Stop Guessing: 3 Practical Marketing Frameworks Every Business Should Use
Most marketing decisions in a small company get made in about four minutes, between two jobs that felt more urgent. What goes out this week. Whether the homepage says the right thing. Whether that ad is worth another €300. Decided on instinct, because there is no time — and instinct is fine right up until it is wrong three months running.
A framework will not turn you into a marketer. It narrows the question so you can answer it quickly, and answer it the same way twice. Three are worth your time. One tells you why anyone buys from you. One tells you what is missing from everything you publish. One helps you write a single page without staring at it. They work at different scales, so they stack rather than compete.
A framework is not a strategy. It is a way of not starting from zero every time you have to decide something.
— Ben Van Aken, Co-Founder & CTO
1. Jobs to Be Done: what people are actually hiring you for
The idea, popularised by the Harvard professor Clayton Christensen, is that people do not really buy products. They hire something to make progress in a situation they are stuck in. The product is the means; the progress is the point.
That sounds abstract until you see what it replaces. Most SMEs describe customers by demographics — size, sector, age, postcode. Fine for targeting an ad, useless for writing one, because demographics never explain why someone acted this week and not last year. A job does. It has three parts: the trigger, the progress wanted, and the outcome that ends the worry.
It also shows your real competition: whatever the customer was doing beforehand. The spreadsheet, the cheap workaround, the nephew who is good with computers. Most deals are lost to coping, not to the firm down the road.
How to find the job
Ring five recent customers. Twenty minutes each, four questions: what was happening the day you decided to sort this out, what you had tried before, what nearly stopped you buying, what would have happened if you had done nothing. Listen for the trigger and the alternatives, not compliments. Then write one sentence: when [situation], I want to [action], so I can [outcome].
Worked example: a plumber near Antwerp
He thinks the job is “replace a boiler”. It is closer to: when my heating dies in November and there are two children in the house, I want someone who picks up the phone and turns up when they said, so I can stop thinking about it.
Nobody in that situation compares efficiency ratings. They compare who answers. So the site leads with response time and coverage area, the phone is answered by a person during the hours boilers actually break, and the most valuable page on the site is a plain one titled what to do when your heating stops on a Sunday evening. It also says what to stop competing on: price runs a distant third to someone cold and worried.
2. The buying journey: awareness, consideration, decision
The second is the one everybody has half-heard of. A buyer passes through three states of knowledge. In awareness they have a problem but have not named it. In consideration they have named it and are weighing approaches, including doing it themselves. In decision they have committed and are choosing who gets the money.
Each needs different material. Awareness content describes symptoms and causes. Consideration content compares approaches honestly, including the ones that are not you, and says roughly what things cost. Decision content is proof: a named case, a scope, a person, a next step.
The gap is the point. Sort everything you published last year into three columns and one is almost always empty. No decision material means plenty of interest and no meetings. No awareness material means you only meet people already shopping around — so you only compete on price.
Worked example: a B2B consultancy in Rotterdam
An operations consultancy selling large improvement projects on nine-month cycles. Their content was almost all awareness — good pieces on why delivery reliability collapses every fourth quarter no matter how many people you hire. Prospects read them, agreed, and went elsewhere.
The consideration column was empty. Nothing explained what a project involves, how long it runs, roughly what it costs, or when hiring internally beats bringing in consultants. So the moment a reader moved from yes, that is our problem to what do I do about it, they learned that somewhere else — and whoever taught them got the shortlist.
Filling it took four pieces: how a project runs week by week, in-house versus software versus consultancy with honest trade-offs, a price band and what moves it, and what would have to be true for it to fail. The last converted best — anyone signing off a large project is mostly managing risk.
3. AIDA: for one page, one post, one email
The first two work on your business and your quarter. The third works on the thing in front of you now. AIDA stands for Attention, Interest, Desire, Action. It dates from the early days of advertising and its exact origin is argued over — inherited common sense rather than anyone’s invention.
AIDA is, honestly, the buying journey compressed into one piece of writing. That is why they pair rather than overlap — the journey governs your quarter, AIDA governs the next two hundred words.
- Attention — the first line exists only to earn the second. Specific beats clever. Name the situation the reader is already in.
- Interest — give something usable immediately: why the problem happens, a detail only someone who does this work would know.
- Desire — describe what it looks like once handled, in their words. Proof belongs here: a customer, a result, a photo of the work.
- Action — one instruction. What to do, where, and what happens next. Not four options.
Write those four lines before you write the piece. If one of them is hard to fill in, the problem is the offer or the audience, not the copy — and rewriting will not fix it.
Worked example: a cargo bike shop in Ghent
A specialist retailer up against online sellers who are always cheaper. Their usual post is “new models now in stock” — Action with nothing in front of it. Run through AIDA it becomes a different post.
Attention: most cargo bikes are bought by people who have never ridden one loaded. Interest: an empty bike on a flat showroom floor handles nothing like the same bike carrying two children and the shopping on a wet cobbled corner — which is why first-time buyers so often regret their choice. Desire: you want the one that still feels planted when it is full. Action: book a loaded test ride — Saturday mornings, twenty minutes, sandbags supplied, no fee.
Same shop, same stock, same week. The post now does something a cheaper online seller structurally cannot.
Putting the three to work
They run on different clocks, which is what makes them practical rather than academic.
- Once a year, or whenever the marketing stops working: five customer calls, then write the job as a sentence. One afternoon.
- Once a quarter: sort what you have published into awareness, consideration and decision, then fill the emptiest column first. One hour.
- Every time you write anything: four lines of AIDA before the first sentence. Two minutes.
The frameworks are not the hard part; an afternoon gets you all three. Week eleven is the hard part — the calls are long done, the audit is a tab you keep meaning to reopen, and there is a quote to send before six. That is where SME marketing quietly dies. Not from bad thinking, from nobody having the hours.
Which is a staffing question, not a motivation one. A European agency retainer runs into thousands a month. An in-house marketer is a salary plus the weekly briefing you owe them. A dedicated Filipino team sits between the two: our packages start at €595 a month for strategy, content, design and community management. If you would rather see the rhythm first, €1 a day gets you one post a day on one platform.
See what each package includes
Whatever you decide, start with the sentence. When [situation], I want to [action], so I can [outcome]. Get that right and the other two largely fill themselves in — and you stop guessing what to post on Monday.