Explore our Digital Marketing Strategy and Planning Toolkit

Our new interactive benchmarking tool lets you assess the digital marketing capability of your business

Author's avatar By Dave Chaffey 24 Sep, 2015
Essential Essential topic

Discover your business's ability to Plan, Reach, Act, Convert and Engage

Applying the many digital channels and technologies to your business is no easy task. The industry moves fast, and there are a large number of different disciplines to master (see our list of the top 20 digital marketing skills). Email marketing, SEO, Social Media Marketing, Conversion Rate Optimisation, the list goes on, and each one requires a very different set of skills and awareness of the success factors for different platforms.

Amongst the many different skills we need to master for digital marketing, it's easy to lose sight of the big picture of how a business is using digital marketing to compete.  Our research shows that many businesses don't have a digital marketing plan, so knowing how to structure a plan can be difficult.

To help provide a structure for creating a strategy, when Smart Insights first launched, we developed this Excel digital strategy audit for Expert members which has proved popular, but being Excel is  bit clunky and difficult to update scores. So, we've recently developed a new interactive tool for all members...

Introducing our new, free interactive digital benchmarking tool - check it out!

We've just pushed our new planning 'app' live, so  if you'd like to check it out here's the new landing page readers can sign up to use it:

If you're already a member of Smart Insights and signed in, click on the link and you'll go straight to the members area with which it's integrated, or click on the logo to sign in.

We hope it will help marketers assess their digital marketing across the customer lifecycle, show the gaps and highlight priorities to improve through recommendations.

Reviewing where your organisation currently ranks and the next steps needed to move it forward can be half the battle. That’s why we have developed our new interactive benchmarking tool to help give better structure and recommendations.

All Smart Insights members can now access our capability review tool via this landing page, members can access in the members area if signed in. The tool will help you to see how you rate across the five key areas of our RACE planning framework. By taking this quick assessment you will be able to.

See how your organisation ranks for its digital marketing

Our assessment will step you through the key areas of digital marketing, divided up into Plan, Reach, Act, Convert, Engage.

RACE planning framework

Working with other consultants and our beta test team, I've looked to apply all my 18 years of experience in Digital Marketing to identify the key activities, organisational structures, and best practices which define how well a business is doing in a given area of digital marketing. Here's an example:

Smart Insights Capability Review tool

By doing this, you will develop a better sense of where your organisation is currently at, which will help with your progress and digital transformation.

In addition, your results will be anonymously benchmarked against the results of all other site members, so you can see how your business compares. This could be very useful if you are trying to get management buy-in for your digital transformation plan or budget for a digital marketing project.

The Ascent of Man

Access actionable advice on how to improve and move up to the next level

When you complete each module you will be given advice for how to progress to the next level that is concise and can be acted on right away. Having this level of personalised advice to push you into taking the next steps can be really handy. Especially because often-digital marketing advice can be vague and offer platitudes that can’t really be put into practice. Luckily you won’t find any of that here. But do feedback if you have suggestions for improvements!

Capability tool recommendations

Learn from our library of resources with over 130 guides, E-books and templates

Here at Smart Insights we love producing resources to help you with all your myriad digital marketing goals. Whilst we find people really rate our resources, the conversations we’ve had with our members often turn to the issue of where best to start.

That’s why we’ve designed this capability review to allow members to see exactly what resources you can use to take your marketing to the next level. Depending on how you rated yourself; our capability review tool will give you key resources to look at to improve your skills. All recommendations come courtesy of our CEO Dr Dave Chaffey, so you know your being pointed towards the best digital marketing resources!

Go to learning topic

Better yet, it also is integrated with our new Digital Marketing e-learning module, so you can access an interactive e-learning topic for each area which you need to improve and use the quizzes to see your progress.

Expert members can re-take the assessment as often as they like to see how they are progressing and what they need to do to progress to the next state and move their business forward. Basic members can only use the tool once, so make sure to download the results and consider upgrading if you would like to use the tool again. Members can access the tool on their members homepage when signed in.

Author's avatar

By Dave Chaffey

Digital strategist Dr Dave Chaffey is co-founder and Content Director of online marketing training platform and publisher Smart Insights. 'Dr Dave' is known for his strategic, but practical, data-driven advice. He has trained and consulted with many business of all sizes in most sectors. These include large international B2B and B2C brands including 3M, BP, Barclaycard, Dell, Confused.com, HSBC, Mercedes-Benz, Microsoft, M&G Investment, Rentokil Initial, O2, Royal Canin (Mars Group) plus many smaller businesses. Dave is editor of the templates, guides and courses in our digital marketing resource library used by our Business members to plan, manage and optimize their marketing. Free members can access our free sample templates here. Dave is also keynote speaker, trainer and consultant who is author of 5 bestselling books on digital marketing including Digital Marketing Excellence and Digital Marketing: Strategy, Implementation and Practice. In 2004 he was recognised by the Chartered Institute of Marketing as one of 50 marketing ‘gurus’ worldwide who have helped shape the future of marketing. My personal site, DaveChaffey.com, lists my latest Digital marketing and E-commerce books and support materials including a digital marketing glossary. Please connect on LinkedIn to receive updates or ask me a question.

This blog post has been tagged with:

Digital Marketing Benchmarking

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