What is the best digital marketing / marketing framework?

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Types of marketing frameworks

1. Consumer behaviour framework - this describes how users buy, i.e. it’s the steps of a buying process. The first visual in this article is a consumer behaviour framework. The AIDA marketing framework is the best known example of a behavioural framework sometimes known by academics as ‘hierarchy of response’.
2. Marketing activity planning frameworks. We originally created RACE to help provide a comprehensive breakdown of key activities that to be controlled for effective marketing today. This is useful when you’re looking to perform a digital marketing audit to review your marketing to identify which activities you need to improve. As I’ll explain later, the more detailed breakdown of RACE contains 25 key activities and we define further Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) to expand on that, so that marketers can prioritize which activities they need to work on as part of marketing planning.
3. Marketing process framework. This defines the stages or steps involved in creating and implementing a strategy and plan. Although RACE is now well-known as a planning framework, it it fact has a process component too - this defines the series of steps that are needed to create the digital marketing plan.  The second part of RACE defined in our in-depth article on the RACE framework and process describes a process of:

• • Opportunity - Complete audits and set targets based on forecasts
  • Strategy - Prioritize marketing activities to achieve targets
  • Action  - Take action to implement that strategy - we do this as part of 90-day planning

4. Marketing maturity framework - these are useful for comparing how advanced different aspects of marketing such as digital marketing, SEO or social media are within an organization, so they can be used for auditing and benchmarking to identify improvements.See our digital marketing maturity framework for examples of these.

What is needed for an effective marketing or digital planning framework?

• Clear purpose  - an effective marketing framework is one that is used to help people looking to understand, audit or manage marketing. Digital marketing is still relatively new, but as we have said, is complex, so we have found that many people are looking to looking to create a digital marketing strategy or plan. That should be the main purpose - to create an effective plan.  This is the case with RACE, but other frameworks such as thee 6Cs are more focused on consumer behaviour
• Realistic model balancing simplicity and complexity - frameworks provide a structure to help simplify a complex situation, so they are a simplified model of the reality.  This is a difficult challenge for the framework creator. If the framework is too simple, it will be easier to understand, but potentially too simple. To get around this challenge, with RACE we created three levels of complexity. There is simple, 5 part  breakdown, but this is divided further to cover all the digital marketing activities that need to be managed. Each of the 5-parts of RACE is divided down further into 5 to give a 5X5 = 25 part structure. Each of these 5 is broken down further to define more specific tasks or standard operating procedures (SOPs) to that need to be managed.
• Application to different businesses and sectors - A framework is most useful if it is open to a range of different sectors. It’s commonplace to develop consumer or retail marketing frameworks, like Google’s ZMOT model, but they aren’t applicable more widely, for example into B2B. We developed RACE so that it can be applied to different business and revenue models - from online-only to multichannel businesses - so it applies to businesses both where transactions occur online, or sales involve human interactions.
• Actionable - This is why we developed RACE, we wanted to create a practical framework that can be used to improve the results from marketing. To do this the framework must help complete an audit, review against competitors, create a strategy and then implement and review a plan.

What is the best market framework?

To return to the question at the start of this article and by way of a summary, the best framework is one which meets these requirements of being realistic and actionable and applicable to different sectors.  In this article I have focused mainly on planning frameworks, but there are many consumer frameworks too.

To answer this question of the best marketing framework definitively, it's best to ask marketers. In this other post, the CIM asked which is the best marketing model - you can see the results in this post.