The 9 Most Powerful Marketing Frameworks For Your Business

Modern marketers need creativity, data analysis, and even project management skills. Adding people to your efforts can multiply results or cause frustration. Which marketing frameworks can unite your team and make life easier?

Here’s a short list of the best marketing frameworks and how to use them.

What are marketing frameworks?

It’s a template or illustration showing how you’ll act on your marketing plan, deliver content and reach goals.

Avoid random ideas, shiny objects, and reinventing the wheel. Use a proven framework. It can cut weeks, even months off the time needed to discover your audience and how to reach them.

Great marketing frameworks can help:

• You and your team communicate and stay focused
• Organize assets like guides, templates, and tools
• Define marketing roles while training and moving people between them
• Limit errors and the redoing of work
• Predict customer behavior and revenue
• Increase your marketing effectiveness and profitability

Here are the best marketing frameworks for you to consider using:

1. STP Marketing Model

Use this to create more personalized, relevant content and ads:

• Segmentation – Divide prospects into categories or segments. Create a profile for each.
• Targeting – Select segments with the most profit potential.
• Positioning – Make your products more attractive to each targeted segment.

2. The 7 P’s Marketing Mix

These P’s stand for: 
Your Product, Price, Place sold, Promotion methods, People making/distributing/selling, Process for delivery, and Physical evidence (customer experience.) 
Leverage this checklist to set goals and prioritize where your company needs improvement.

3. Porter’s 5 Forces Model

Use these 5 external profit-affecting factors to evaluate your company, and boost strengths and profits, while eliminating weaknesses:

• Competitive Rivalry – How many and how strong are your competitors?
• Supplier Power – How many suppliers are there? Which are the best and why? How much do they cost?
• Buyer Power – How can customers influence your company’s decisions?
• Threat of Substitution – How likely are competitors to match or beat your product?
• Threat of New Entry – How strong is the barrier to new competitors appearing?

Here are the best newer frameworks.

4. Lean Analytics Stages

1. Empathy – Listen to people. Find a problem you can solve. Create a minimum viable product (MVP).
2. Stickiness – Create a base of engaged, returning customers with a low attrition rate.
3. Virality – Before spending on ads, focus on organic growth (getting existing customers to tell them).
4. Revenue – How much do you spend to acquire customers? Reach initial revenue goals.
5. Scale – Increase revenue from your market while looking for new markets.

5. The Hook

In his book, Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products, Nir Eyal shows you how this works.

There are Facebook addicts and Candy Crush addicts. Want more examples? Search for any
successful product or company name plus “addict.” Bored people turn to Facebook. Others “swipe the stress away” with Candy Crush.

There are 4 steps to making habit-forming products:

• Trigger – Create a trigger so users think of your product first because it satisfies a negative emotion.
• Action – Make it as easy as possible, motivating people to act. Then dazzle them with an experience.
• Variable Reward – Slot machines and lotteries don’t give the same reward each time. Instagram shows a different picture gallery each time you open it.
• Investment – After multiple triggers, actions, and rewards: ask for time, data, effort, social capital, or money. Users can sign up, like, or share items.

6. Pirate Metrics (AARRR)

Serial entrepreneur David McClure’s model improves your customers’ journey. Each letter represents a step in a marketing funnel, progressing from top to bottom:

• Acquisition – Where did they find you? Ads, search, blog, etc.
• Activation – What steps did they take at your site? Account signup, free giveaway, etc.
• Retention – Do they come back? How often?
• Revenue – How do you earn money from customers? How do you measure your efforts?
• Referral – Happy customers tell others, lowering your customer acquisition cost.

7 . The ICE Score

Sean Ellis recommends 3 simple questions to evaluate the growth potential of any marketing channel or idea:

• Impact – What will be the impact if this decision works?
• Confidence – How confident am I this will work?
• Effort – How much time and money will this take to get done?

8. STEPPS

Jonah Burger describes his formula for creating contagious content in the book Contagious: Why Things Catch On:

• Social Currency – Make people feel included. 
• Triggers – Frequently remind others about your product.
• Emotion – Use high-arousal emotions like anger rather than others like sadness.
• Public – Make your content public.
• Practical Value – Create useful content.
• Stories – We’re wired to respond to memorable, relatable stories.

9. They Ask, You Answer

How did Marcus Sheridan use this method to go from near failure to becoming a world-leading pool company?
Clearly answer all, (yes all), customer questions on your website. Sheridan put questions in 5 categories, giving these recommendations:

• Price – Don’t just give numbers, explain factors causing your prices to go up or down.
• “Best Of” Lists – Tell people the important options they should consider before buying.
• Problems – Openly share your product’s disadvantages and who shouldn’t buy.
• Reviews – For everything related to what you sell, give expert reviews, whether you sell it or not.
• Comparisons – Offer apples-to-apples similarities between products to help buyers decide.

What do all of these marketing frameworks mean for you?

Choose one or more of these methods based on your goals, how marketing works in your business, what you’re capable of doing, and how you measure success.

The greatest marketing frameworks are the ones you complete with massive action.