We know that whenever new industry or professional frameworks get released, they are often met with a collective shrug, if not outright resistance. Marketers like other professionals can be set in their ways. For proof, consider Hubspot’s Flywheel, which aimed to replace the classic marketing funnel that had been around since St. Elmo Lewis first developed a model for awareness, interest, desire, and action in 1898. (Note: The funnel itself didn’t come into play until William Townshend first put it in that structure in 1924.)  

While some took to the Flywheel concept, which put customers at the center of a model around which marketing, sales and advocacy flowed, many marketers questioned the Flywheel’s validity, asking: “How does a company gain customers to be at the center to begin with? Doesn’t it just go back to a funnel?” And then, even if you think about any purchase process, there’s no getting around the fact that customers naturally behave as a funnel: More people are aware of a product than consider it, and the people who consider it are greater than those who actually buy it. The data itself reflects a funnel shape.

The bottom line: To put out anything new that gains traction, it has to reflect reality.

PATIO: Codifying Your Existing Marketing Operations

For us at Marketing Nice Guys, there were no great frameworks out there that fully captured all the goal-setting, processes, and steps that marketers needed to make on a day-to-day basis. And we knew that with any new framework, all marketers had to see themselves in it. We think PATIO accomplishes this.

PATIO stands for:

• Planning & Strategy
• Approach
• Tools & Tactics
• Implementation
• Optimization

What we like about this framework in particular:

1. It covers all the key operational steps and processes that best-practice digital marketers follow, and includes the considerations and decisions they have to make on tools, technologies, and how those can be used most effectively.

2. There’s a natural order in how marketers should approach their operations, starting with planning & strategy and ending with optimization, which feeds back to planning at the beginning, starting a continuous cycle.

3. The framework is flexible: You can use this for any digital marketing channel or a redesign, or even the consideration of a mobile app.

4. It’s easy to remember! Every time you see your home patio, you can think of marketing! (OK, maybe not but we wanted the acronym to be easily remembered.)

Let’s cover each area in a bit more detail:

Planning & Strategy:

One of the dirty little secrets of our field is that many marketers don’t plan, they just dive in and do. It’s understandable given what often amounts to a huge volume of work that needs to be tackled. But taking the time to plan is critical. And we don’t mean that once-in-a-year marketing plan that’s done for C-suite executives. Research in content marketing, for example, suggests that nearly 70 percent of successful marketing organizations have a documented plan of some kind. And given that digital marketing is all connected, it’s important to state how the various channels work together: After all, paid search works hand in hand with email, which works with content, which works with social. And of course, most everything has some connection to the website. So, having at least an overall plan that covers what each channel contributes, how and at what part in the funnel is huge so that everyone on your team has a consistent idea of what you’re trying to accomplish. In planning & strategy (both overall and for each channel), typical questions to answer include:

• Establishing the End Goal: What’s the overall end goal of my efforts (overall and for each channel?) Also, what are the main KPIs that will help me measure my success?
• Setting the Budgeting: What’s the budget and/or resources am I going to dedicate to marketing overall and for each channel?
• Audience Targeting: What audiences am I targeting and based on what research?
• Which Marketing Channels: What marketing channels will I employ based on the resourcing and importance?

Approach:

Based on the plan, each marketing department will typically have a unique approach, both overall and for each digital marketing channel – one that aims to answer “how” you will accomplish what you’ve set out to do in the plan. Typically, the approach is based on industry, audience, and the company brand. In content marketing, for example, the approach might include choosing the content types and the tone, voice, and style, as well as what we would call one of the six “content approaches”: social currency, triggers, emotion, public, and practical. While the questions in each digital marketing channel will vary, some common ones might include:

• What “campaigns” (overall planning or for each individual channel) will I put together?
• What’s the tone, voice, style, and content approach I’m pushing out to the audience? 
• What content types do I choose?

Tools & Tactics:

Each digital marketing area has a unique set of tools. And certainly, a large part of marketing is determining the tools you’ll use for each channel and understanding the best practice tactics that go with using those tools. To give you an idea of the vast range, consider all of these tools that are used in a digital marketing context. These might include everything from planning to production to implementation and optimization. Tactics, on the other hand, are those techniques you employ to get customers into your marketing funnel, as well as what you do to push them down the funnel toward purchase. These are generally granular and channel specific.  

Implementation:

From any operations standpoint, this is really the execution piece of what marketers need to do. So based on the plan, the approach, and the identified tools and tactics, teams have to develop content assets, schedule, post, send, and update. For digital marketing, what that means in particular is paying attention to details, getting the right resourcing, understanding data, and focusing on processes that are repeatable. At Marketing Nice Guys, much of our training (both corporate training and for our two-day, virtual digital marketing boot camp), we provide a lot of this how-to, tactical detail for each channel.

Optimization:

These days, no good digital marketing department simply “sets it and forgets it.” The departments that are really good at what they do focus on continuous optimization to try to maximize results. They analyze data, make determinations, and optimize for incremental gains in each digital marketing channel.  These optimizations and data also feed back into the planning and strategy, approach, and tools and tactics and implementation phases so teams can continuously adjust based on the results they’re seeing.

Conclusion

As mentioned above, we think PATIO is a comprehensive framework that will help better codify your existing marketing operations so that its transparent for both staff and leadership. And we think it will reflect your current reality no matter what industry you’re in. We’d love to hear your thoughts, comments, and feedback!

To learn more about PATIO, check out our two-day, virtual digital marketing boot camp on Sept. 24-25, 2020, where we will cover the framework and how it applies to each of the 12 core digital marketing channels in depth.