On Friday I shared the Action Stream Framework with you.
The Action Stream Framework is a small element of your overall Customer/Prospect Ecosystem.
For e-commerce brands, this is second nature. For traditional brand (those built prior to the year 2000) this “feels” like second nature but is implemented only on the right side of the image.
“Your Marketing” in the image above is your Marketing Strategy. Your relationship with your Paid Search Vendor is a tactic, it’s one way you reach out into the Customer/Prospect Ecosystem. Similarly, your marketing efforts on Reddit or YouTube or Instagram are tactics … nothing more. Your Marketing Strategy determines how you use those channels.
You’ll see e-commerce brands use email marketing to push a customer to YouTube to watch a video. That’s part of a Marketing Strategy. You’ll see traditional brands create a video and put it up on YouTube and wonder why nobody watches it? Well, there’s no Marketing Strategy to use social channels, email, print, television, whatever to fuel the YouTube channel, which then fuels traffic to Search and Your Brand, ultimately resulting in an Action Stream you use to push an existing customer to a purchase.
I guess what I’m saying is that Traditional Brands struggle to leverage Marketing Strategy to feed the Customer/Prospect Ecosystem as illustrated above. It’s just something that Traditional Brands are not good at.
If you have 250,000 twelve-month buyers, your Customer/Prospect ecosystem likely has 5.0 million Customers/Prospects. That’s your ecosystem. In 1995, you’d rent a list of customers within the 4.75 million prospects. In 2025 you seed your ecosystem via your Marketing Strategy, leveraging Social Channels and Search.
