A marketing strategy framework details how you will organize and measure your team's performance, make strategic decisions, organize your department, operationalize strategies to tactics and reach your marketing goals. It’s often a template or visual representation of the critical components of your strategic vision.
In short, a marketing strategy framework keeps you and your team focused on your goals and provides a viable path for reaching them.
There are a variety of ways you could organize your marketing strategy. At Fratzke, our experience working with Fortune 1000 and industry- leading companies has led us to develop the Five Ps Framework. It’s a simple and streamlined approach that focuses on the most essential elements of your marketing team.
The Five Ps Framework helps marketing leaders organize and measure their digital marketing results across five critical components: people, process, platforms, partners, and performance.
The Five Ps Framework includes:
All five components independently and collectively impact your brand's ability to make a meaningful impact in the digital marketing landscape. They also help measure and assess a brand’s digital marketing strategy and tactical effectiveness.
Measuring your team’s performance is paramount when it comes to setting goals and holding individual contributors accountable.
The challenge in today's digital marketing landscape is that there are millions of performance metrics you can focus on. This highlights the importance of marketing benchmarks and focussing your team's performance around a clearly defined set of key performance indicators (KPIs).
Remove the vanity metrics and only focus on the most essential metrics to measure, share with leadership, and improve upon.
According to James Clear, author of Atomic Habits: You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems. At Fratzke, when we talk about process, we always include our core value “relentless consistency” in the conversation. Unfortunately marketing teams often lack consistency across processes within the organization. You’ve probably experienced this first hand.
Processes make action possible. They provide the environment that makes strategy, goals, objectives and key results, and tactics come to life.
A plan without process is chaos! Key elements of your process include:
These are just a few of the process elements you should consider implementing.
It’s important to regularly audit your team's current processes and, potentially, lack thereof, to optimize and improve them.
According to one of the most respected business minds of our time, Jim Collins, people are a critical component of what helps good companies transform into GREAT organizations. In Jim's own words “first [get] the right people on the bus (and the wrong people off the bus) and then [figure] out where to drive it.”
It’s equally important to get the right people in the right seats. In other words, you may have a star player in the wrong position and a simple move or additional training and development can unlock his or her full potential. Of course, the other side of this coin, getting people off the bus, is very difficult. But, the research shows that it is worth it. The best teams win!
You need to evaluate your marketing team's strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities. Then create a plan to develop their skills further.
Platforms is our term for all technologies leveraged by your marketing organization, often referred to as your technology stack. In today's fast-paced world, technology can help teams automate processes, keep better track of project progress and key documents, provide world class customer-facing digital experiences, and collect valuable data on customer preferences and behavior.
Your team's technology stack can slow them down to a snail's pace, or help accelerate processes and performance to the speed of light.
Platforms in your technology stack may include, but are not limited to
According to Gartner, 23% of marketing leaders believe one of the biggest challenges to executing on their marketing strategy is selecting the right technologies for supporting digital marketing efforts.
You should regularly audit your digital marketing technology stack. This includes auditing your current platforms and a gap analysis for missing technologies that could help make your team more efficient.
One of the biggest concerns we hear from our clients is not knowing how to keep their partners accountable. Agencies and independent contractors can be difficult to manage and measuring success can be tricky.
To be clear, partnering with outside firms to help fill the gaps or accelerate a campaign's reach and performance is an important part of any digital marketing strategy. One of the key insights that often gets surfaced in our Digital Marketing Benchmark Audit are gaps between the desired benchmark results and your team's ability to reach them. Bringing in the right partners can help bridge that gap between where your team is, and where they want to go.
Like we mentioned above, there are many marketing strategy frameworks you could adopt for your marketing organization. We prefer the Five Ps Framework, but we’re a little biased.
Marketing Strategy Frameworks
When considering the tradeoffs, Hubspot has a great article on other strategic frameworks, that you can read here.
Leveraging a marketing framework is the best way to ensure that everyone on your team knows how success is measured and what your expectations are as the marketing leader. Additional benefits of utilizing a marketing framework include:
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How Fratzke can help? From decreasing budgets to changing consumer behaviors, the stakes have never been higher for leaders to make smarter, faster marketing decisions. Our marketing experts can help you prioritize your team's time, resources and budget by establishing an impactful marketing strategy and operations plan in alignment with the Five Ps Framework.
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