Actionable Marketing Advice

Prioritising your online presence with the Digital Marketing Radar

A tool for reviewing the options for marketing and monitoring for social media and other sites

You may have noticed that there’s a fair amount of choice online for reaching and interacting with your audience; it’s overwhelming!

To help you review and prioritise, we’ve developed the “Digital Marketing Radar“. More recently, we have developed this into a Social Media Marketing Radar infographic – see this post for more details on each platform and to download our free set of infographics.

This is the first version and we intend to refine it, while keeping it simple, so tell us what you think!

Why we developed the Radar

I’ve always thought that the Conversation Prism developed by Brian Solis a couple of years ago was a great way of thinking through your options for making use of and monitoring social media.

How to use the Digital Marketing Radar

Our radar follows a similar idea to to help think through the options available, but with a couple of  differences which make it more applicable to overall digital marketing strategy:

1. It’s simpler! Trouble is The Conversation Prism has grown over time so that now I can’t really use it effectively in workshops – there are too many options and the more important ones aren’t distinguished from the less important. So I thought I’d create a tool for visualising the option which was a little simpler.

2. It’s scope is broader. It’s not limited to social media sites since most sites now have some form of peer-to-peer interaction facility. Instead it shows all the main places where a company should review its representation used to increase awareness of it’s brand through display advertising, search marketing as well as online PR and social media.

3. It’s intended to help prioritisation. It can be used to discuss with colleagues or agencies which sites warrant or deserve most attention in the different categories. Sites which are agreed to be more important which warrant more resource should be positioned more towards the centre. Once we’ve finalised it, we’ll provide some blank templates and downloads. To help you review the relative importance of different sites:

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  • http://www.twitter.com/mrrx Rory

    Hi Dave. I definitely agree the Conversation Prism can be a little overwhelming and doesnt support prioritisation. This is great start for a framework to support the ‘legwork’ required to by marketing managers to assay the full ‘egosphere’(!) to develop their own brand-specific digital marketing radar.

  • Dave Chaffey

    Thanks for your comments Rory, appreciated!

    I have also had a comment via Twitter that email isn’t supported in the diagram, i.e. ads in enewsletters or rented lists. I agree that is an omission, and its value is often underestimated, but that presence would be included under publishers – I will add a note to that effect.

  • http://richard-sedley.net Richard Sedley

    Hi Dave

    Very interesting idea. Based on my experience I agree with most of the positioning my only divergence is on Linkedin which from a small business, B2B and event based marketing I think is actually more important than any of the other Social Networks if used well.

    Likewise I suspect that Delicious is maybe more important than Stumble Upon (but that’s probably splitting hairs).

    The only other thing I’d add is that FriendFeed is also worth consideration. FriendFeed appears to be picked up more by Google Alerts than a lot of other social media so might be worth including.

    • Dave Chaffey

      Thanks Richard – let me know how it works if you use it as a training aid on your CIM courses?!

      I’d agree with what you say about B2B/Smaller business – Twitter and Linked In should be priorities – the idea with the Radar is that it’s a tool for discussion between agency and client – what should be nearer the centre – so you would redraw for your B2B example.

      Friendfeed is a good spot although it seems to be on the wane as does Delicious. I have Stumbleupon higher priority since it does pass Page Rank and it has more of a viral effect than Delicious. That said I find Delicious a useful research tool – must write a little post on that one day.

      • http://charliesaidthat.com/digital charliesaidthat

        I agree 100% with Richard, my experience is that in B2B LinkedIn is invaluable compared to other social networks.

        I would go as far to say that LinkedIn when used creatively and well – can be a great customer service tool too.

        I’d also move Reddit above Digg – since New Digg has lost a lot of trust and userbase to Reddit – (It is increasingly difficult for brands to leverage Reddit though – it has to be organic).

      • http://www.richardsedley.com Richard Sedley

        I’ll definitely be using it on my course and I’ll let you know how it is received. Thanks.

  • http://www.vmcg.co.uk Neil Wilkins

    Hi Dave. This is really interesting work and will be particularly useful in discussions on CAM Digital Marketing Course Days when talking digital marketing metrics. With ‘measurement’ in mind would it be worth showing more ‘profitable’ icons larger than others in terms of their performance against strategic objectives. I like your point 3 in terms of prioritisation and as a dashboard it’d be helpful to integrate ‘measures’ inside it at the same time. Regards, Neil

    • Dave Chaffey

      Good to see that another trainer may use it Neil. Let me know what the discussion throws up if you get a moment.

