in marketing. Remember marketing is effective only when all the elements of the framework are present. Mapping out everything requires thoughtful planning and deliberate strategy, which companies can only maximize through a framework.