Digital marketing is more important now than ever. My recommendations on the challenges and opportunities for growth
Digital marketing is deceptively easy if you take the deliberately simple definition from my book Digital Marketing:Strategy, Implementation and Practice where I define Digital Marketing as:
"Achieving marketing objectives through applying digital media, data and technology".
But in reality, digital marketing is a tough challenge since many businesses know how vital digital and mobile channels are today for acquiring and retaining customers. Yet the research shared below shows that many businesses don't have an integrated plan to support digital transformation and business growth based on engaging their audiences effectively online.
In this article, I will explain why a digital marketing strategy is essential for all businesses. If you're looking for an introduction to the scope of digital marketing and what should be included in a plan, see my post explaining What is Digital Marketing.
Regardless of the type…
Why use a framework to create an integrated marketing strategy?
I believe that implementing a digital marketing strategy framework to follow is essential to ensure the success of your integrated marketing strategy. Importantly by agreeing on a marketing plan structure during the planning phase, you can ensure the buy-in from your team and business to support your integrated marketing strategy.
Applying a strategic framework creates a system to make your plans easier to understand and gives a way to assign specific metrics to monitor, manage and measure the performance of your integrated marketing strategy.
The RACE Framework
We've created the RACE Framework and subsequent RACE marketing training to empower marketing leaders to take a data-driven, customer-centric approach to planning, managing, and optimizing their marketing strategies. By using this structure for your planning, you can integrate all your marketing activities across your key omnichannel customer touchpoints, to strengthen your reach, interaction, conversion, and engagement.
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Actionable steps across the pillars of digital marketing from our recent report
Digital marketing today is complex and it’s inevitable it will get more complex in the future as new technologies and platforms emerge. Take the huge adoption and interest in Open AI ChatGPT, as an example. Marketers also have to contend with the complexity of the many channels we need to track in our analytics such as organic and paid search, social media, display, and email marketing.
September 2024 update
We have just published our Future of Marketing report and summarized the 10 main trends in our 2025 digital marketing trends article.
March 2024 update
Here we'll update readers on the latest developments in digital marketing relevant to marketers.
The best AI tools for marketers?
At the end of the article, I recommend different Generative AI tools beyond ChatGPT and show how widely they have been adopted. I have recently written a new update asking…
Examples of essential questions to ask when structuring a digital marketing audit
Auditing your digital marketing activities is an essential technique to start a digital marketing strategy. But they’re also useful for finding opportunities to improve your digital marketing by identifying priorities you need to act on to get better results.
Knowing where to start and what to include can be difficult since although you may have your own area of expertise such as search, social media or business, you may not know about other topics. In this article, we’ll provide a comprehensive checklist you can use for your business based on the Smart Insights RACE Digital marketing framework. Each of the five parts of RACE is broken down into five to give a comprehensive evaluation of digital marketing for which I outline questions in this post.
I developed this framework…
What's needed to build a strong marketing strategy?
Creating a winning marketing strategy that takes advantage of the key marketing opportunities available today is challenging because of the pace of change and continuous hype.
Smart Insights offers marketing leaders and business owners practical, strategic advice designed to help them achieve their goals. Our free blog format has a weakness in that although the posts are engaging, it's difficult to see the big picture of how they relate. That's why we offer annual and monthly memberships, for marketers looking to get ahead.
To help get you on track with planning, managing and optimizing your marketing strategy, we've picked out our top recommendations, so you can start driving results through marketing.
Our 10 marketing strategy success factors
Dan Bosomworth and I went "back to basics" to work through what is needed for marketing strategy success. We've set out this in this manifesto. This is what drives us,…
What are the essential parts of a business plan template?
Understanding and creating different types of marketing plans and knowing when they are needed is essential to creating a thriving business. But it can be difficult to know which type of plan to use when and how best to structure them. In this article, we look at the essential parts of a business plan and show how to lay it out.
Our new, free PDF download detailing the different types of marketing plans will help you structure different types of plan and gives recommendations on how to make them effective.
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What is a business plan?
A business plan…
Don't get left behind with your digital marketing strategy, follow these 7 steps to brilliant B2B marketing!
Many Business-to-business (B2B) companies are already successfully getting great results using digital marketing tactics like SEO, PPC, landing page creation, social media and email marketing linked to a CRM marketing automation system or a simple email autoresponse system.
But often, B2B organizations are not getting the most from today's marketing since they don't have a planned approach based on an integrated inbound marketing plan. To create an infographic showing the latest research on how companies are using inbound marketing, we've researched how B2B companies are using digital marketing. The results across different studies show that while many companies are delivering brilliant results, many could do more.
Our updated infographic shows a planned approach based on our B2B digital marketing planning workbook.
We originally published this infographic back in 2012 when a longer guide was available, but we hope…
Who in the agency should work on discovery and how can you convince clients it should be paid for?
In the Smart Insights Agency Guide to Discovery, I suggest a checklist of the areas you might explore as part of a discovery process for clients. But is a guide needed, we all know what ‘discovery’ entails, don’t we?
If you search Google on the agency discovery process, you’ll get between 35M to 75M results, depending on the phrase you use. In any case, that's seemingly a huge number of agencies or training providers talking about discovery. So you may think it’s a well-understood topic.
But from my direct experience and conversations over the past few years with industry contacts, there’s still some uncertainty within agencies around three areas:
What should be examined, which stones turned in the process?
Who is best to carry out this activity?
Can an agency charge for what can be…
Attribution, publisher transparency, behaviour, and segmentation are all key features
Retargeting is often seen as a quick win when it comes to digital marketing; simply re-engage with people who didn’t convert and optimise accordingly. With the 5 tips below, you’ll be able to drive more efficiency and growth from your retargeting activity.
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1. Use Attribution to measure the ROI of your campaigns
To gain a true view of the performance of your retargeting activity, you must measure it within an analytics or attribution tool. This will allow you to see the…
What can an ancient text do to help your digital marketing?
Sun Tzu's The Art of War is a widely studied piece of literature, so communicating its principles from reading it feels a little like learning to drive a car by watching a movie with a car chase in it.
What I'd immediately remembered (from reading it 9-10 years ago) was that the book itself is short and powerful. Each chapter layers onto what was taught in an earlier chapter.
Despite the title indicating otherwise, it's part science and part philosophy; it centres around the idea of winning without conflict, by competing based on position, not through 'warfare'. This is immediately powerful and relevant to marketers with experience in brand or marketing strategy.
I think that you can summarise the whole book (very crudely) with two questions:
How do I use information that is available to…