      Interesting to think how you could integrate measures, e.g. mention, referrers, conversion, sales and use it as a dashboard.

  • Gregg Houlden

    I find this a very useful and effective tool. I am a General Manager with a remit to grow whilst maintaining margins. I think the ability to drill down and really evaluate the content and positioning as part of a holistic strategy is a real winner in terms of making sure an enterprise gets maximum bang for it’s Pounds. I think tools that allow an effective visualisation of ones position should be on everyone’s radar.

    • Dave Chaffey

      Thanks Gregg. I’m pleased that was useful – good that my intention to simplify and define priorities at which to excel rather than doing everything badly strikes a chord with you.

  • Pingback: Marketing Radar /Radar Mercadologico

  • http://www.twitter.com/rubyq ruby quince

    thanks for this. saw it before but several people fowarded it to me again (viral splashback!) so i’ve printed and put it on our wall in the digital department! A lot of the priorities change in line with the specifics of a campaign objective/client. I <3 delicious, but @charliesaidthat has a fair point about stumble

    • Dave Chaffey

      “Viral Splashback” – not sure that I like that idea! But it’s great this tool is being passed around and I’m delighted that it’s on the wall – shows we’re helping.

      When I get a moment I’ll update with a blank version and a .ppt version.

  • http://www.millstream.eu Neil Thompson

    Hi Dave – where do you see Wikipedia fitting into the radar?

    • http://www.smartinsights.com/about-dave-chaffey/ Dave Chaffey

      A fair/good question Neil, it doesn’t really fit in any of these categories really, with the closest fit in Publishers or aggregators and syndication – it’s an aggregator of knowledge. The Radar is about prioritising, so if companies felt it was important, they could add it onto their scope.

      I didn’t include Wikipedia since these days there’s relatively little to do to influence it and links within in it are nofollowed, so there’s limited SEO benefit other than awareness raising.

      Of course, if you’re a larger brand it will be part of your representation and its worth monitoring reputation and correcting/contributing via the editors.

  • Simon

    Hi Dave, Did you get around to creating the blank version and PDF version? Would be really useful for me.

    • http://www.smartinsights.com/ Dave Chaffey

      Hi Simon,

      Yes, we did create a PDF version which is available free for Basic members as part of the free downloads (access from the Membership menu).
      We didn’t do a blank version in Powerpoint since we thought people would like to create their own and many other priorities to update content – sorry.
      HTH, Dave

  • http://twitter.com/JMSTheReal John-Michael Scott

    I have to admit, while I appreciate the heck out of this radar – I think there are some clear missing annotations:
    1. When a person searches for a “product” and has previously made a purchase on Amazon, there is a strong trend toward that person returning to Amazon to look up any other consumer product.
    2. When a person searches for a restaurant or other local business on Yelp, there is a strong trend toward that person returning to Yelp to look up any other local business – with a caveat – if someone has looked for a home repair business of any sort – there is a bifurcation taking place between Yelp and Angie’s List.
    3. When a person is searching for general information without clarity of terms that they should be using, there is a strong trend toward that person using Google, or whatever search engine they happen to have on their mobile device (usually google).

    So – depending on what you are offering – the text search is likely to be found on one of these 3 other sites and that really has to be taken into account.

    it is interesting that the Yelp insignia is in your graphic above, but not in your radar. In real world terms, I have heard from multiple local business people who are getting a lot of pull-thru from yelp searches – while this is anecdotal – it is a rising trend that should be accounted for.

    Cheers and thank you for the simplification of the Conversation Prism. Love Jess & Brian’s work, but it is really a disaster trying to speak with a business person today about these things.

    One last comment – Social Bookmarking…Pinterest is exploding in this space with it’s highly visual approach.

    Cheers!

    • http://www.smartinsights.com/ Dave Chaffey

      Glad you like it John – and thanks for adding to it – it could use an update for 2013 although the groups of areas don’t change much.

      Useful to flag up Yelp and the text links – thanks for sharing.

      Dave

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