Many marketers today start their career without a qualification in marketing, often moving into the role straight from college or even from a sales career, therefore are not aware of the different marketing frameworks. And whilst experience is utterly irreplaceable, a good grounding in marketing principles is essential to the success of any marketing role.
Marketing has many evolving tactics, strategies, and innovations to get stuck into. It certainly keeps us on our toes.
However, so many options can become overwhelming. It can be easy for marketers to become distracted and lose sight of how to apply these to their main goals or objectives.
That’s where marketing frameworks come in; focusing the marketer on specific steps and stages to help them achieve their overall goal. With fewer distractions, wasted resource, and unnecessary budget spend.
If marketing frameworks are unfamiliar to you, these are 5 of our favourites to help you succeed in this ever-changing industry.
7Ps Marketing Mix
The 7Ps Marketing Mix is one of the most widely known, and used, marketing frameworks within the marketing industry. And is used to help determine a product or brand offering.
This framework is an evolution of the poplar 4Ps marketing mix, which focuses on product, price, place, and promotion.
7Ps, on the other hand, throws in some other elements to keep this framework up to date with modern consumers and marketers. These 7Ps include:
Product
What are you selling?
Price
How much does it cost?
Place
Where will you sell it?
Promotion
How will you sell, engage, and communicate with your audience?
People
Who is involved with the creation, promotion, sale, and distribution?
Process
How will you distribute or deliver to your customers?
Physical evidence
How do you prove to your audience that your business and product exists?
The beauty of the 7Ps Marketing Mix is how flexible it can be to a business’ needs. It can act as a checklist for businesses who are building their marketing strategy, whilst also evolving and growing as the business does.
Porter’s Five Forces
Instead of just focusing on the product or audience, Porter’s Five Forces concentrates on the outside influences and the competitive environment which can affect the profitability of a business or product.
The framework identifies five competitive forces which influence every industry and helps businesses to identify their strengths and weaknesses. These forces are:
Competition in the industry
What is the strength of your competitors in this industry? How many competitive businesses exist and what are their competitive strengths and weaknesses?
Potential of new entrants into the industry
Are there significant barriers to entry into the industry, or is it easy for newcomers to make an impact?
If entry into the industry is easy and cheap, then the potential for competitors to increase is high.
Power of suppliers
How easily can suppliers drive up costs within the industry? How many suppliers are you reliant on? Is it easy to switch suppliers?
The more suppliers available, the easier and cheaper it is to switch.
Power of customers
If there are a low amount of customers compared to competitors in an industry, then customers have significant power. This means they can easily switch to a competitor.
Identify your buyers, who they are, how much they spend, and how much would it cost for them to switch to a competitor.
Threat of substitute products
How likely are customers to find a substitute for doing what your business does? Do you offer a unique process or product, or one that can easily be replicated?
Porter’s Five Forces is particularly useful for new businesses and startups to understand the industry they are potentially entering. Or for established businesses to explore new industries to branch out into.
Pirate metrics
Pirate metrics, sometimes referred to as ‘AARRR’, offer a framework to categorise metrics depending on which area of the business you wish to measure.
These groups align neatly with customer lifecycle stages, meaning they can help marketers to identify where in the lifecycle they should focus their activity.
These stages include:
Acquisition
Where are your prospects discovering you? Is it via paid advertising, social media, organic search, word of mouth?
Activation
What journey did the potential customer take once they hit your website? Did they create an account, make a purchase, or sign up for a free trial?
Retention
How often do these customers engage with you? Retention can refer to coming back to your website or making another purchase.
Revenue
How are you making money from these customers? What are your conversion rates and customer lifetime value?
Referral
How likely are your customers to refer your business to others, including friends, family, and colleagues? This reduces acquisition costs as referred customers are further down the buying cycle and are more likely to become loyal customers.
STP
STP refers to segmentation, targeting, and positioning and is aimed at helping marketers to analyse their product offering and the way they communicate its benefits and value to their audience.
STP allows marketers to take large, anonymous audiences and define how their different products, or elements of their products, relate to consumer segments within this audience.
This helps marketers to understand how to position their products, communicate their value, and engage each segment.
The STP model is made of:
Segmentation
Segment your audience based on sets of criteria, such as their demographics, their behaviour, their lifestyle, and their psychographics.
Targeting
Now you have your audience segments, you can begin to target them. Identify the segments worth targeting based on the volume of potential customers, differentiation between other segments, accessibility, and ability to serve this segment.
Positioning
Now you can establish how best to position your product with these segments. This should be based on their needs, wants, and desires. But also by filling in the gaps where other competitors excel and fall short.
STEPPS
The secret to viral content is something that any brand would love to know. Fortunately, STEPPS is dedicated to creating the most engaging content possible.
The framework believes that viral content can be created by following six key elements:
Social currency
Identify who it is that your audience is trying to impress, and create content that is valuable to them. Thus, increasing the social standing that your audience has online.
Triggers
Incorporate a word, phrase, or image that is closely related to a business’s message, and will remind their audience of their product or brand.
Emotion
Consumers share content that makes them feel something. This is particularly prevalent in content that conjures up emotions of excitement and awe, which have been found to drive people to share more content.
Public
Consider if there is anything in your content that would stop others from sharing publicly. These could be sensitive topics, something that goes against your audience’s morals and values, or something NSFW.
Practical value
Consider your audience’s pain points and the information they may seek online, and address them directly. If this content is useful for your audience, they are more likely to share to help others in the same situation.
Stories
Storytelling is key to great content marketing. Audiences consume content easier when it’s incorporated into a story which can influence the way we think and feel.
Give your audience a story that they can tell others and ultimately share. But always remember to make your brand central to the storyline.
Image source – Cooler Insights
To conclude
Whichever framework you choose to use will depend on what works best for your business. We highly recommend you familiarise yourself with these to use and adapt to formulate your own that meets your business needs.