Discover how to create a simple marketing strategy framework to help you engage with your target audience in a way that naturally leads to more sales.
You know that without marketing, you won’t be in business for long. But there are so many ways to market that you find yourself overwhelmed instead of taking action. This is why we want you to understand how to create a simple marketing strategy framework that takes away all of the indecision and allows you to showcase your business and connect with your ideal clients in a meaningful way.
Join our Marketing Methodology Workshop to Get a Copy of The Annual Trello Board & Your Free Content Planning Grid.
Introduction to a Marketing Strategy Framework
At Encore Empire, we like to shine a light on the fact that marketing is simply communication. While this is true, your first step to success is understanding what to communicate, to whom, and when. That’s where marketing strategies come into play. And because marketing is required for your business as a whole and for every service or offer, a framework is required to keep things straight.
What is a Marketing Strategy Framework?
To answer this question, we first need to understand what a strategy is. A strategy is a plan of action to achieve a major or overall aim (goal).
Next, we need to understand what a framework is. A framework is a basic structure underlying a system, concept, or text. Frameworks are what we use to organize multi-faceted projects. Marketing for any business is definitely a multi-faceted project! To effectively execute a multi-faceted project, you will need good time management skills.
When we’re looking at marketing a business, we need to take into consideration all the things that require their own marketing strategy. We’ve broken them down into two major categories:
Brand Awareness
Introduction to The Owner and/or Team
Company Values, Mission, and Vision
Who The Company Serves
How The Company Serves
Each Offer or Service
Lead magnets
Paid Offers
Products
Services
In order to create a strong know-like-trust factor for your business, your potential customers need to know all about your brand and what your business stands for. Additionally, each offer or service you promote requires its own marketing funnel and marketing strategy.
Because there are so many different aspects of your business that you need to communicate to your audience, creating a marketing strategy framework allows you to build-in efficiency. It allows you to follow a plan within a plan while maintaining brand consistency.
What do we mean by following a plan within a plan?
To generate a strong brand identity, the best way to attract new customers is to ensure your marketing includes brand awareness campaigns. It’s through these campaigns that your audience gets to know you, like you, and trust you.
You’ll also need to create marketing campaigns for every one of your offers. These campaigns are the offer marketing plans within the brand awareness marketing plan. When done well, your offer plans will include brand awareness.
The Difference Between a Marketing Strategy Framework and a Content Marketing Framework
A marketing strategy framework will give you the overall strategy you will use in your marketing efforts. This framework will apply to all of your marketing plans.
A content marketing framework will illustrate when, where, and how you will use content in the marketing of your business in support of your marketing goals across all your target segments. Once you implement your strategy(ies), you’ll be able to identify the key performance indicators, such as conversion rates, and track the metrics from your marketing activities to determine whether or not each strategy is working. There’s nothing better than the physical evidence data provides to fully understand what your next step should be.
Why is a Marketing Strategy Framework Important?
The importance of a marketing strategy framework cannot be overstated. Frameworks allow you to build your plan once and use it repeatedly, which helps streamline your operations and eliminate decision fatigue.
What happens after you’ve implemented the strategy we teach at our Marketing Methodology Workshop?
It will streamline your content and marketing activities so you know you’re attracting the right people who are more likely to say “Yes” to taking the next step with you.
You’ll finally have the clarity you need to effectively communicate what you have to offer, who it’s for, and what solution it provides. This clarity will transform your marketing.
If you’re tired of being pulled every which way by the latest online trends, you’ll be happy to know that this method releases you from the grip of shiny object syndrome!
Once implemented, you’ll always have a clear direction and action plan to follow.
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What Happens When You Don’t Have a Marketing Strategy Framework
The marketing strategy framework we teach creates a repeatable system to streamline your efforts. When you don’t have a repeatable system, you may experience the following:
- It’s more likely that you’ll over-commit yourself by doing “all the things” to try to reach your revenue goals which equals burnout.
- You’re always second-guessing yourself—you don’t have an easy way to gauge whether or not your content is bringing in qualified leads.
