Successful marketing is about frameworks, not campaigns

I’ve spent the last two and half decades as a marketer, with a focus on digital. In the beginning, digital actually meant anything online or website as the remit was very broad, e.g. Any of the new stuff around the internet, online advertising, paid search, email and search engine optimisation that nobody else knew about or wanted responsibility for!

This traditional view of the role also encompassed creative disciplines such as copywriting and image manipulation, as well as testing like UX (User experience) and CRO (conversion rate optimisation). It was implied that everything you did could be tracked and success evidenced, it was the birth of data analytics and performance marketing.

Add social and content marketing to the mix and the complexity becomes onerous, leading to teams of marketers with functional responsibility only.

In my opinion, digital is now a term that transcends technology and is viewed as the marketing discipline that is responsible for marshalling all these disparate functions to deliver cohesive marketing operations.

To be a true digital marketer, however, you need to have the right mindset. it’s not just about doing stuff, it’s doing the right stuff for a reason and aiming for the desired outcome. Therefore, you need a methodology or framework as a backbone to provide the required structure to this complexity. Marketers love simplifying complexity with models, it provides the necessary comfort to position their activities and efforts in the context of the overall business objectives.

The conversion funnel is my preferred model, and I truly believe that if any of your marketing activities or marketing spend is not supporting customers moving further through the funnel, you shouldn’t be doing it!

It’s all about Customer Lifecycle marketing, and optimising Recency | Frequency | Monetary values to get them to buy regularly, buy more often and spend more. Segmentation becomes critical, as you cannot send compelling communications if you don’t know who you’re talking to and what motivates them.

Marketing is fundamentally very simple, find out what people want and then give it to them. As long as you can do that at a profit, you’ve got a viable business. The same concept can be applied to each interaction you have with a customer, does the planned activity grow the conversation or their awareness of the product/brand. If yes, then you have a viable contact strategy that is aligned to business revenue targets.

So, it’s not just about martech tools, promotions or big brand campaigns, unless those activities are aligned with the marketing framework that supports the marketing strategy.

Good luck with the framework for your own company, once you’ve got the methodology and process rigour in place, choose the right martech to support your vision that enables you to do more with less!