How does your business compare with others for digital marketing capability to Plan, Reach, Act, Convert and Engage?

Since we introduced our free interactive benchmarking tool to audit digital marketing for Smart Insights members in September 2015, we've expanded it from auditing top-level digital strategy to also review individual channels like SEO, AdWords, Content Marketing, Email and Social media as part of our toolkits on each. This uses a similar approach of selecting a rating from just 7 questions for each - there aren't hundreds like some other audit tools.

Want to try the auditing tool?

If you want to try the audits, but you're not a member, just sign-up here using the form.

http://www.smartinsights.com/howgood/ If you're already a member simply sign-in - top right and click on any of the toolkits on the members home page with…

A case study example of applying the Smart Insights RACE framework to  measure customer engagement and marketing success

You probably already use—or at least have thought about using—some form of marketing dashboard to track and manage your analog and digital marketing KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). But how has it impacted your decision-making ability concerning customer engagement? And do you effectively leverage that data to help you manage all the most important marketing factors that drive success for your organization? I subscribe to the basic premise behind the Smart Insights RACE (Reach, Act, Convert, Engage) framework for organizing and tracking digital marketing KPIs as they relate to customer engagement, but I’ve expanded it to include analog marketing activities as well. [Editor's note: Since Kent Huffman wrote this post, Smart Insights have created a RACE dashboard based on Google Analytics to automatically…

Chart of the Day: An example of the 'Critical few' KPIs

To coincide with the release of an enhancement to our RACE digital marketing dashboard, today's Chart of the Day isn't published research around digital marketing. Instead, it's what I think is a nice, practical example of achieving focus through a marketing dashboard: The visual dashboard above is a well-known dashboard example, taken from the well-regarded source of sharing approaches to managing Digital Business - the UK government's digital service. Their article explains that when they're building a digital-by-default service like Carer’s Allowance, their team is continuously designing, testing and releasing changes to the live service to improve it and better meet user needs against critical KPIs of which standard usability measures like completion rate, user satisfaction and time to complete are…

Use our new Digital Marketing metrics Google Docs reporting Spreadsheet to see your key marketing metrics at a glance

For Marketing, Digital marketing or e-commerce managers, the first week of the month is always a frantic one launching new campaigns, monthly dashboard reviews and on top of that you need to report the performance of your marketing to the internal stakeholders (the boss). Hopefully, it's a good news story, but if it isn’t, that just adds to the workload, identifying what went wrong and putting plans in place to turn things around. This is where you need to practice the art of analytics, to quickly create a report or dashboard with a subset of key metrics covering all marketing activities in an easy to understand format for rapid review and recommendations for upcoming activities? But how do you create a dashboard for reviewing digital marketing performance to compare different…

A technique for comparing and selecting the best marketing technology or tool for your business

The job of many marketers consists of countless hours doing something that can be automated. Hence why Marketing automation is growing so much in recent years. It’s not just email, but also any other software that you can use that improves performance, such as automatic reporting tools, social media marketing, Analytics, SEO tools, testing tools, etc… Believe it or not, in these marketing tools infographics, including this one from Scott Brinker you can see there are 3,874 tools in 2016 represented across 50 categories, no wonder we all walk into the jungle of marketing technology. Over 3,000 companies in 2016, is this good or bad? The point of this graphic is to demonstrate the following: Marketing has become a technological discipline; Marketers need to know how to choose the…

You may be focusing on the wrong metrics and missing the most important KPIs

As a digital marketing professional, you may have once expected that your job would involve a lot of creativity – you’d spend your days creating innovative advertisements, writing engaging copy, maybe even crafting catchy memes. And of course, you do work on these tasks, but unless your company has a committed marketing analytics professional on staff, you also likely spend much of your day surrounded by numbers, working hard to assess the effectiveness of your campaigns. All those numbers, taken together, are known as Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Unfortunately, sometimes the numbers piling up on your desk indicate that your marketing strategy isn’t working out as well as you’d hoped. That’s when it’s time to take your ad campaigns and KPIs back to the drawing board. Here are a few analytics strategies you can try to kick start your…

New 'SimilarTech' service promises to help marketers compare martech stacks

We love any tool which helps marketers do their jobs better, which is why we created an infographic breaking down 150 of the best marketing tools into 30 different categories. But we aren't the only ones. Some of the folks at SimilarWeb also looked at how to help marketers decide on what marketing tools to use, and came up with a clever new service which they've dubbed 'SimilarTech'. We chatted to Daniel Buchuk, SimilarTech's head of brand and strategy about their new feature, what inspired it and how it works.

As someone involved in the marketing technology industry, what did you make of Scott Brinker’s latest Martech graphic? 

Scott Brinker's market landscape graph is testament to the extraordinary evolution of this industry, featuring featured 350…

Rob McLaughlin, Head of Digital Analytics at Sky explains the importance of a data-driven approach to modern marketing

Q. You recently moved from agency DigitasLBi, to join Sky as their Head of Digital Analytics. Why the move?

It has been a great experience working with my colleagues and clients at DigitasLBi, the breadth and depth of our engagements ensured interesting and challenging projects which really helped me continue to develop myself. I have been incredibly fortunate throughout my career to have been given the opportunity to work with some fabulous brands and high -growth businesses, DigitasLBi continued to add to that but the human aspect of that agency is something special. The agency is a collection of exceptionally bright and diverse individuals and one can only benefit from sharing space and time with them, I highly recommend the experience! More than any other role I have…

Do you know what pages are drawing valuable traffic and which aren't pulling their weight?

For all of the discussion about creative content marketing campaigns, and for all of the plaudits that they attract, there is an elephant in the room that many brands are ignoring. These brands are investing significant sums in producing campaign-led creative content, but it is the content that they already have that is arguably where that investment should be focused. Functional content, on-site content, static content or whatever term you prefer to use, is the lifeblood of your digital presence. It is what drives your search visibility, guides your users through the customer journey and reflects your brand personality. But it is all too often neglected. As search engines continue to change their approach to assessing on-page content, many organisations fail to review and update their content to keep pace with the ever changing, and ever-growing list of…

What does it take to build and improve a successful website? It all starts with the analytics

Your website is the most important asset you have for attracting and converting customers. Optimising it for SEO and conversion is critical for growing your business. In this talk Dave Chaffey talks with Grant LeBoff from Sticky Marketing about the key things you need to consider to improve the effectiveness of your website. Watch it to find out what you need to do to take your site to the next level. In a noisy office? Don't have headphones? No problem, instead of watching the talk you can just read our transcript instead: Grant Leboff: So Dave, when we're talking about digital marketing, obviously the one piece of real estate that I think everybody owns these days is a website. What are the things businesses need to think about when they're…