Digital marketing strategy playbook 2025

Use the RACE Planning Framework to plan, manage and implement your digital marketing strategy initiatives

How will this digital transformation playbook help me and my business?

Creating an effective digital marketing strategy is complex because there are so many potential marketing activities across different paid, owned and earned media which can be improved. Changes to improve internal processes, team structures and skills, technology, data management, insight, and reporting are also important to successful implementation. For larger organizations, digital transformation projects are complicated further before more teams and functions need to be involved.

This digital marketing strategy playbook will provide you and your business with a comprehensive structure to follow to create your plans. It will help you plan and prioritize digital transformation activities across different marketing communications in the customer lifecycle using the Smart Insights RACE Planning Framework. It's an efficient way of checking all of our PowerPoint, Word and Excel template and strategy example downloads to support you when creating or refining your strategy.

At the start of the playbook we recommend key focuses for digital marketing strategy in 2025 including managing AI for marketing, measuring marketing effectiveness and Zero-Click Marketing.

What is a marketing playbook?

A marketing playbook defines the types of communications, best practices and optimization techniques that should be used to maximize return-on-investment for different marketing objectives. They are designed to help you prioritize where you need to focus your efforts, with quick links to relevant resources to help you in each area.

Playbooks help a business make the most of today’s marketing opportunities by approaching each communication channel in the most effective way, by considering:

Investment priorities and best practices for communications
Audience media use
Communications orchestration
Goal setting and measurement
Integration of activities
Marketing technology and data

Who is this playbook for?

This guide is aimed at managers responsible for digital transformation who are creating or rolling out improvements to marketing communications required by digital transformation. These include:

Senior marketing managers such as CMO, VP or Head of Marketing and Marketing Director
Managers accountable for digital marketing results for a business including Digital Director and Digital Marketing Manager
Managers responsible for technical platform delivery who need to learn about digital marketing activities and insight sources they must support including CIO, Head of IT and E-commerce manager

How is the playbook structured?

To provide a comprehensive coverage of all marketing activities, this guide is based on the Smart Insights RACE Planning Framework. For this playbook, the framework is broken down into 25 more detailed activities for you to review in a checklist format. For each of these 25 activities, we recommend specific actions to take with links to resources and tools giving more detailed advice on best practices.

The five parts of our multichannel RACE planning framework will help you:

Plan – Define your digital communications strategy and digital brand
Reach – Build online awareness for your brand(s) by tapping into search intent for your products and using advertising and PR to generate
Act – Encourage digital interactions with online prospects and customers via improving customer journeys and sign-posting relevant lead-generation
Convert – Increase conversion rates through multichannel approach to turn subscribers into customers through online and offline conversion
Engage – Improve customer loyalty and advocacy using digital customer communications including email marketing, marketing automation and social

Resource Details

Author: Dr. Dave Chaffey
Format: PDF playbook with actionable checklists and tables cross-referencing recommended Smart Insights resources

About the author

Dave is co-founder of Smart Insights and creator of the Smart Insights RACE Planning Framework. For his full profile, or to connect on LinkedIn or other social networks, see the About Dave Chaffey profile page on Smart Insights. Dave is author of 5 bestselling books on digital marketing including Digital Marketing Excellence and Digital Marketing: Strategy, Implementation and Practice. In 2004 he was recognized by the Chartered Institute of Marketing as one of 50 marketing ‘gurus’ worldwide who have helped shape the future of marketing.