Plan for Success: 7 SMART Digital Marketing Objectives for 2023
Digital Marketing 4 min read
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Home Blog Digital Marketing3 Basic Digital Strategy Frameworks to Guide Your Planning
Digital Marketing 4 min read
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Do you know these basic marketing frameworks like the back of your hand?
The practice of digital marketing has grown a lot in the last three decades as the number of people surfing the web surged over the years. From the era of keyword stuffing and spammy backlinks, it evolved into a more sophisticated practice, using big data, personalization, and a whole host of different strategies that involve planning, audit, communications, branding, and more.
Put simply, the practice has become more complex than ever; and without a solid digital strategy framework, you’ll get left behind. With all the aspects you need to keep an eye on when engaging in digital marketing, it’s easy to miss some elements that can make or break business success. For this reason, one of the most important things you must do before delving into the nitty-gritty of strategies and campaigns is to have a clearly defined digital strategy framework.
Our very own team uses a scalable, data-driven digital marketing strategy framework that we developed from our experiences with different client-brands through the years. If you’re still trying your hand on systematizing your marketing process, the good news is that you don’t have to start a digital strategy framework from scratch. There are basic models you can pattern yours after.
First things first, what exactly is a digital marketing framework or digital strategy framework? In simple terms, it’s a document that outlines the flow of the marketing process, identifying critical requirements and key touchpoints. It ensures you miss nothing in the complex process.
There are many different types of digital strategy frameworks, tackling different aspects of the practice, from communications to planning to strategy. Some integrate all, while others target a specific aspect. When creating your own, you must know your business needs and priorities to come up with a model that suitably accommodates your objectives. Use these basic digital marketing models below to guide you through the process of creating yours.
Created by learning platform Smart Insights, RACE is a mnemonic that stands for Reach, Act, Convert, Engage. These four steps refer to online marketing activities you must have as you engage with customers in different channels in different stages of their journey.
What is it good for?
At the core, RACE Planning will help you draw up an effective digital marketing strategy as it identifies key activities for each step in the customer journey.
Photo of the RACE model courtesy of Smart Insights
How can you adopt it?
Plan your action steps for RACE:
This is one of the most used digital strategy frameworks, showing the journey customers take when engaging with your brand, starting with finding out your products and services to buying from you. The marketing funnel has four levels:
In an e-commerce platform, these stages are highly trackable. A potential customer visits your website (awareness), clicks on a product and reads through the description (interest), adds an item to their cart (consideration), and checks out (action).
What is it good for?
While RACE Planning identifies your key action points in the digital marketing process, the Marketing Funnel can summarize for you the customer journey, and therefore helps you identify roadblocks to conversion. This informs your digital marketing planning framework, enabling you to list down opportunities in leading people to your desired action.
For example, if you’re getting only less than half of the people who added the item to their cart, you may have to send automated messages to remind them of products in their shopping bag. This is an opportunity that may yield the results you’re looking for.
Graphic of marketing funnel as seen in Sprout Social’s article ‘How to Build a Social Media Marketing Funnel That Works‘
How can you adopt it?
With the funnel, draw up your action steps for each stage:
The Flywheel, a model created by Hubspot, puts customers at the heart of all business processes. It’s better understood in contrast with the marketing funnel. In the funnel, the customer is the end-all-be-all. In the Flywheel, it’s the driving force. It’s the very thing that “spins” or energizes the entire strategy.
With customers at the center of the digital strategy framework, they’re surrounded by sales, marketing, and support teams, each one aiming to enhance the purchase experience, which largely includes minimizing “frictions” or anything that slows down the spin of the flywheel. Similar to other models, it shows the buyer journey, summarized in three phases:
What’s it good for?
Because the Flywheel model is designed to create synergy among business teams, it minimizes gaps in handoffs. Moreover, it speeds up digital marketing because it reduces friction at every stage of the customer journey.
How can you adopt it?
These are some action steps you can take to adopt the Flywheel:
Our very own adoption of the Flywheel in the Propelrr digital strategy framework puts the objectives – both your business’ and customers – in the center of our approach as the force that will dictate the movement of the various levers. From there, we take a multi-pronged or multi-channel approach to achieving and communicating your objectives and brand message, and then integrating these into the strategy and execution.
These executions, once rolled out to your audiences or customers, should then provide the most optimal customer experience – guaranteeing a pleasant and seamless customer journey that will keep them deligthed with your brand and business.
The right digital strategy frameworks can help you come up with better strategies and make success consistent. As you choose or create your own, at the core these are the things you must remember:
What do you think about these digital strategy frameworks? Tell us about your insights in the comments section below or talk to us on our social media channels Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.
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