- By focusing on one-to-one calls, you’re limited to how many sales you can make—there’s only so much time in a day. We teach you how to use a one-to-many model and leverage your precious time.
How to Develop Your Marketing Strategy Framework
There are many types of marketing strategy frameworks that you can find by performing a quick online search. Hubspot shares some in this article. However, we believe most are missing the most critical component of marketing success - market research. While big companies hire marketing teams to perform market research, as a small business owner, you need to understand your market inside and out.
During our free Marketing Methodology Workshop, we teach attendees our simple 3-step marketing strategy framework:
- Begin With The End In Mind
- The A-B-C Method of Converting Prospects to Clients
- How to Build a Streamlined, Effective, Flexible Marketing System
What we teach includes how to connect with your audience on an emotional level and how to determine the gap in the market that you can fill using the following valuable insights:
- Know Your Ideal Client Avatar (ICA)
- Connect with your audience on an emotional level.
- How to perform market research to get to know your ideal client
- Use your ideal client’s words in your marketing so they get the feeling that you really understand them and can help them.
- Connect with your audience on an emotional level.
- Know Your Competition
- Identify the gap in the market that you can fill.
- How to perform market research to get to know who your competition is and what their focus is. Answer these questions:
- What is everyone talking about?
- What is missing in industry discussions and in the way your competition serves the market based on what you learned from your ICA research?
- How to perform market research to get to know who your competition is and what their focus is. Answer these questions:
- Identify the gap in the market that you can fill.
During our workshop, we cover the following:
Reverse Engineering
Before you can create a successful marketing strategy, you must know what your ideal client most wants. You must be able to answer the following questions about your ideal client:
- What are their pain points?
- What are their short-term goals?
- What are their long-term goals?
- What are their big dreams?
Creating buyer personas that include the answers to these questions is a great way to categorize and segment your target market.
To be successful, we need to meet our prospects where they are. “Where they are” shifts as external factors create change in their personal lives and in the world. In recent years, many countries have experienced recessions that greatly impacted their populations and affected consumer behavior. Your messaging needs to shift from year to year and address what’s going on to stay relevant.
Each of your offers must be relevant to your ideal customer and lead them to the result they want.
When developing a marketing strategy for an offer or service, you can reverse-engineer a step-by-step plan for leading them from where they are to where they want to be. Fully understanding what your prospects need requires validating that with them.
We teach you all of this during our five days together in the Marketing Methodology Workshop.
B2B Versus B2C Content Marketing Strategy
The type of business you have dictates which social networks you will focus your content marketing on. If you have a B2B business (Business to Business), the marketing channels you might want to utilize will be blog posts, podcasts, and YouTube. LinkedIn might be the right social media platform for you to connect with the right people and create posts, articles, and possibly a newsletter.
You want to leverage evergreen content and search engines because your target customers are most likely too busy running their businesses to be hanging out on social media as much as consumers do. Search Engine Optimization, in particular, is a powerful tool to implement for your business as it allows your prospects to find you when they’re searching for help.
If you have a B2C business (Business to Consumer), your focus will be on social posts on the platforms that your ideal clients most often spend time on, as well as blogs, YouTube & Pinterest. Not all of them! Just what you can manage.
While we can’t prescribe the best platforms for your business until we get to know you, your digital marketing strategy framework will always depend on where your ideal clients are most likely to be reached. You also want to ensure that you factor in what works for you. You must enjoy what you’re doing or hire team members to manage your marketing on social media platforms. If you’re unable to maintain consistency, your efforts will be wasted. Following these best practices will help you create the framework that will bring you efficiency and success.
Topic Categories
One of the biggest struggles entrepreneurs face is knowing what to post, when, and where. Topic categories are one way to help keep you on track. Topic categories are industry-specific categories and are one element of your foundational business strategy. They allow you to organize your content in a way that ensures you touch on the most important topics in your industry. They also keep your messaging focused and relevant to ensure a fantastic customer experience from beginning to end.
