Generating attention and exposure for any brand or business today is both unprecedentedly easily and difficult. With the array of tools and resources available, reaching audiences has never been easier. However, such access has also created a huge insurgence of competitors that make it difficult to be seen through all of the noise that other brands are creating.

Ultimately, digital marketing revolves around a few critical steps. Before you can begin projecting to the world, however, you must first develop a solid framework and plan for reaching and persuading audiences.

Today, we’ll be taking a look at what it takes to build a proper blueprint for marketing in the modern world.

Conduct Market Research

Before any viable marketing effort can be conducted and deployed, understanding the nature of who and what should be the focus is essential. Market research involves determining whether your approach, audience and aspirations are grounded in reality and reflect the best choice(s) possible for your brand.

By pinging search engines and other platforms for comprehensive data, you can quickly uncover the basic demographics and details of target audiences, costs of varying marketing approaches and more. More extensive, professional market research can also be obtained through firms and agencies dedicated to this specific task.

Determine Targets

With comprehensive market research data in hand, the next part of building a strong marketing framework is to determine who exactly will be targeted by any and all campaigns. Most are familiar with the concept of target audiences, but this is only the beginning of a marketing campaign effort.

Every campaign is different and may focus on different subsets of this audience. Likewise, not everybody in the target market is necessarily a prime candidate for your marketing efforts. Target markets are the combined number of people within the target audience who actually will be targeted by one or more marketing campaigns; target segments are the groups who will be targeted by a single marketing campaign.

Knowing the difference between these three types of audiences is crucial before deploying a single ad or campaign.

Decide on Your Brand Image

As with any form of brand visibility, marketing must also take into account the reality that how a brand is perceived is just as crucial in many cases as whether a brand is seen at all. For this reason, cultivating the key tenets of your brand image initially will help better inform any marketing efforts before they even begin.

In some situations, this may simply involve pinging search engines with the right keywords and phrases. In other cases, the use of colors and logos within select PPC campaigns can impact how audiences perceive the brand, whether it is viewed as trustworthy, and so forth. An overall aura for the brand – what is its purpose, who does it serve and what problems does it tackle? – is equally important to consider when aiming to persuade your target market.

Fundamentally, every brand has a unique set of challenges to face when cultivating a marketing approach. However, building a framework is fairly universal in many settings. These three elements must be considered by every brand before any successful marketing campaign begins: keep these considerations in mind before any action is taken!