Marketing strategy

Improve your Marketing strategy with our hub page

Use our hub pages as a reference to get up-to-speed on all the main digital marketing techniques. They will help you quickly understand how to make the most of the technique through definitions and recommendations on our member resources and blog articles covering strategy, best practices and the latest statistics.

How to structure a marketing plan?

We believe that an omnichannel marketing strategy is essential for marketers to take advantage of the growing digital marketing opportunities for acquiring and retaining customers - so you can win more sales. That's why we recommend using the RACE Framework to plan your marketing strategy, across Reach, Act, Convert and Engage.

Apply an integrated marketing strategy

An integrated marketing plan will give you a foundation for all the key online marketing activities. We recommend using the Smart Insights RACE Framework.

This integrates 25 essential multichannel marketing activities covering all parts of the customer lifecycle broken down in these sections:

Plan - Use a data-driven approach to review your current digital marketing effectiveness, customize analytics, set up KPI dashboards and SMART objectives create a strategy of prioritized improvements to how you deploy digital marketing media, technology and data to increase leads and sales
Reach - Build awareness using the 6 key online marketing techniques which will drive visits to your site.
Act - Encourage interactions on your website or social media to help you generate leads for future
Convert - Use retargeting, nurturing and conversion rate optimization to remind and persuade your audience to buy online or offline if phone and face-to-face channels if these are important to you.
Engage - Increase sales from existing customers by improving personalized communications using web, email and social media marketing

Create a winning strategy

Get started today using a tried and tested step-by-step process. Apply the Smart Insights RACE Framework to optimize your marketing and win more customers.

Reasons why you need a digital marketing strategy

Did you know even in 2021, many companies don't have a digital marketing strategy?

Our recent Managing Digital marketing research report showed that almost half (45%) of companies don't yet have a planned strategy:

Does your organization have a clearly-defined digital marketing strategy?

Marketing strategy quick guide

Marketing strategy success factors

An effective marketing strategy will help you take the right decisions to make a company successful. A strategy process model provides a framework that gives a logical sequence to follow to ensure the inclusion of all key activities of strategy development and implementation. We recommend the SOSTAC planning approach.

A marketing strategy should involve a review to check that all of your capabilities are in place to help your organization manage all of the digital touchpoints. But which capabilities are important, which do you need to review?

In our Business Tranformation Learning Path for Business Professional members we show these in our capability visual:

Digital Marketing Capabilities Model

A successful strategy should be built on reviewing 7 core capabilities which are strategic approach, performance improvement process, management buy-in, resourcing and structure, data and infrastructure, integrated customer communications and customer experience.

Marketing strategy definition

Marketing strategy

A marketing strategy is a proactive, data-driven approach to marketing and communication activity across all channels and touchpoints. The marketing strategy informs all marketing activity taking place for the business since all marketing plans stem from this overarching structure and vision. Once the strategy is set and communicated, marketers use tactics to put into place their actions that drive to the result.

Digital marketing strategy

A digital marketing strategy is a channel strategy stemming from a marketing strategy. The digital marketing strategy must...

Be informed by research into customer channel behaviour and marketplace activity = intermediaries, publishers and competitors
Based on objectives for future online and offline channel contribution %
Define and communicate the differentials of the channel to encourage customers to use it,
BUT, need to manage channel integration

So put another way, digital marketing strategy defines how companies should:

Hit our channel leads & sales targets
Budgets for Acquisition, Conversion, Retention & Growth, Service
Communicate benefits of using this channel “ enhance brand
Prioritize audiences targeted through the channel
Prioritize products available through the channel

Recommended member resources for Marketing strategy

Toolkits on

B2B startup digital marketing plan workbook and case study

Ebooks on Digital marketing strategy

Online training on Digital marketing strategy

Digital marketing e-learning course

Marketing templates on Digital marketing strategy

Related statistics

Tools & Software

Best websites on Marketing strategy

There are surprisingly few quality digital marketing strategy sites since most focus on the strategy. We like to think we're different in our focus on strategy too. These are our top 10 sites to learn more about digital marketing strategy:

1. BCG Perspectives - The Boston Consulting Group of "BCG Matrix" fame has recently improved its articles and research on multichannel marketing and customer insight
2. Econsultancy reports - The Econsultancy blog mainly covers tactics, but there are sound research reports on managing digital channels and ecommerce teams.
3. Figaro Digital. Unusual since it's an online magazine, but these editorial articles often cover digital strategy and are accessible by industry.
4. Forrester Marketing Blog. Forrester analysts write about developments in technology and consumer behaviour .
5. [email protected]. The Marketing section often covers online marketing issues and cases.
6. Financial Times Connected Business. Monthly articles based on case studies.
Harvard Business Review blog. Quality commentary on the intersection of marketing and technology strategy, but unfortunately, not a well-tagged blog.
7. McKinseyQuarterly. Articles regularly cover digital marketing strategy.
8. The Web Strategy blog. A personal blog by Jeremiah Owyang, previously a Forrester analyst, now at Altimeter. Mainly covers social media strategy.

Key techniques for Marketing strategy

These are the related techniques which we recommend as important for managing Marketing strategy effectively. View these hub pages giving details on best practices, statistics and examples for these techniques:

View all blog articles on Marketing strategy