Optimize Your Marketing Strategy with the See Think Do Care Framework

In a nutshell, marketing involves reaching a wide range of audiences to promote your brand and products or services. But what better way to kick this up a notch than to use the STDC framework? 

The rule is simple: Let your potential customers SEE your brand, THINK of your value, DO buy your products or hire your services, and CARE about your brand. Easier said than done!

Fret not; This page shares what you need to know about the see, think, do care (STDC) framework. Learn how to employ this framework to optimize your marketing strategies, whether you run a small business, service-area agency, or an e-commerce store.

Ready? Read on. 

Understanding the See Think Do Care (STDC) Framework

First things first, what is the STDC framework, and how does it work?

STDC stands for See, Think, Do, and Care—the stages involved in the entire customer journey. The idea is simple: Your potential or existing customers have distinct needs and circumstances in each phase. Hence, you must align your communication, content, and marketing strategies with their needs and circumstances in every stage.

This STDC framework was conceptualized by no less than Avinash Kaushik when he was working for Google as a digital marketing specialist. It's a potent tool used to implement various marketing tactics designed for every stage of the customer journey. 

But how does it work then? Think of the four stages below:

• See phase: Is your target market aware of your brand in the first place? How can you reach out to these potential customers? This phase seeks to create awareness about your business!
• Think phase: What do people who've seen your brand think about your business? What value can you offer? This phase aims to drive customers to consider your offers, whether products or services!
• Do phase: Are customers interested in buying your products or ready to avail of your services? This phase plans to make successful conversions, where leads turn into sales or prospects become customers!
• Care phase: Are customers satisfied with your products or services? Can you expect a repeat business from them? This phase hopes to turn mere customers into loyal supporters!

Critical steps to take for the STDC framework

The STDC framework must be a customer-focused marketing approach. It should involve the following crucial steps:

• Prioritize consumer needs. First, understand the customers' pain points, needs, interests, goals, and motivations. Needless to say, perform due diligence!
• Generate targeted content. Your content pieces must resonate with your target audiences.. Whether how-to articles, product images, or promotional videos, they must align with consumer needs.
• Optimize marketing tactics. Your strategies must be optimized for each phase. Consider digital marketing techniques such as SEO, PPC, email outreach, and social media management.
• Monitor and measure performance. You must also set key performance indicators (KPIs) to monitor and measure your marketing performance. Based on the KPI results, adjust your tactics for your STDC framework accordingly.

Key benefits of STDC framework for marketing

Marketing is crucial for fostering customer connections and business profitability. It helps you connect with the right audiences, engage with prospects, and build good customer relationships. While at it, it allows you to promote your brand, offer your business value, and sell your products or services. Ultimately, it can be instrumental to your overall business growth and success.

However, it's best to implement your marketing strategies with a streamlined approach. That said, here's how the STDC framework proves beneficial to marketing:

• Enhanced brand awareness: As a business, you want your brand to be seen and recognized. However, reaching out to the right audiences can be difficult at first. The STDC framework helps you take the proper steps towards brand awareness and recognition right at the onset.
• Increased generated leads: Boosting brand awareness is one thing; Generating leads is another. As a brand, you want to attract potential customers to your business, whether through organic traffic, PPC ads, or social media exposure. The STDC framework lets you use data analytics to generate leads for your business.
• Successful sales conversions: The hardest part of marketing isn't connecting with the right audiences and winning prospective customers. It's turning prospects into real customers or converting leads into sales. The STDC framework allows you to strategize your marketing for successful conversions.
• Guaranteed customer loyalty: Attracting and winning customers aren't enough. To achieve business growth and long-term sustainability, you must strive to gain regular customers or loyal supporters. The STDC framework gives you the means to earn customer loyalty over time.

How To Optimize Your Marketing Strategies with the STDC Framework

In today's business landscape, it's vital to implement effective marketing strategies for startups, SMEs, and even big companies. Gone are the days when these entrepreneurs heavily relied on traditional marketing, whether print, radio, or television. Today, business owners and online marketers harness the power of digital marketing.

In fact, Market.US expects the global digital marketing market to grow from $366.1 billion in 2023 to $1,310.3 billion by 2033 at a 13.6% compound annual growth rate (CAGR).

(Image Source: Market.us)

While digital marketing proves highly effective for business, it requires critical planning and robust implementation. Sure, there are a plethora of approaches to marketing campaigns. However, what better way to boost your marketing strategies than to employ the STDC framework? 

