How to use Segmentation, Targeting, and Positioning (STP) to develop marketing strategies
Today, the STP marketing model (Segmentation, Targeting, Positioning) is a familiar strategic approach in modern marketing. It is one of the most commonly applied marketing models in practice, with marketing leaders crediting it for efficient, streamlined communications practice.
STP marketing focuses on commercial effectiveness, selecting the most valuable segments for a business and then developing a marketing mix and product positioning strategy for each customer group.
As Martech continues to develop, so do opportunities for segmentation, targeting, and positioning. So whether you're brand new to STP or a seasoned veteran, it can be useful to take stock and double-check you're utilizing every chance you get to reach, interact with, convert, and engage customers.
But, how do you know which customer segments to focus on? We recommend using personas to identify your…
Simon Sinek explains how to use the Golden Circle model to truly differentiate your brand's value proposition when most fail
Leadership expert Simon Sinek is perhaps best known for giving one of the most popular TED talks of all time, which you can view at the end of this post. The Golden Circle theory explains how leaders can inspire cooperation, trust and change in a business based on his research into how the most successful organizations think, act and communicate if they start with why.
I think that marketers will find the most value in his Golden Circle model, which helps give focus to how a business can stand out from similar competitors by communicating its differences.
I was prompted to check it out after a workshop when discussing the importance of developing a strong digital value proposition as part of a digital marketing strategy a few years ago. One…
How to streamline your planning and measurement of integrated digital marketing using RACE
Smart Insights created RACE as a practical tool to help marketers and business owners plan, manage, and optimize their digital marketing using a more strategic, structured, and data-driven approach.
Our RACE Growth System for improving marketing effectiveness has two parts which we will introduce in this article through two different visuals:
1. The RACE Planning Framework: defines the essential activities and measures businesses need to master to survive and thrive in today’s marketing world.
2. The RACE OSA improvement process: defines the three steps needed to build and implement your growth plan - either for your overall marketing plan or for an individual channel, such as organic search, social media or email marketing.
Use our free, planning template download to get started with using RACE to grow your business. These will help you create a 90-day prioritized plan to improve your results from…
5 Reasons to consider a life as a T-Shaped Marketer
Editor's note: We have updated this post, ten years after Simon Swan originally wrote it, to highlight what we have always felt is missing from the concept... the need for strategic marketing skills. The team at Smart Insights has created a new infographic to highlight these skills: The Strategic Digital Marketer.
At their heart, the Strategic T-shaped marketer is someone who has excellent skills and experience in developing strategies that align digital marketing tactics and investment with the needs of the business. Contrast this with the original visuals shown below which focus solely on tactics. Don't get us wrong, these best practices are vital to success in modern always-on lifecycle marketing . However, to help unify digital marketing with the needs of the business and the customer, consideration…
Updating approaches to your online branding for the digital world
Brand is No.1
I want to start with a bold statement. The online brand is the single most important element to a business or organization. If you think about what online branding actually is; a position that has been carefully established, and a set of customer promises and overall experiences based on communication and service, then not delivering on these promises and what a brand stands for will lead to failure.
In today's digital landscape, strong online branding will allow you a closer connection with your prospective customers, leading to conversion and retention.
Without a strong online brand, a business will experience reduced competitiveness, inaccessible products and services, customer confusion, and dissatisfaction. As your online brand shows its form in all your customer touchpoints, then to say it is everything is really not an overstatement.
What is online branding?
Website(s), search marketing, mobile content, social media,…
Set the right goals for digital marketing using the 5Ss
Do your set of goals for online marketing cover all the bases? A good set of digital marketing goals covers a range of different measures to help set, review, and control performance across all digital marketing activities. In this article, we cover the 5S framework which are a simple method to gain more focus on how digital marketing can support a business.
The 5Ss are a great simple framework, as the examples show. It's worth bearing in mind that goals are broader than objectives which we recommend as essential for setting targets and reviewing performance using digital marketing dashboards. If you need to use a more data-driven approach to digital marketing, see these primers or our free template for more examples:
Setting SMART objectives for…
What is PR Smith's SOSTAC® marketing planning model, what is the RACE Growth System, and how do you use them to win more customers?
If you don't know PR Smith's SOSTAC® model, it's worth getting to know if you're involved with planning marketing strategies or campaigns. SOSTAC® was voted the third most popular model in the CIM poll on marketing models because it's easy to remember and it makes it easy to structure plans for different planning activities.
So, whether you're creating an overall marketing or digital marketing strategy or improving individual channel tactics like SEO or email marketing, SOSTAC® is your friend. In this article, we will talk through applying the SOSTAC® planning model to your marketing strategy, with the RACE Growth System.
What is SOSTAC®?
SOSTAC® is a planning model, originally developed in the 1990s to help with marketing planning by PR Smith, who is my co-author on Emarketing…
Leading digital analytics experts share their examples of how to effectively use data and analytics to generate actionable insights for your marketing strategy
The number of data sources that are available is growing every day. For some of us, this might be a good thing, but for many digital marketers it brings up a lot of challenges to deal with. With increased data, it can be easy to lose focus, become obsessed by 'vanity metrics', and fail to generate actionable insights for your business.
McKinsey notes that surges in data caused by rapid digital disruption 'have not provided marketers with a substantially better understanding of their customers, because their companies’ outdated data modeling isn’t able to capture these shifts with the necessary granularity and speed'.
So, while the innovators are leading the way with actionable analytics feeding their data-driven marketing, others become stagnant. In today's competitive marketing landscape, this means…
E-commerce 2023: The latest data and forecasts for all things online retail growth
It's interesting to look back at e-commerce growth over the last few years and think forward to the future of this industry. As demonstrated by these charts from Statistica, the annual revenues of the US e-commerce industry shot up in 2020 and 2021.
What's more, despite recent growth slowing slightly, Statistica Market Insights estimates strong continued growth in this area in 2023 and beyond.
The reasons for this are two-fold - the rise of revenue from total retail sales, both in the US and worldwide, and also stark growth in the % of the total retail sales being e-commerce.
This constitutes a much larger share than previously to the pandemic, showing that some of the rapid changes to…
Selecting the best revenue model options for your digital business
A good revenue model is a proven technique used by digital businesses globally, from startups to global corporations, to generate income from traffic on their website, mobile apps, and via digital channels.
The 10 digital revenue model options explained in this include both ad revenue models and charging for access to a digital service including freemium revenue models where limited free access is provided with fees charged for the full service.
I created this post originally in 2010 to support a revenue model spreadsheet for site owners to forecast their revenue generation. The main parameters you need to set are the variables for each Ad Unit or Container Type (blue fields) and it works out the revenue earning (orange fields) for you!
The site ad revenue model
If you 'plug-in' some average figures for pay-for-performance-based advertising options like cost per click or cost per action…