We suggest 5 - 7 topic categories and have provided you with examples below:
Encore Empire’s topic categories are:
- Business Development
- Mindset
- Sales & Marketing
- Productivity
- Metrics
- Systems & Setup
- Finance & Accounting
A copywriter may have the following topic categories:
- Brand Voice
- ICA Language
- The Power of Storytelling
- Content Marketing
If you have not identified topic categories for your business yet, we highly recommend that you do so. During our Marketing Methodology Workshop, we go into detail about how to identify the best topic categories for your business. We work with you side-by-side and answer your questions as they come up so you can take specific action and walk away with your custom strategic marketing framework.
Your topic categories are what will pave the way for you to be able to develop your repeatable system. Remember, the system is going to give you the freedom you need to know that your marketing is reaching the right people who want and need what you have to offer
Annual Planning
Annual marketing planning requires you to map the client journey inside the ecosystem of your business. We teach you how to outline your conversion events for the year, which will help determine your annual marketing plan.
But first, what is a conversion event?
When we think of a “conversion event,” most people think of a workshop, a webinar, or a summit, but there are so many different types of conversion events. A conversion event is any intentional activity meant to bring in sales. Examples of conversion events are:
- Podcast Interviews
- Consultation Calls
- Giveaways
- Collaborations or Joint Ventures
Quarterly Planning
Quarterly content planning includes everything from social media posts to email marketing to blog posts and podcasting or videos. Because only 3% of your target market is ready to buy at any given time, a strong content strategy is what’s needed to nurture the 97% until they’re ready to buy.
Whether you own a B2B business or a B2C business, your topic categories, your ideal client’s goals, and your conversion events combined will inform the topics you need to focus on and when. The difference will be which social media platforms and offline platforms you use depending on your business model. This is where clarity comes in and helps you identify specific goals that your content marketing can help you achieve. Understanding where you’re leading your audience based on their needs creates a level of freedom and fun in marketing that you will absolutely love!
It all starts with the goals and desires of your ideal clients - we can’t overstate the importance of this. Until you understand what they most want, you’ll be spinning your wheels without gaining any traction.
H2 - Traits of an Effective Marketing Strategy Framework
- Ensures Your Marketing Efforts are Strategic - Without intention and a solid strategy, you’ll end up posting for the sake of posting, or worse, creating a disjointed brand message. Because confused minds don’t buy, clarity and consistency are essential. We create clarity and consistency easily when we follow a strategic framework.
- Allows You to Track, Measure, and Improve Your Marketing - We need to assess the effectiveness of everything we create, from marketing messaging to lead magnets to offers and services. Your marketing strategy framework will allow you to identify which metrics to track throughout your customer journey. As you do, you’ll inevitably find areas you can optimize. Tracking, measuring, and optimizing will become part of your ongoing operational process.
- Streamlines Your Marketing Process - Building out a framework that you use over and over alleviates wasted time and effort on your part and that of your team. Systems create efficiencies, and your marketing strategy framework is a powerful system.
Achieve Your Business Objectives With a Marketing Strategy Framework
Everything we do should have a purpose. We don’t want to do things just for the sake of doing them. Sometimes, we can be lured into creating something we “think” our target market needs. However, unless you’ve validated that assumption, you’ll be wasting time creating the offer, marketing, and trying to sell it. Instead, you’ve got to enter into discussions with prospects in order to qualify them as ideal prospects. Remember, we want to build our audience of the RIGHT people, not just ANY people.
During our Marketing Methodology Workshop, we teach you how to create your custom marketing strategy framework. Your framework will bring a level of clarity to your marketing that you can’t achieve without it. You’ll be able to map out your content to lead the right people to the offers and services that are perfect for them. As you implement your strategies, you’ll gain further clarity, which will help you achieve sustainable business growth.
Your level of financial freedom hinges on clarity, consistency, and leveraging your time. You cannot create leverage in your business if you do not have the systems and strategies to increase your visibility and market in a way that creates a strong relationship with your audience.
The Marketing Methodology Workshop
A Simple and Easy FRAMEWORK
How would it feel to ditch the marketing overwhelm so you can spend your precious time growing your business?
Build out your custom marketing framework and create a simple-to-follow system to achieve your business goals in three easy steps.
