Planning Quick Guides

How to create a digital marketing strategy

Our poll showed that many companies don’t yet have a digital marketing strategy:

But we believe that there are many reasons you need a digital marketing strategy.

Choose from a Quick Guide in our planning section for guidance on the main issues to think through when developing a digital marketing plan.

Affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing is still an essential digital media channel for many transactional Ecommerce sites for retailers, travel and financial services. Affiliate marketing is also a revenue model to consider for site owners, especially online publishers. Here’s the issues to think about it to manage it effectively.

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B2B Digital Marketing Strategy

Traditional promotional techniques will only get today’s B2B marketer so far. Digital marketing techniques can support B2B marketing well since B2B relationships are rarely about an immediate one-off transaction. Rather it is about building reputation, demonstrating capability and showcasing credibility.

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Content marketing management

Content marketing is a vital method of engaging online audiences and using social sharing to reach new audiences too. Our content strategy guides and templates give you the tools to support this process.

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Customer engagement

Of all the areas of digital marketing we cover on Smart Insights, Customer engagement is arguably THE most important and THE most challenging for a brand. It’s crucial to repeat business, but with the choice available online difficult to achieve.

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Customer relationship management

Customer relationship management or CRM is a well established approach. Although some argue it’s impossible to achieve and customer managed relationships is more appropriate! Digital media provides new opportunities to tailor customer communications integrated with traditional channels.  We also review this for our email marketing tactic.

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Digital marketing platforms

In the beginning, the web was just flat text and images accessed through desktop computers. In this section we cover emerging technologies and innovation.

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Digital marketing strategy

Your digital strategy provides a foundation for all of your tactical marketing to engage customers across the lifecycle of Reach-Act-Convert-Engage summarised in our RACE digital marketing planning framework.

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Ecommerce

Our content on Ecommerce focuses on techniques to increase sales of transactional Ecommerce sites including retail, travel and financial services.

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Email marketing

Some say Email marketing is dead. We’re sure there’s a lot of life in yet; it’s still a primary way of engaging customers and one of the most popular topics on Smart Insights.

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Goal setting and evaluation

If you don’t know where you’re heading, you’ll never know when you get there or whether you’re on track. Setting the right goals for digital marketing isn’t so easy, but our RACE framework should help you select the right goals.

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Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a fantastic tool, but to get the most from it and so get more commercial value from your Internet marketing needs careful setup. Our guides take you through the steps to customise it for your business.

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Managing digital marketing

Managing digital marketing will often need new skills, new staff, new technologies and new processes for marketing. It’s a big change! We look at digital marketing governance the – best way to structure teams and update processes in larger organisation. If you’re a team of one you can ignore this section! The bigger the organisation, the bigger the challenge!

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Marketing planning

A business is directionless without a marketing plan, so every business should have one. Creating digital marketing plans can be difficult for many working in digital marketing since there isn’t a solid marketing plan to base it on. So in this section our resources show how to create a marketing plan and examples of what it should contain.

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Marketplace analysis

Understanding your customers online is the first step to improving your results from online channels. Next, it’s benchmarking competitors and looking for partners to work with. We’ll show you how to audit your capabilities and identify the best commercial opportunities.

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Mobile marketing

Mobile marketing is massive already and forecast to exceed desktop Internet access in many developing countries. So every marketer needs to keep tabs on the opportunities of reaching their audiences via mobile and how to make their mobile sites and presences visible and accessible. To learn more take our free mobile marketing healthcheck

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Online PR

We think Online PR is one of the most cost-effective marketing approaches for all types of business. But it’s difficult to get right since it is often managed by different people and there’s the overlap with SEO and social media marketing.

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Online brand strategy

The Internet and digital technologies give fantastic opportunities to engage companies with your brand in new ways.

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Search engine optimisation (SEO)

Our recommendations on SEO best practice

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is arguably THE most cost-effective digital marketing technique, but also the most challenging to get right. Our SEO resources are aimed at marketers who need to ask the right questions to get better results from SEO whether they are working on SEO themselves or they have an in-house or agency SEO resource.

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Here is a selection of the most useful articles on SEO on Smart Insights followed by a listing of the most recent articles.

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Social media marketing

You may have heard of this! It’s transforming marketing, for the better most would say. We’ll help you navigate social media with a strategic approach sharing approaches from the leading commentators and companies.

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Traffic building strategy

Most site owners want more traffic, that’s quality traffic of course. In this section we show how a planned approach can help you build traffic. We also cover how to increase the reach of your brand through publisher sites and social networks.

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User experience UX

The tools and techniques for creating a compelling user experience are constantly changing. With today’s websites and social networks offering interactivity and rich media we couldn’t have dreamt of a few years ago, there are great opportunities to produce an effective experience.

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Blog posts

Developing a marketing roadmap
Susanne Colwyn, May 17, 2013

Insight from Connect2013 – the marketing roadmap and exploiting data in the right way for your business In previous years, Dave Chaffey has spoken at the eCircle conferences, but this year was different since eCircle is now part of  Teradata …..

Digital marketing strategy Read more
Social CRM Strategy Definition
Dave Chaffey,

Definition, frameworks and best practice advice from Accenture and Altimeter analysts In October 2010 Accenture published a useful new guide to social CRM summarising the transformation required in organisations by the advent of Social CRM. This is useful addition to …..

Social CRM Read more
Facebook case study
Dave Chaffey, May 13, 2013

The development of Facebook’s strategy including business and revenue model You use Facebook, but have you ever wondered about its business model and how it has evolved? In my E-business and E-commerce Management book we have reviewed the development of Facebook for over six …..

Facebook Marketing Read more
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