This digital marketing framework aims to help you get results from the digital marketing activities you are engaged in. Most people waste time and resources by engaging in digital marketing without a clear picture of what they want to achieve and how they will do it.
The number of platforms and activities that can be done there makes the situation worse. There is no need to be chasing the newest technique or possibility if you are not clear how it will help you achieve a pre-determined objective.
The Digital Marketing Framework [images inserted here]
Digital Marketing Framework
This framework was developed to make it clear to digital marketing practitioners and clients the need for varied digital marketing activities for the business get the most of our digital marketing. There are vanity statistics in digital marketing. Vanity statistics are measurements that can excite marketers and business owners but do not add value to be business. Its unintended success figures.
This framework any business involved in digital marketing have a clear goal and KPIs for all their efforts. It also makes it very easy for digital marketers to generate useful business reports that can be used for strategic decisions by management.
There are five parts to this framework: traffic sources, lead generation, lead nurturing, conversion and measuring.
Stage 1: Traffic sources
Marketing cannot be a success if it does reach the targeted people. The number of people that are reached by our marketing should be enough to generate enough business for profitability. At this stage in the framework, we have to answer very important questions.
Who are we looking for?
For each product or service on offer, there are ideal customers. Who are they? The more detailed the answer to this question, the easier the marketing will be.
To get a clear useful answer here, there is a need to develop buyer personas. You can learn how to do it here, there are templates too.
Please note that a typical product has more that one persona. At least 2 or 3 are good enough. Creating negative personas may be useful too. Negative buyer personas are those clients who are less profitable but requires too much attention and resources from the business.
Where do we get them online?
After being clear on who we are looking for, we need to know where they hang out online. Which social network do they use daily? Which online news platforms do they use? Are they likely to click on digital ads?
It is easy to get traffic online but traffic is not the point at this stage. We need traffic that brings value. We need traffic which is likely to bring in business. Even though the traffic volumes are not high, if the conversions are high we are good!
Where do we send them?
Sadly, people drive traffic to the wrong places too often. Now we have them, what do we do to them?
The most important thing to note here is that you do not have control over all the digital channels out there. So it is important to have a connection with your customers on a channel that you have the highest control over: for most situations, it is the website, blog or mobile app.
Ideally, we must send the traffic to the website, blog or mobile app. Why? The truth is over the past 5 years social media platforms have changed the rules to their advantage and many businesses realised they had built their castles in someone’s backyard.
One of the major changes I remember was when Facebook removed the notifications to from Page posts. Most people’s blogs and website traffic plunged. Facebook now requires you to pay for your posts or ads to be seen by the people following your page. People had paid so much to get more page likes, it was now useless.
So let’s drive traffic from all those sources to our websites, blogs or applications. Whatever changes happening there won’t affect our business too much.
Therefore we must treat social media and search engines as traffic sources but not destinations.
Stage 2: Lead generation
There is something called the buyer’s journey. It is the mapping of the stages that a potential customer goes through before they get to the point of purchasing a service or product. It’s not all the time that a client interacts with our digital channels that they want to purchase. Even though that’s what we want them to do, they are not going to do that.
To do well online, we must sell helpfully. The client must have a feeling that they are being helped by the products or service they are getting from us.
Lead generation is the art of creating tomorrow’s customers from today’s traffic. When someone interacts with our digital channels but they are not ready to purchase, we need a way to filter them through into a business lead.
To do that we need lead magnets. A lead magnet is something we offer to all the traffic that comes through to our digital channels. The lead magnet should be designed such that it only attracts our ideal buyer personas.
All the traffic which is not interested in the lead magnet should be outside our target ideally. For example, an online course website could use the course outline as a lead magnet.
Anyone who is interested in taking the course should be interested in the course outline. Lead magnets must be very useful to the potential client. It also the first point to build trust and credibility.
At the lead generation stage in this digital marketing framework, we have to create a number of lead magnets for each of the targeted personas. The goal is to exchange the lead magnet with the client’s contacts.
Ideally, all the people who download the lead magnet should be interested in the product or service we are offering.
Stage 3: Lead Nurturing
Now that you have the business lead’s contacts you have to nurture or guide them towards purchasing. Take note, only a percentage will buy.
Lead nurturing is an effort to move leads from being interested in purchasing. This can be done through education, discount offers, reminders depending on what’s being sold.
Sharing information which is useful is critical at this stage. The more value you give to the leads, the higher the chances of getting business from them.
The techniques of effective lead nurturing are in the infographic.
Stage 4: Conversion
As odd as it may sound, most websites make it hard for people to become customers. Because most businesses do not see their websites as the centre of business online, there is usually no way for a client to be concerted on the website. That is very unfortunate because, even if the actual conversion cannot be done online, the client should at least successfully initiate the process online.
A conversion is when a client takes an action that brings value to the business. Usually, these are purchases, bookings and anything that moves some value from the client to the business.
One of the challenges that digital marketers are faced with is the inability to prove Return on Investment (ROI). When we successfully take conversions online, we can easily track them and report digital revenue generation properly even though the service delivery was done offline.
It is important for digital marketers to make sure that there is a possibility for their client to convert on their website.
Stage 5: Measuring and Improving
Digital marketing has this huge advantage in measurements. We don’t have to be stuck with any bad decision or conclusion made earlier. If we targeted the wrong buyer persona, we can see that with the results.
It is important for digital marketers not to be presumptuous. Situations may have many similarities but for success, we have to learn from customers how they want to be treated, what they want to read and what makes them convert.
One of the commonest measurement tools is Google Analytics. Make sure you have installed and configured properly on your website. Google Tag Manager offers way more powerful options for tracking client activities on your digital channels.
Using this framework
This framework should be used on setting or realigning your digital marketing efforts toward helping the business become profitable. It is also a good place to start strategy sessions as it places everything in perspective of the business.
[Video of example ]
Download infographic.