The STDC framework helps you align your marketing tactics with the consumer needs in every stage of the customer journey. But you've got to plan critically and do the work strategically. Clueless? Here's how to optimize your marketing strategies with the STDC framework:

1. Set your marketing goals

Before setting your STDC framework, define your marketing objectives first. Ask yourself: What do you aim to achieve from your marketing campaigns in the first place? That allows you to employ marketing strategies best suited for every customer journey stage. Below are common marketing goals:

• To reach a wide range of customers. Do you need help connecting with the right audiences? You've got to be strategic in your marketing tactics during the See phase.
• To boost your brand awareness. Do you think only a few people know your brand, products, or services? Find ways to expose your brand right before the eyes of your target audiences.
• To generate more leads. Are you struggling to capture, segment, and nurture prospects for your business? Leverage data analytics for your lead generation as part of your marketing campaign.
• To increase your sales. Are you planning to boost your sales this year? Employ marketing tactics for turning leads into sales or prospects into customers.
• To gain loyal customers. Are you looking to gain loyal customers? Establish good customer relationships to get their support in your business for good.

Brooke Webber, Head of Marketing at Ninja Patches, underscores the importance of goal-setting in any marketing campaign. "You might employ various marketing techniques and use different frameworks. But you must kick them off with clear goals and objectives so you know exactly what to achieve."

2. Study your target market

After setting your marketing goals, it's time to focus on your target market. As cited, the STDC framework should be customer-driven. This means your marketing tactics must align with your prospective consumers' needs. Here's how:

(Image Source: Hubspot)

• Identify prospects on various channels. The internet is a goldmine of potential customers. Search for leads on the web through organic traffic, your website, or social media pages, such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and LinkedIn. Note that Facebook and Instagram offer social media marketers the highest ROI (at 29%).

• Segment your leads. Once you have a list of prospects, analyze and segregate them. Consider lead categories based on demographics, psychographics, consumer behaviors, financial capabilities, and other key factors.

• Analyze consumer needs. It's time to unravel their needs and wants through performing due diligence. As mentioned above, you must understand their pain points, potential challenges, personal preferences, buying goals, and lifestyle motivations.

• Create your customer persona. This persona is an ideal representation of your potential customers based on demographics, psychographics, and other vital factors mentioned above. Now you know whom to target for your marketing initiatives.

• Examine your unique value proposition (UVP). Based on consumer needs, see what value you can offer, whether products or services. Then, create smart design ideas to demonstrate your UVP and target your marketing strategies with specific demographics.

Grant Aldrich, Founder of Preppy, suggests creating customer or buyer personas as part of the STDC framework. "It's best to come up with personas for every stage of the journey. Identify your target consumers during the See phase, leads during the Think stage, potential customers for the Do stage, and existing customers for the Care stage. That allows you to target them more efficiently and effectively."  

3. Map the customer journey

The customer journey is a critical part of the STDC framework. It refers to what your customers will experience from the initial brand awareness to the final purchase. It encompasses all customer interactions with your brand, whether online or offline. Map your customer journey based on the following:

• Awareness: It begins when consumers have problems and look for solutions. Are you ready to put your brand in the limelight and showcase what you have to offer?
• Consideration: It happens when consumers have options after searching for various products or services. How can you demonstrate your business value and stand out in a sea of digital competition?
• Decision: It is when customers decide to buy products or hire services. Are your sales and marketing tactics good enough to convince them to take your offers?
• Retention: It occurs when new customers become regular ones. Do you offer excellent customer service or support to encourage repeat business?
• Advocacy: It's when loyal customers start recommending your products or services to others. What have you done to build consumer trust and gain customer loyalty?

Sergey Taver, Marketing Manager at Precision Watches, recommends a detailed customer journey mapping. "You must be critical in your STDC framework by listing your marketing goals, target audiences, and marketing strategies for every phase, whether See, Think, DO, or Care stage. That's what effective customer journey mapping is all about."

4. Create phase-specific content

It's time to generate various content pieces for your marketing tactics before the actual implementation. Of course, they must be designed for your STDC framework. Note: Over 35% of businesses reported allocating 10-29% of their budget to content marketing.

(Image Source: Forbes Advisor)

Below are some content types you can generate for each stage:

• See phase: During this stage, your goal is to boost your brand awareness. For example, you can post keyword-integrated blog posts for SEO, product photos on Instagram, promotional emails, or video clips on TikTok.
• Think phase: You hope your target customers will consider your products or services during this stage. You can convince these prospects to do business with you through content pieces, such as case studies, white papers, and ebooks.
• Do stage: In this stage, you aim to convert leads into sales or turn prospects into customers. You can achieve this goal by offering discounts, presenting product demos, and providing customer testimonials, among others.
• Care stage: How do you make your regular customers care about your brand? You can offer them special offers or exclusive deals, provide loyalty programs, and give excellent customer service.

John Baek, Founder of JSB Digital Works, highlights the power of content in digital marketing. "It has the power to connect with people, engage with them, and influence purchase decisions. It's safe to say that content remains king in the digital world. Harness the power of content for your STDC framework."

