A Simplified 5-Step Marketing Strategy Framework

Marketing strategy can be complex. If you’re overwhelmed or underresourced, a simpler marketing framework may be all you need, at least for now.

There’s no one way to create a marketing strategy. That flexibility can be great, but it can also feel so overwhelming that we never start building one. And by the time we’re done, so much may have changed that it’s no longer relevant. Or, worst of all, we spend months building a world-class marketing strategy and then present it internally–and it just sits in a file folder
collecting digital dust.

Here’s the good news. There’s an excellent chance that your company doesn’t need a comprehensive marketing strategy. As often as things change, it’s probably better to iterate throughout the year instead of hoping your once-built behemoth of a plan accounted for all the unknown challenges ahead. Marketing strategies may have common elements, but there’s no checklist. If anything, the most important thing is that your strategy is documented. Not cemented. Documented.

We call this a framework because it provides the foundation you can build upon and a central structure you can build around. Let’s make this as simple as possible. At a minimum, your marketing framework should include:

Stephen Covey said it best. Begin with the end in mind. Documented goals will come up again later, so make sure they’re grounded in your business’s long-term objectives and that you have a baseline to measure success against. The easiest way to pressure test your marketing goals is to ask, Does achieving this goal get us closer to where we want to be as a company?

Take note, we’re documenting business goals here—not campaign goals. We’ll get to those later. For now, it’s important to focus on measuring what matters most in the big picture, especially if you’re short on resources.

Start your marketing strategy framework with one to three primary goals.

Sample Goals to Consider:

Gather our customers’ biggest challenges related to our product/service.
Build a quarterly report showing which pages on our website are viewed most.
Identify a list of dream prospects to target with highly personal touches each year.
Publish original thought leadership content in an industry publication.
Create a set of internal brand guidelines.
Find new advertising opportunities and eliminate underperforming ads.
Identify actionable ways our website can support sales efforts.
Track success metrics in every marketing or advertising campaign.

Growth Consultancies Provide Insight.
Once you’ve narrowed your focus by listing a few business goals, do what you can to make them SMART goals. Making goals Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Timely sets you and your entire organization up for success.

Believe it or not, many mid-size companies still market to just one audience—everyone. In those companies, we hear things like: this is how we’ve always done it or we already know what our customers want.

Defining your target audience(s) allows you to deliver more effective messaging (coming up next) where it’s most likely to have an impact (coming up after that).

RC Tip: Skip the traditional age, gender, education, and hobbies fields when building your first buyer personas. Instead, flag common job titles, talk to customer service about FAQs, ask sales to let you listen in on a few prospect pitches, and note the step-by-step journey and the change of mental state they must go through before becoming a customer.

Believe it or not, many mid-size companies still market to just one audience—everyone. In those companies, we hear things like: this is how we’ve always done it or we already know what our customers want.

Defining your target audience(s) allows you to deliver more effective messaging (coming up next) where it’s most likely to have an impact (coming up after that).

What’s Next?
Once you’ve defined your target audience in a general sense, you can dig deeper into the common motivations and decision-making factors that form buyer personas and help you map out the customer’s journey from awareness to action. Eventually, if you can build a customer advisory board, you’ll ensure a close connection to your target audience as their industry and their buying needs change–which they inevitably will.

RC Tip: Skip the traditional age, gender, education, and hobbies fields when building your first buyer personas. Instead, flag common job titles, talk to customer service about FAQs, ask sales to let you listen in on a few prospect pitches, and note the step-by-step journey and the change of mental state they must go through before becoming a customer.

Note the commonalities: As a growth consultancy, we’ve built our marketing messaging around our desire to help companies grow their business and the three primary ways we empower that growth. Each audience-centric theme focuses on what our clients need and their definition of success–not what the services we offer.

What’s Next?
Messaging is such an essential part of your marketing strategy. Once you’re ready to dig even deeper, it’s time to talk about Positioning, Value Proposition, Tagline, Brand Voice,
and Brand Tone.

RC Tip: Learn Why the Right Message is One of Three Reasons Content Succeeds

So, you’ve documented your goals, you’ve identified your target audience, and you know exactly what they need to hear. The fourth step in a simplified marketing strategy framework is determining the best ways to deliver your message, so it’s received when it matters most.

Think of publishing, distributing, and promoting your marketing messages across three parallel streams: owned channels, earned channels, and paid channels. A truly integrated marketing strategy leverages all three ways of reaching your target audience. This is a crucial step if you want customers to experience your brand in a consistent and coordinated way, whether they visit your website (owned), read about you in an industry publication (earned), or stumble upon an ad campaign (paid).

Companies waste tons of time and money creating marketing assets that, at best, may be published once, poorly distributed (once), and poorly promoted (once). Yet, at the same time, those companies struggle to maintain a presence on social media, via email, at events, in print, and on their website.

Very few companies challenge themselves by asking,
“Which channels should we really be using (and not using)?”
What they should be asking is, “What’s working?” “What’s not?” and
“What should we do differently?”

What’s Next?
Organization and structure are the keys to managing an effective multi-channel marketing strategy. Suppose you want to integrate advertising, email marketing, direct mail, events, social media, webinars, podcasts, blogs, white papers, infographics, or videos. In that case, you will need a content plan, an editorial calendar, and some technology tools for project management, automation, and data analysis–which brings us to our final step in this simplified marketing strategy framework.