Selection of Ultimate Marketing Models to Improve Your Sales Funnel

It’s relatively easy to get started as a marketing professional in today’s world. There are tons of materials, guides, and checklists with specific steps for key tasks on the job. When you take your first steps, you’re guided by the experience of your predecessors, and then it becomes a habit and you work automatically. But let us give you a little cheat code and share the ways to go beyond the limits of work. There are some special mechanisms that can help you build your marketing and PR strategies in a whole new way. After all, a successful businessman is one who takes every opportunity to improve his performance. And the one who is constantly improving the techniques of work. So grab a notebook and write down our suggestions.

SOSTAC

The model was developed in the 1990s by Paul Smith, a British expert at the Royal Institute of Marketing. In 2004 he described it in his book “Marketing Communications”. The SOSTAC model is used to develop a marketing plan. It helps to choose adequate goals and find ways to achieve them. This model of effective marketing strategy planning is based on 6 components:

How to use SOSTAC

1. Analyze your current marketing situation. Ask yourself how you are positioning your company and analyze your strengths, weaknesses, the market you operate in, competitors, and audience.
2. Formulate goals. Usually, the goals of the business are profit, promotion of a new product, and brand development.
3. Break down the goals into objectives:

• Identify your main target markets
• Find your distinctive advantage
• Formulate your product positioning
• Set goals for marketing

4. Choose the tools. For example, if you are promoting your brand online, the tools will be contextual advertising, advertising on social networks, and SEO promotion. Specify key performance indicators for each tactic.
5. Describe what must be done to implement the plan:

• Make a schedule of activities
• Designate those responsible
• Allocate a budget to implement the plan

6. Check KPIs. For example, you can estimate advertising costs by the cost of attracting a customer or by the ROI.

RACE

This is a model for improving communication with the user. This model is commonly used when promoting complex and expensive products that do not sell “here and now”. For example, cars and real estate. It consists of 4 steps and covers all points of contact with the audience:

R — reach. The moment the audience reaches your ad.

A — action. The user interacts with you, going to your site and researching products.

C — convert. The target action — to make a purchase.

E — engage. The object gets into your loyalty program or subscribes to your social networks.

How to use RACE

1. The first step is to increase the visibility of your brand, using all channels and points of contact. It’s a good time to master new outreach channels and expand your professionalism. Pay attention to the following:
   • search engines
   • social networks
   • media publications
   • contextual advertising
   • email marketing
2. In the next stage, the potential buyer is familiar with your offer, compares it with others, and is ready to make a choice. He commits some actions on your website, for example, he orders a consultation in chat and fills out a contact form.
   In order not to lose a potential customer and lead to a deal, you need to schedule regular communication. Consider a chain of newsletters or prepare regular emails about choosing layouts, finding apartments, and trends in the real estate market. Interact with your audience and help them make a choice in your favor — start a blog, and organize a webinar with experts.
3. The third stage comes when the customer has already bought your product, and now you need to provide them with everything they need to get and use the product comfortably. Be in touch with them at all times and use remarketing to retain users.
4. Maintaining communication with your customers will help you increase their loyalty and likelihood of making a repeat purchase. So keep communicating with customers on social media through helpful content, and build a community — advocates for your brand.

The marketing mix and its followers

In 1964, marketer Jerome McCarthy proposed a model based on the marketing mix — the 4Ps: product, price, place, and product promotion.

The 4P Model

According to this model, if a company produces the right product at the right price and sells it in the right place with the correct advertising support, it will have many customers.

This concept focused on manufacturers and worked as long as the choice of products and services was limited. As soon as competition began to grow, the manufacturers’ task shifted: they thought about how to stand out and please the customer.

The 4C Model

In 1990 the American professor of advertising Robert Lauterborn suggested a new approach — 4C, which described the promotion of products from the consumer’s point of view, focusing on four key areas:

• customer value
• cost to the customer
• communications
• convenience to buy

To work with the 4C model, answer these blocks of questions:

1. Who is your customer?
2. At what price is the user willing to buy the product?
3. How is your communication structured?
4. Is it convenient for the customer to make a purchase?

As competition in the markets got tougher, the 4P model expanded, and the 5P and 7P models emerged on its basis.

The 5P Model

In 5P there is a new element — people (people or personal). It includes all market participants: producers and suppliers, sellers and buyers, employees, and management. The 5P model covers the interaction between market participants, the development of human resources policies, and the attraction of potential customers. This item may answer the question “How should your employees be perceived by customers?”.

The 7P Model

As you can easily guess, this is an expanded version of the 5P. Two elements were added to it:

• The consumer-brand interaction process. It answers the question: “How to optimize the process of production and delivery of the product to the customer?”
• The physical evidence. The atmosphere and the environment in which the company provides a service or sells a product (physical evidence). It answers the question: “How can the store environment influence the customer’s decision?”

PESO

The PESO model was proposed in 2014 by marketing and public relations expert Jeanie Dietrich. The model helps to promote a brand comprehensively and select the right communication for each channel. The PESO model is often used for planning content marketing and PR. This acronym stands for:

P — paid. Channels with the ability to post content “on a pay-per-click basis”. These are media in which it is possible to publish paid publications about the company: partner materials, display ads on sites, placement with influencers, and native articles.

E — earned. Channels in which the brand is mentioned: comments from experts of your company, press releases, and news about your project. The material or comment goes into the media for free and causes more trust from users than advertising.

S — shared. Channels in social networks and blogs on external resources, for example, on blog platforms. This includes user-generated content about your brand — customer reviews.

O — owned. Own brand channels: company website, corporate blog, email newsletters, and other platforms that the brand controls. Only the brand decides what the content looks like, in what format it is published, and with what pitch.

How to use PESO

1. Identify your target audience and divide it into groups — by age, interests, and social media preferences.
2. Choose the publications that your audience reads, prepare interesting content, and publish it in those publications.
3. Distribute links to the published materials in social networks and set up targeted advertising for the target audience.

HADI cycles

HADI is one of the agile tools that came to marketing from IT startups. It allows you to quickly and cheaply test hypotheses and identify effective channels for product promotion. It also helps to scale without draining budgets on non-performing ad campaigns. The name of the technique is formed from the first letters of the cycle stages:

H — hypothesis formulation

A — action, hypothesis testing 

D — data, getting a measurable result 

I — insights for formulating new hypotheses

How to use HADI cycles

1. Formulate a hypothesis. Use the SMART approach: The hypothesis must be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. Test the hypotheses one at a time. If you test more than one hypothesis at a time, you won’t know which one influenced the result.
2. Implement the hypothesis. In the second step, determine the actions to test the hypothesis. For example, to send out voice messages, you need to plan a budget, identify those responsible, and determine the timing of the experiment.
3. Collect data. Calculate the results.
4. Draw conclusions. The results of hypothesis testing could be three options:
   • the hypothesis is confirmed — implement and scale it
   • it is partly confirmed — analyze if you need to modify it or postpone it
   • not confirmed — fix the conclusions.

Final thoughts

Those who seek will always find the desired, so if you are determined to develop and improve the mechanisms of your work, you will constantly find innovative ways to increase sales and conferences. We have mentioned only five techniques, there are countless on the web. For example, you can also study the AIDA model, RFM analysis, and Ben Hunt’s ladder. Move your progress forward and never stop — it will definitely pay off.