RACE Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) for digital marketing

Use our SOPs and resources to audit and review your always-on marketing activities

How will this RACE Standard Operating Procedures for digital marketing help me and my business?

Digital marketing is complex with many options for businesses to use different digital marketing channels and platforms. Smart Insights developed the RACE Framework to define a simple, yet comprehensive structure which helps marketers ensure they plan for all the success factors of modern, always-on customer lifecycle marketing.

Within the RACE Framework, each of the five parts of RACE is broken down into five key activities. This defines 25 key marketing activities across RACE that need to be considered by all types of businesses who want to manage modern marketing effectively. 

This resource defines these 25 key activities and recommends relevant premium templates and learning path modules from Smart Insights that you can use to improve your marketing.

Since successful digital marketing needs granular skills and processes to be developed, we also define 70 Standard Operating Procedures for Marketing to help you review your skills and processes. We explain the Opportunity, Strategy and Action for each SOP and show you which templates and Learning Paths will help improve your activities.

What is an SOP?

SOPs define how marketing activities should best be completed to give the best results by defining a series of steps or sub-tasks. SOPs are particularly well-suited to digital marketing since when marketing using channels like organic and paid search, social media and email marketing, there is a lot of complexity and best practices to follow for the best results.

SOPs are a foundation of Smart Insights, since when we launched, we wanted to help marketers or business owners who were new to digital marketing save time and get better results through following best practices based on our experiences and tests of using digital marketing across many sectors.

Our premium members use the explanations in our Learning Path online training courses and recommended templates highlighted in this Google Sheet to take action to improve results based on an audit of their SOPs.

An index of our editable templates for customization or white labelling

Editable documents, spreadsheets, and presentation templates are the most popular Smart Insights premium member resources. They are particularly useful for agencies and consultants since, with a Smart Insights Business Membership, they can be rebranded (white labelled) or amended for use with your logo and recommendations for presenting to clients. They are also often used in-house for amending or creating strategies and action plans within a company’s own business.

These editable templates are downloadable as Word, Excel or PowerPoint files which can also be imported into Google Documents equivalents. They have been designed to help members rapidly create audits, strategies and action plans for many marketing activities, with the emphasis on digital marketing. 

We created this Index of Smart Insights resources and editable templates to help members have a simple overview of the editable resources we have available to support marketing SOPs.

How is this guide structured?

The first tab on the workbook defines the 25 core RACE activities and 70 SOPs. For each SOP we summarize the Opportunity, Strategy and Action and show you which templates and Learning Paths will help. 

There are also additional tabs for each of our 20 core toolkits which enable you to focus on an activity such as strategy or channel improvements. In each sheet, you will find a list of all the resources within that toolkit, and which you can edit/white label for your business or clients. We’ve also included a brief summary of each resource and why you would use it, as well as recommended Learning Paths to support your marketing further.

Most template formats can be directly edited, and you can save a copy of Google Sheet files (File > Make a copy) or Export to Excel so that you can edit to keep a record of which templates you have applied to your business.

Resource Details

• Authors: Amelia Cooper and Dr. Dave Chaffey
• Format: Google Google Sheet document detailing Smart Insights RACE SOPs and each of our 20 toolkits, listing our range of resources with summaries of what you would use them for, and which are editable/customizable.
• Update frequency: This resource is updated monthly to ensure it contains the most recent changes and new releases to our content library.

About the authors

Amelia Cooper

Amelia Cooper is Head of Content at Smart Insights. She is responsible for managing the paid member content library and e-learning resources, as well as strategic planning to ensure customers get the most from their memberships. She is a University of Southampton and the Chartered Institute of Marketing graduate with over 8 years’ experience in digital marketing, specializing in content marketing.

Dr. Dave Chaffey

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.