Digital marketing delivers excellent returns on investment for every industry, but marketing costs differ by avenue. Pay-per-click advertising can deliver ROIs of 200% to 800%, but almost half of businesses get the most value from search engine optimization instead. To use your ad budget wisely and maximize ROI, your business needs a digital marketing strategy framework.
What Is a Digital Marketing Strategy Framework?
A digital marketing strategy is a plan that outlines your company’s goals for online advertising, the target metrics you want to achieve, and the steps to reach your objectives. A detailed framework can help you overcome obstacles and make intelligent decisions.
To understand what a digital marketing strategy is and how it works, think of a construction blueprint. Blueprints help you visualize the project, revealing potential problems and showing you what to prioritize for amazing results. Similarly, a marketing strategy framework can make your advertising more valuable, effective, and profitable.
How Do You Create a Marketing Strategy Framework?
Skilled architects create unique blueprints for every construction project. That way, the finished home checks every box on the client’s wishlist. When you build a marketing strategic framework for your business — instead of copying one from a template — you get a better fit for your budget, products, target customers, and business goals.
1. Choose or Review Your Marketing Model
Before you can draw up a detailed digital marketing strategy, map out the broad strokes. Start by choosing a marketing model that offers the best foundation for your campaign objectives:
- STP: Segmentation, targeting, and positioning is a customer-centric model that divides your market into target groups and helps you reach each segment with the right message.
- Seven Ps: This business strategy focuses on your product, pricing, and promotional options, as well as the places you sell (e.g., e-commerce, brick-and-mortar, or both).
- Porter’s Five Forces: This model helps you predict and adapt to advertising challenges from competitors, buyer sentiment, alternative products, market barriers, and other outside forces.
- AARRR: The acquisition, activation, retention, revenue, and referral model looks at customer lifetime value and acquisition costs to help you maximize advertising profitability.
- Hook: The hook model relies on understanding your audience, such as internal and external triggers, actions, rewards, and the factors that drive brand attachment.
Each model offers pros and cons for different industries. Small businesses may get better results from the STP or Seven Ps strategy. Manufacturers and B2B organizations often use AARRR. Porter’s Five Forces is an excellent choice for highly competitive markets or large urban centers.
2. Define Campaign Goals
Clear goals are like a compass for your digital marketing strategy framework. First, decide the main purpose of the campaign, such as capturing more leads, increasing brand recognition, boosting website traffic, or improving sales.
Set specific digital marketing targets. Examples include:
- Reduce bounce rate by 50%
- Increase lead generation from landing pages by 20% (or 200 signups)
- Lower PPC costs by 25% without lowering traffic
- Increase the ratio of qualified leads or conversions from clicks by 20%
- Generate $25,000 in e-commerce sales over the next quarter
- Rank in the top five for your ten most important search terms
Why are specific figures necessary for the planning phase? They’re the only way your team can measure campaign effectiveness. Performance indicators tell you which avenues deliver the most value for your business.
3. Identify Current Challenges or Problems
Keep your company’s operations in mind when setting digital marketing goals. E-commerce stores have starkly different advertising needs than CNC machining businesses. Well-known brands have resources and search advantages that startups don’t (yet).
Set aside space in your digital marketing strategy framework to list your company’s largest advertising challenges. Here are some common difficulties:
- Lots of clicks but few conversions
- High bounce rate
- Reputational problems because of past employees
- Too much competition in the local market
- Poor search rankings or low page visits
- Difficulty fighting established brands for keywords
All of these issues have solutions. Openly discussing the problems with your current marketing strategy helps you know where to start. Sometimes, the fix is as simple as making web pages load faster or look better on mobile devices.
4. Analyze Target Audience Behavior
Your ad spend has limits, so it’s essential to know where your traffic comes from and which channels drive the most revenue. You can learn a lot by analyzing your target audience’s online behavior. There are many sources of accurate customer data:
- Facebook Audience Insights
- Google Analytics
- Brand surveys
- Your CRM or sales software
- Website metrics
- Social media feedback
You shouldn’t put all your eggs in one basket, but if email marketing drives the most conversions for your business, it should be a major pillar in any campaign. On the other hand, if your sales funnel requires informational searches before purchase intent, high-quality content marketing is a must.
5. Create Up-to-Date Solutions
To stay ahead of the pack in a digital environment, your marketing must be agile and attention-grabbing. Don’t underestimate the impact of trends on a customer’s decision-making process:
- Social media marketing
- YouTube and video content
- Storytelling instead of bullet-point benefits
- Edgy or irreverent branding
- FAQs for web pages
Working with SEO or PPC experts can also help you keep on top of annual changes to search engine best practices or paid search techniques.
6. Set Reachable Objectives
Make sure your digital marketing strategy is reasonable. Don’t pull performance targets out of thin air. Base them on accurate metrics and your organization’s honest capabilities.
For example, small businesses are unlikely to win head-to-head in PPC bids against national brands, but there are cost-effective workarounds. Local SEO or high-value, low-volume keywords can be a game-changer for small business marketing efforts.
7. Plan Effective Content
Attractive content and marketing success go hand in hand, so it makes sense to include content plans in your digital marketing strategy framework. Prioritize the content avenues that are most likely to motivate your target audience:
- Blog posts
- Landing pages
- Social media posts
- Buyer’s guides
- Long-form articles
- Marketing emails
For greater organization, use a separate content calendar and add a link in your marketing strategy framework.
8. Put Your Framework in Writing
A digital marketing strategy is more effective as a document, not just a meeting or brainstorming session. Being able to refer to your strategy (and share it with employees) helps you keep your priorities clear when making marketing decisions. Divide long-term goals into smaller objectives and check them off as your team hits targets.
9. Perform Ongoing Analysis
We recommend reviewing your campaign progress, keyword performance, and website metrics as part of an SEO weekly or monthly checklist. Look at key performance indicators to understand what’s working, what isn’t, and why.
Your marketing strategy isn’t set in stone. Use the information you gather to continually improve your results. Surprises can be good, too, potentially giving you the opportunity to rank high for overlooked keywords.
Does Your Business Need Help Designing a Marketing Strategic Framework?
Creating a digital marketing strategy takes effort, but the returns are impossible to ignore. What if you’re too busy to create or manage marketing? Outsource the heavy lifting. We’re happy to handle planning, optimization, metrics, content, and PPC management.
At Digital Neighbor, we’re experts in digital marketing for small businesses, retail and e-commerce, real estate, healthcare, manufacturing, and many other industries. Explore our case studies to see how a digital marketing strategy framework has helped our customers stand out online. Let our friendly team help you set marketing goals and reach your target audience effectively – get started with a consultation today!
