As the old saying goes, fail to prepare – prepare to fail. Although you may have created the most detailed plan for your latest marketing campaign, every element of that plan needs to be properly managed and executed to ensure the campaign fully delivers on your core marketing goals.
With a marketing management framework in place, your team can be confident that the right content is being delivered to the right audience, through the right channels, at the right time.
What is a marketing management framework?
A marketing management framework is a template that contains instructions for the delivery of your marketing plan. Concerned with the “what” and “how” rather than the “why” of your marketing plan, it’s a detailed overview of how you intend to execute it. In the same way your skeleton gives shape to and supports your body, a marketing management framework gives your marketing plan shape to support its long-term success.
What it isn’t is a planning tool, like SWOT and PEST analysis. These are used in the creation of your initial plan, helping you identify the long- and short-term goals you want to meet. A marketing management framework helps you consolidate these goals, and organise them into clearly defined stages and processes.
Ultimately, a marketing management framework is an essential tool for all marketing teams, allowing them to focus more clearly on each stage of their marketing plan, and outlining the steps they need to follow to deliver it to greatest effect.
How to build a marketing management framework
There are several widely-used and proven marketing management frameworks that will suit the different needs of different businesses at different times.
The “7Ps of the Marketing Mix” framework, for example, covers the core tactical components of a product marketing plan: Product, Price, Place, Promotion, People, Process, and Physical evidence. While it’s very comprehensive, it’s perhaps a little outdated in today’s age. Even more comprehensive is the “Pragmatic Marketing Framework”, which encompasses analysis and planning as well as execution. The inbound marketing sales funnel, on the other hand, is more concerned with the use of content to drive everything from customer awareness to purchase, and is particularly relevant to any company with a strong online presence.
There’s clearly no one-size-fits-all framework. Indeed, depending on your own marketing goals, you may well choose to build your own. There are commonalities, though, when it comes to achieving your marketing goals. If you do decide to build your own framework, it’s important to account for the following factors:
- Goals – Refer back to your initial analysis. What are the short- and long-term marketing goals you want this campaign to achieve?
- Audience – Who do you want to reach? Define your target audience in as much detail as possible.
- Distribution/Channels – Where is your audience? Make a detailed list of which channels, off and online, you’ll use to reach them.
- Competition – Who else is trying to reach this audience? Refer to your SWOT analysis. What tactics are they using? How successful have they been?
- Choose – Taking all the previous points into consideration, outline what content and which promotion methods you’ll use to reach your target audience
- Measure and adjust – Your campaign shouldn’t be static. It’s important that your framework allows you to test and measure its success (or otherwise) at each stage. If it’s not achieving your goals, you need to move fast and adjust course. This means adapting as you go, making micro-changes to your strategy, rather than trying to define everything upfront and sticking to it, as per more traditional frameworks such as the 7Ps of the Marketing Mix.
The right tools for marketing management
Following the steps in your marketing management framework will go a long way to helping you meet your marketing goals. But the whole process can be improved further with the right tools to support you. This is the thinking behind TrueNorth’s marketing platform.
In fact, TrueNorth’s Growth Projection process is of huge value even before a framework is established, helping to guide ideation, inform the timeline, and set an expectation for results. The platform then helps you to visualise your goals, and compare all the available options before committing to the right one.
It allows you to break your goals down into milestones for greater accountability. By doing so you’re better able to measure your campaign’s performance, tracking its progress against your projection and making adjustments as you go.
And once a campaign has run its course, TrueNorth enables you to show its ROI and demonstrate its impact to stakeholders with a fluff-free source of truth on how it performed across all channels.
Building a marketing management framework is a crucial step in successfully implementing your marketing strategy and ensuring every element is executed as it should be, when it should be. Once your framework’s established, however, it’s even more helpful to be able to manage everything – from planning, through execution, to reporting – from a single place.
To see for yourself how TrueNorth can help you implement your own marketing management framework for the best possible campaign execution and impact, get a free trial here.
