Our recommended process and tools to help you grow your marketing career with strategic skill development
As marketers, we understand how challenging it can be to keep all your plates spinning. You’re trying to manage your day job, while staying up to date with all the latest industry and platform changes, while making sure you are fed and watered and clean and getting enough sleep to keep your brain in gear. Not to mention remembering Auntie Wendy’s birthday and making sure the dog has had enough exercise. With all this going on, setting time to learn marketing skills is often pushed to the back of your priority list. Over time, you drop the plate.
There are a few reasons for this. From speaking to marketers over the years, Continuous Professional Development (CPD), feels like something you should be doing, but often gets ‘saved for later’, while we try to keep…
Dr Dave Chaffey’s annual review of the marketing trends that will matter for B2C and B2B marketers in 2026
In my review this year, I'll be again be aiming to keep it practical for marketers since I will recommend trends to review across the customer lifecycle based on our RACE planning framework. I'll cover all the key media channels and tactics such as those in the lifecycle visual below.
This is a B2B Marketing lifecycle example, we also cover B2C lifecycle marketing in my original article on Lifecycle marketing.
As well as practical marketing tactics covered under RACE, I will start with strategic marketing trends covered under Plan.
Plan marketing trends
Plan-related trends cover how marketing is managed, and within digital marketing, deploying the latest marketing technology is a large part of this. It's no surprise that Martech trends for 2026…
Our quick Q&A guide answering the top 10+ questions on digital marketing we are asked
Since we launched Smart Insights, we have specialized in helping marketers answer the common questions around digital marketing, particularly related to digital marketing strategy and best practices. We found that although people can quickly understand the difference between the different digital marketing channels available like search, social media and email marketing, there is a lot more to digital marketing strategy than that. In fact, our co-founder Dr. Dave Chaffey has written an entire book on Digital marketing strategy and implementation, which is now nearing ten editions since there is so much involved with answering these questions accurately...
To succeed in digital marketing strategy you need to review your whole approach to marketing and your brand. That’s where many go wrong with digital strategy, diving straight into channels without considering the bigger picture of their marketing strategy.
Dr. Dave…
From SMART to SMARTER marketing objectives: Discover how to define marketing objectives, measure your digital marketing goals, and use data to inform your marketing strategy
When identifying specific marketing objectives to support your long-term goals, it is common practice to apply the widely used SMART mnemonic. You will know that SMART is used to assess the suitability of objectives set to drive different strategies or the improvement of the full range of business processes.
By its simplest definition, an effective SMART marketing objective is:
Specific, measurable, actionable, relevant, and time-bound.
But you will learn in this article that beyond this well-known acronym, there are different variations and nuances which you can apply to practice Smarter Marketing.
What is Smarter Marketing?
The SMART acronym is much more than a mnemonic since it defines a way of thinking about getting better results within business and marketing. This mindset is based…
How the RACE Framework can help you improve your digital marketing
Marketing frameworks are really useful tools to help us plan, manage and optimize marketing. They’re particularly useful for digital marketing, since it’s so complex today because of all the digital channels available. This is shown by our customer lifecycle visual (below), which suggests the many different touchpoints that potential communications may have with their audiences.
The example shown in this visual is for a B2B scenario where different nurture activities are used to help convert interest in a product or service through to purchase. Many similar stages are involved with B2C marketing.
In this article, I’ll explain how and why we created the Smart Insights RACE Framework for online and multichannel marketing and at the same time, explain some of the key features of marketing frameworks. When I created RACE, it was my…
From B2B to E-commerce to Brands, we've got examples of digital marketing plans for early startups through to multinational enterprises
Whether you're starting from scratch, or improving your existing plans, examples of digital marketing plans help marketers see the how, not just the why, of structuring their approach to digital marketing. Because of this, we have always included examples with our planning templates.
Sharing examples can also be useful for onboarding your team in the marketing planning process, or getting marketing strategy buy-in from senior management.
How example plans can help you
Are you looking for a very basic structure from which to start building a scalable digital marketing plan?
Are you approaching planning with only a very limited time to pull together any kind of digital plan right now?
Are you brand new to the planning process and unsure of what your first step should be?
If you answered yes to any of…
Dr. Dave Chaffey, author of Digital Marketing: Strategy, Implementation and Practice explains a process to achieve success by focusing on the 18 most important digital marketing techniques
Simply put, our definition of digital marketing, or online marketing, is:
"Achieving marketing objectives through applying digital media, data and technology."
Within this broad digital marketing definition, there are many vital channels and platforms that we will introduce and share strategies and tactics for in this article, as well as the key digital marketing KPIs and metrics for success. To our overview of digital marketing relevant for 2025 we also share some of the latest insights on which the most successful digital marketing channels are in 2025.
In this overview of digital marketing designed for people who are new to it, I will cover:
What is digital marketing?
18 key types of digital marketing techniques across 6 media channel
How to achieve the business…
Do you, or does your organization, use SOPs for digital marketing activities?
You may not have heard of SOPs, since the technique seems to be more widely used in the US and in markets where the sales process is more technical (think E-commerce or B2B rather than consumer brands and smaller businesses). But I believe they are a powerful technique that any business in any market can benefit from. They are particularly useful for agencies and consultants to use when working on client activities. In a larger team, in particular, they can help achieve consistency of approach and results by everyone following best practices and can support training of less experienced team members.
What is a Marketing Standard Operating Procedure (SOP)?
So, what is an SOP? In short, an SOP defines a repeatable procedure for how a business process task should best be completed by defining a series of steps or sub-tasks.
In marketing,…
Use our digital marketing strategy template integrated across the RACE Framework to plan and get ahead in your digital marketing
We all know the old saying “if you fail to plan, you are planning to fail”, but when it comes to digital marketing, this really is the case. It has never been more important than it is now to use a digital marketing strategy template so you can plan, manage and optimize your online activities.
Today, digital media is vital when it comes to driving leads and sales, meaning marketers need to understand how best to engage and convert online audiences. Despite this, our research into digital marketing trends for 2025 shows that many businesses (around 40%) still don’t have a digital marketing plan. As a result, companies are missing out on the benefits of having a digital marketing plan integrated into their overall marketing plan or as a separate roadmap…
Using GenAI RAG techniques to support marketing strategy development
Since I’ve been involved in digital marketing from when we used to call it Internet Marketing, I’ve always been keen to help businesses use a more strategic approach. I believe it’s essential since digital marketing is complex, and it’s vital that it’s aligned with marketing strategy and not just treated as tactical, as it often is. So, in my consulting, training, books and on Smart Insights, how to use a strategic approach to digital marketing has always been a big part of my recommendations.
The recent growth in adoption of GenAI has been fascinating for me, since although it can be used in a tactical way to support copywriting for digital channels, it has also been enthusiastically adopted for marketing and digital marketing strategy and planning as our research on digital marketing trends shows.
46% reported that they had already used AI for…
