What Are Marketing Frameworks?

Every marketer knows that a great marketing strategy begins as a plan. You do a lot of hard work identifying your target audience, where they spend time, how to reach them, and communicating to them that they need or want your product or service. A marketing framework takes all this hard work you did and puts it together in one visual place so that you can share it with others on your team or at your company and make it much easier to execute. There are several different types of marketing frameworks. We will tell you about some popular marketing framework examples and how to choose the best one for your business.

What is a Marketing Framework?

You wouldn’t start building a house without a blueprint, would you? Well, your market framework is the blueprint of your marketing strategy. So, before you sit down to create your marketing strategy, consider your marketing framework. The marketing framework is the visual representation of how marketing gets done in your business. It details how you will execute your marketing plan and deliver your content to your audience. Sometimes, it is called the marketing strategy framework.

The Benefits of a Marketing Strategy Framework

A marketing framework is meant to help your marketing team function at its highest level. There are several benefits to creating a marketing framework, including:

• Improving the overall marketing strategy, which in turn benefits the growth and success of your company
• Keeping you and your team focused and on the same page
• Creating a home for all the templates, guides, tools, and assets that make your marketing strategy and everyone on your team might need to access
• Establishes approved verbiage used by the organization throughout packaging, social media, newsletters, etc.
• Allows you to clearly communicate and designate roles and responsibilities for various team members, or transfer people between roles if necessary
• Saves time by making expectations clear and avoiding redos or errors

Different Types of Marketing Framework Models

Over time, many marketing frameworks models have been developed. The following are a few of the most common and popular examples of marketing frameworks:

The 7Ps Marketing Mix

Perhaps the widely used marketing framework is the 7Ps Marketing Mix. It is popular because it helps you analyze and optimize every facet of your business to ensure success, whether you are just starting a new company or simply want to evaluate your current process and optimize campaign performance. 

The 7Ps include:

• Product: What you are selling.
• Price: How much the product costs.
• Place: Where the product is sold.
• Promotion: How you share your product with your audience.
• People: Who is involved in the production, promotion, and distribution of your product.
• Process: How the product is delivered to the customer.
• Physical Evidence: How you prove to customers that your business exists.

The STP Marketing Model

In STP, S stands for segmentation, which is dividing your audience into different sections; T stands for targeting, which is determining who will want or need your product the most; and positioning, how you make that product the most appealing to your target audience.

The STP model is a top-down approach that focuses on getting highly personalized and applicable information to an extremely targeted audience. If your product is fairly specific, this might be the right marketing framework example for you to use.

Porter’s Five Forces

Many marketing frameworks focus mostly on the product or service and/or the target customers, but Porter’s Five Forces is a different type of model. It looks mostly at the outside factors that could affect the success of your business, including:

• Supplier Power: This includes how many other suppliers exist, what differentiates them from yours, and the cost of their product compared to yours.
• Buyer Power: This is the customer’s ability to influence decisions made by the company.
• Threat of Substitution: This compares your product to the others on the market.
• Threat of New Entry: What barriers might you face entering the market?
• Competitive Rivalry: What are some other outside factors that might affect how your product performs compared to the competition?

Pirate Metrics (AARRR)

This is one of the more modern marketing frameworks and works especially well for e-commerce businesses. (Don’t worry, there is no need to set sail!) Pirate Metrics was developed by serial startup founder Dave McClure and shows you how customers travel along their buying journeys and which areas might use some improvement. Let’s break down AARRR:

• Acquisition: This is how leads find you. You might use website visitor tracking to determine how your audience is arriving at your site. Is it via search engines, Instagram ads, a blog, an influencer, etc.?
• Activation: This is the step the lead took once they arrived at your website. It might be giving you their email address in exchange for a discount on their first purchase, signing up for an account, etc.
• Retention: Once that lead leaves your site, do they return? How often?
• Revenue: How do you earn money from your clients? You can review data like conversion rates, shopping cart abandonment or size, and the customer lifetime value.
• Referral: When customers are happy with your product or service, they will tell other people, and this means more customers. This is great for business because it means you have to spend less money attracting new customers via marketing campaigns.

How to Choose the Best Marketing Model for Your Business

There is no one “best” marketing framework that will fit every business. The right marketing framework for your business depends on you, the marketer, your target audience, your product or service, and other factors, including:

• Your business goals
• The role of marketing within your company
• How you define and measure the success of your marketing campaigns
• The capabilities of your marketing department
• Areas where marketing is most necessary in your company

The best marketing framework for your company might be one of the examples mentioned above, a combination of them all, one we didn’t include here, or even one you create yourself! The important thing is finding a marketing framework that fits your business.