There is a multitude of marketing tools, procedures, frameworks and rules of thumb in the world. After a long process of selecting, testing and trying, we at Archetix gave the green light to the STDC marketing framework as the basic tool we use when working with clients. In this article you will learn why we made that decision and what the STDC framework actually brings to a company’s marketing.
Updated 15 April 2018: In our new post you will learn how to plan a marketing strategy in the STDC framework. The post also contains worksheets that will help you with everything.
The STDC marketing framework? What? WHY?
The STDC marketing framework was introduced to the world by the global guru of digital marketing and, above all, digital analytics, Avinash Kaushik. Through Marketing Festival it bubbled into the Czech marketing pond as well, and it is used by Czech agencies and freelancers to prepare campaigns and devise marketing strategies. At Archetix we approached everything a little differently and made the STDC marketing framework the centrepiece of our communication with clients, and of planning and executing their marketing strategies.
The main motivators for this decision were the overall logic of the framework, its almost beautiful simplicity combined with the completeness it brings to a company’s marketing. What we love most about it is that right after an introductory training, which can take as little as 1–2 hours, clients immediately start thinking about their marketing differently. Lots of new ideas for campaigns and content appear, in short, those aha moments you simply have to love.
The framework makes it possible, on the basis of business goals, to create marketing strategies and marketing goals and to turn them into action and specific campaigns. Great emphasis is also placed on how to evaluate them using web analytics.
WHAT exactly does the STDC marketing framework do?
The STDC framework segments customers based on their relationship to your product or service. You could say it divides them into so-called stages of the buying process. For these stages it uses the labels See, Think, Do and Care. Customers in the individual stages differ in their relationship to your product and, above all, in their business intent (that is, whether or not they want to buy your solution). This gives you a completely different view of your customers from the one you have been used to. From the very first moments you start thinking about your company’s marketing and customers in terms of STDC, paths and ideas for new marketing activities will open up that would not have occurred to you before. You may find that there are customers you have completely ignored or channels you have not used at all. Everything here revolves around content, marketing and measurement, and we will look at these components in detail.
The framework can be used for the whole of a company’s marketing, not just digital marketing.
Great, but HOW do I put it into practice?
The ideal is to first understand how the framework works. For that you can use the plentiful online resources or arrange to work with someone who already has experience implementing the framework ;-). If you work with us, we will first go through a non-binding introductory consultation, where we get to know your business and you get to know our work. This consultation can be followed immediately by training on the whole STDC framework. Attending this training is key for everyone who has a say in marketing and for those who run the campaigns themselves. Put simply, depending on the structure of your company, everyone from the director, through the marketing and sales directors, down to the last PPC or Facebook manager. The second option, of course, is for only the directors to attend and then train their teams themselves.
To get started with the framework we have prepared special worksheets, which will help you plan the STDC framework and its individual key components, such as the measurement strategy, campaign plans or the communication plan.
Updated 15 April 2018: In our new post you will learn how to plan a marketing strategy in the STDC framework. The post also contains the worksheets mentioned above, which will help you with everything.
Free MEASUREMENT STRATEGY form. We consider a measurement strategy an absolutely key tool for all marketing, regardless of whether you use STDC or not. That is why we offer you a form for putting it together completely free of charge.
These parts of the STDC framework then allow you to manage your marketing in a meaningful way and steer it towards the goals you have set. The emphasis is on evaluating marketing activities based on data. They let you derive specific marketing activities from goals and strategies, which will certainly not be unfamiliar to you: campaigns and profiles on social networks, PPC campaigns, informational emails, websites, blog posts, videos and so on.