The Online Marketing Framework is my attempt at providing an overview of what the main disciplines are, how they relate to each other, which types of activities they consist of, and what they focus on achieving. The framework is not meant to be all-inclusive and I hope to have addressed the key aspects of online marketing with it, but I definitely welcome your thoughts in the comments section.

The Online Marketing Framework is built up as follows:

• Purpose First it looks at the purpose, i.e. what should the efforts focus on achieving?
• Activities Then it describes categories of activities that look to serve each purpose.
• Disciplines Finally, it positions the driving disciplines that incorporate the activities.

Purpose

The ultimate purpose for online marketing—for commercial organizations—is to stimulate sales. However, there are underlying purposes that collectively serve the end purpose of sales. These four purposes represent what organizations should focus their efforts on:

• Awareness This one’s obvious, you want to get the word out on your brand and product.
• Attention Whereas awareness is about people getting to know you, attention goes one step further. It’s about people actually paying attention to what you’re saying (about your product).
• Relevance This refers to offering people something that is of value to them. Whether it’s a need or a desire, it’s relevant in people’s context.
• Trust People can know you, listen to you and be interested in your product, but if they don’t trust you, it’s less likely to lead to a sale.

These four purposes are essential to online marketing and the image below establishes the foundation of the framework.

Activities

Numerous activities are at a marketer’s disposal but not all of them are equally suitable for the purposes described above. However, four types of activities can be identified that have a specific focus:

• Promotion This category focuses on awareness and attention by distributing messages to an audience or a community. Examples of activities are email marketing and banner advertising.
• Attraction Here, you’re focusing on awareness and relevance by positioning your brand or product to be visible when people are looking for it (or looking for something similar). Attraction consists of search engine marketing activities like paid search, contextual advertising and SEO.
• Content Here’s where you created well-targeted, relevant content that helps build authority and/or trust. Examples of content (platforms) are blogs, instruction video and ebooks.
• Influence This refers more to a process than a certain set of activities. It consists of the things that your market expects or appreciates from you. Whether it’s delivering on your promise, being nice or helping people with their problems, the process of establishing trust and gaining the attention of your audience/community helps you build influence.

The image below depicts the added activity sets within the framework so far:

Disciplines

Disciplines are basically the key pillars of the framework. The four disciplines I identified are:

• Push Marketing Sometimes also referred to as outbound marketing, this discipline consists of efforts that focus on establishing awareness, attention and relevance. This is done mostly through paid media, such as search engine advertising and display ads.
• Pull Marketing Also referred to as inbound marketing, the efforts in pull marketing focus on awareness, relevance and trust through a combination of earned media and owned media.
• Social Media The efforts of social media focus on generating relevance, attention and trust through also a combination of earned media and owned media. Social media can also create awareness, but that is more the result of the way social media works—i.e. people spreading the word about you—rather than the result of your efforts as a marketer.
• Branding This is the discipline where efforts focus on generating awareness, attention and trust. Branding is the process of establishing a reputation and promoting yourself through the brand you’ve built.

This is how these disciplines are positioned within the framework.

This is the full Online Marketing Framework:

The idea behind the Online Marketing Framework is that there’s no single solution. The individual disciplines and activities have their strengths (and weaknesses). There’s also overlap in the disciplines and activities because there are synergy effects. For example, clever content marketing on a blog can help SEO (attraction).

The various disciplines and related activities all need to be implemented to get the best results. It is up to marketers to find the mix that is appropriate for their brand, their organization, their product and their market.

These are obviously my thoughts, but I’d love to hear yours in the comments!