5. Implement marketing strategies

At this point, you are ready to implement your marketing campaign using the STDC framework. Marketing comes in different techniques, so choose those best suited for every customer journey stage. Below are some of the popular marketing tactics to employ:

• Search engine optimization (SEO): While SEO is ideal for the See stage, there are SEO secrets for outranking competitors and winning clients. However, it all boils down to optimizing your website (technical SEO), publishing relevant content (on-page SEO), and promoting your business on other digital platforms (off-page SEO).
• Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising: Like SEO, PPC is also best for the See stage aimed at boosting your online presence and website traffic. This form of advertising lets you display your ads on the search engine results pages (SERP) for brand awareness. However, you must pay for every successful click.
• Email outreach: There's no denying the impact of email marketing on businesses offering local services and companies offering tangible products. You can implement email outreach for various stages, whether for the See, Think, Do, or Care stage. It just depends on what content pieces you'll generate for your customers.
• Social media management: Entrepreneurs can no longer ignore the power of social media in today's business landscape. As such, master social media for your service-area business or e-commerce platform. You can use Facebook for customer engagement, Instagram for product display, YouTube for video promotion, and LinkedIn for B2 clients.

Tom Golubovich, Head of Marketing & Media Relations at Ninja Transfers, recommends social media marketing for the STDC framework. "Social media is where people live and breathe. Therefore, you can leverage these channels to expose your brand (See), promote your value (Think), influence purchase decisions (Do), and build customer relationships (Care). It's like hitting various target birds with one marketing platform."

6. Leverage digital tools and technologies

It's no secret how modern technology has transformed today's business landscape. As a digital 

marketer, what better way to optimize your marketing strategies than to leverage digital tools and technologies? They can help streamline your campaigns for increased efficiency, enhanced customer experience, and improved conversion rates.

Below are popular technologies to incorporate into your STDC framework:

• Robotic process automation (RPA): RPA automates various marketing functions to get rid of manual tasks and speed up processes. As such,  use software automation for marketing campaigns like SEO, PPC, email marketing, and social media management, to boost your overall efficiency and productivity.
• Artificial intelligence (AI): AI is the simulation of human intelligence into technologies. A few examples are AI-powered chatbots as customer service representatives (CSRs) and generative AI like ChatGPT and Gemini for content creation. Nearly 95% of business leaders say AI is extremely vital to organizational success.
• Data analytics tools: There's no denying the role of analytics in digital marketing. Machine learning (ML) allows analytics tools to analyze datasets and make decisions based on patterns or trends. They aid in marketing research and analysis, lead generation and persona creation, and performance monitoring and measurement.

(Image Source: Deloitte)

Thomas Medlin, Co-founder at JumpMD, suggests leveraging digital tools and advanced technologies for marketing campaigns. "The whole customer journey can be quite complex. Handling consumer data, managing customer interactions, and analyzing your STDC framework results can be overwhelming. However, using technology can make the entire process more seamless, accurate, efficient, and effective."

7. Monitor and measure your marketing performance

Finally, we've reached the last step. Your marketing campaign with the STDC framework won't be complete without performance monitoring and measuring. Are your marketing strategies working at every stage of the process? Are you doing the right thing? Take note:

• See phase: Determine whether your SEO, PPC, and email marketing are boosting your online visibility and website traffic. Measure KPIs like organic traffic, site visitors, etc.
• Think phase: Check if your marketing tactics are able to generate leads for your business. Use web or data analytics to see the number of website visitors or users interested in your business.
• Do stage: Measure your conversion rates. How many sales have you earned in a month? How many leads have turned into successful sales?
• Care stage: Monitor your interactions with existing customers and try to build positive relationships with them. The numbers will speak for themselves.

Jesse Hanson, Content Manager at Online Solitaire and World of Card Games, emphasizes the need for marketing optimization. "You don't just implement any marketing tactics, whether SEO, email marketing, or social media outreach. You ought to set your key metrics and measure your performance against them. That lets you see if your strategies are working and whether you need to adjust them. Ultimately, these insights help you optimize your strategies more efficiently and effectively."

Final Words

The STDC framework plays a crucial role in business and marketing. This approach allows you to connect with your target market every step of the way. It lets potential customers see your brand, think of your value, patronize your offers, and care about your business.

However, employing the STDC framework isn't a walk in the park. That said, consider our practical tips and steps recommended above and reinforced by some business experts. 

Start with goal-setting and end with performance measurement. But somewhere in between, study your target audience, map the customer journey, and deliver stage-specific content. More importantly, employ marketing tactics designed for every phase and leverage some of the latest technologies today.

With a robust STDC framework in place, you can kick your marketing up a notch for business growth and overall success!