Digital Strategic Frameworks

Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

Digital strategy frameworks

Choosing the right mix of channels to target your audience and deliver on your objectives is an essential part of a digital strategy. To help justify the details of your chosen channels, you can use several models and frameworks in your digital strategy document or PowerPoint.

These include:

• SOSTAC
• RACE
• The 4C’s
• AARRR

It’s useful to consider a number of these models to help craft a digital marketing strategy. There is no perfect model, but by considering aspects of each of these models you can plan an effective digital marketing strategy. Let’s look at these in some more detail and you can then decide which model or models you might like to include in your strategy based on your own needs.

SOSTAC®

The steps in the SOSTAC® framework for implementing a digital marketing strategy are:

• Situational analysis: This involves an analysis of both the internal and external environments that the organization is operating in. Firstly, considering your internal capabilities. Are you ready? Are you technically equipped to deliver the strategy? Do you have the right resources, skills, and capabilities to work on this campaign, and deliver the desired outcomes? Then, consider external factors, such as what are your competitors doing? Is it the right time to implement your digital strategy?
• Objectives: This part of the process aligns the different objectives of the company. Think about the objectives of your digital strategy. Do they align with your organization’s overall objectives? If your overall business goal is to deliver a hassle-free service to your customers, your digital strategy should complement that, not work in different directions from it.
• Strategy: This is the long-term strategy that will be implemented to achieve the organization’s objectives. Segmentation, targeting, and positioning are commonly used tactics and tools for devising a strategy.
• Tactics: This process involves accounting for how the business will deliver the marketing strategy that it has devised, by translating it into specific actions. The foundation of this is known as the ‘marketing mix’. In other words, what steps would you take to implement this strategy?
• Action: Actions help assign responsibility and deadlines for the performance of certain tasks detailed in the marketing mix.
• Control: This task is primarily keeping track of progress. Action performance measurements should align with objectives which are assessed at the end of the SOSTAC process.

RACE

The RACE Framework, created by Dave Chaffey, helps with forming a digital channel and campaign strategy in a structured way. It can be customized and applied to all types of B2B and B2C businesses from small businesses and startups to larger organizations working on digital transformation.

RACE summarizes the key online and channel marketing activities that need to be managed, and covers the full customer lifecycle.

Using your business objectives, you can start to plan how you can:

• REACH your audience.
• Encourage your audience to ACT and engage with your brand and content.
• Drive your audience to CONVERT and take the valuable actions you want them to take.
• ENGAGE your audience and drive repeat business from your existing customer pool

The 4 C’s

The 4 C’s (Creativity, Critical Thinking, Communication, and Collaboration) can help when validating the effectiveness of your digital strategy before, during and after launch. These are key competencies, which will differentiate your strategy for the more complex work environments of the 21st century.

• Creativity and innovation for new ideas, concepts, and products is key for competition in business. It also includes processes and leadership situations where there is currently no known answer, or multiple solutions which lead to ambiguity.
• Critical thinking involves the ability to solve problems, manage projects, and make effective decisions, using all of the tools and resources at your disposal.
• Communication is the ability to listen and communicate verbally, or in writing, and through the effective use of digital tools. This is essential for the successful development, execution, and review of your strategy.
• Collaboration is the ability to work with your own and other teams, contribute to their learning, and demonstrate a degree of empathy when considering their own goals.

AARR

Another framework that is useful when implementing a digital strategy is AARRR, also known as the Pirate Metrics framework. This is a set of five user behavior metrics that can help you to evaluate your product and audience while creating digital marketing strategies.

The acronym stands for acquisition, activation, retention, referral, and revenue, and represents stages of a simplified buyer’s journey. Potential customers start at the acquisition stage and move through each stage to make your business successful.

Focusing on your strategy, you can use the AARRR framework by asking yourself the following questions:

• Acquisition: How are people discovering your product or company?
• Activation: Are these people taking the actions you want them to?
• Retention: Are your activated users continuing to engage with the product?
• Referral: Do users like the product enough to tell others about it?
• Revenue: Are your personas willing to pay for this product?