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.
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.
We recommend using the RACE Framework to structure your marketing strategy, integrated across Plan, Reach, Act, Convert and Engage.
As you can see via the marketing funnel below, building an effective digital marketing strategy requires these 5 steps which nurture the customer through their experiences of your business while influencing their decision making process and lifetime value.
The RACE Framework is a streamlined, practical, marketing framework which can be scaled up or down according to your business goals. The benefit of our digital marketing strategy system is you can start to see results from your marketing activities instantly, and you can use data and insights to adapt your plan to meet your objectives.
The 5 stages of strategic digital marketing planning include plan, reach, act, convert and engage. In this section, we will summarise the key success factors for each stage of your digital marketing strategy, with examples, integrated across the Smart Insights RACE Framework.
Every successful digital marketing strategy starts with a plan! We recommend you use a data-driven approach, review your current digital marketing effectiveness, and plan to improve from there.
Omnichannel planning opportunities include customizing analytics, setting up KPI dashboards and setting SMART objectives to create a strategy of prioritized improvements to how you deploy digital marketing media, technology, and data to increase leads and sales.
To ensure your digital marketing strategy is working efficiently and effectively, we recommend taking a digitally-focused approach to strategy and planning. Our digital transformation solutions are designed for marketers and managers to create a fully integrated, data-driven, practical digital marketing strategy to support their business' overall vision.
The aim of digital transformation is to improve digital maturity across your business, while, at the same time, integrating ‘always-on’ digital marketing activities with brand and product marketing within the business.
As identified below in our digital marketing maturity benchmarks, an 'initial' maturity level equates to having no defined plan or strategy, no clear goals for digital contribution and limited prioritization of activities.
On the other hand, an optimized, market leading digital marketing plan includes full integration of digital marketing across the business, a strcuture testing and optimziation program, and mattech and data integrated for 360 degree customer views.
Strengthen your marketing funnel by reaching more customers and building awareness. Inform your digital marketing strategy with the latest key online marketing techniques to drive visits to your site.
Smart Insights members can keep up to date with the latest marketing techniques across each stage of the RACE Framework. For example, find three steps below to improve your organic search in 2022, taken from our digital marketing trends.
Encourage interactions on your website or social media to help you generate leads for the future. Having reached your audience, it's crucial you influence their next steps to move down the funnel towards a purchase decision.
Here, strategic content marketing comes into play. Use content marketing to entertain, inspire, educate and convince potential converters during their customer lifecycle.
To influence customer behavior on your site or social media platforms, you should also look into the current wide range of innovations in interaction design, proven to boost engagement with your content. Taff has published this useful summary, with examples, of what they see as the latest interaction design trends which we can see continuing into 2022.
The pinnacle of your structured digital marketing strategy is, of course, to convert more customers. 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.
Our digital marketing trends highlight three tips for increasing your conversions
Finally, after you're worked so hard to get them, did you know you can increase sales from existing customers by keeping them engaged after their first purchase? Improve your personalized communications using web, email, and social media marketing using the data you already have about them to create hyper-personalized marketing campaigns.
Customer engagement research and testing options for digital marketers today include:
Moreover, machine learning enables unprecedented insights into consumer behaviour. For example, predictive analytics can be used to identify:
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.
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:
Our blog, 10 reasons you need a digital marketing strategy sets out the 10 most common problems that in our experience arise if you don't have a strategy. This can help you hone the scope and purpose of your digital marketing strategy, and make the case for investment in digital marketing. Examples include:
A clearly defined digital value proposition tailored to your different target customer personas will help you differentiate your online service encouraging existing and new customers to engage initially and stay loyal. Savvy marketers tailor their marketing techniques to attract B2B, B2C of D2C sales and leads effectively.
Developing an omnichannel marketing strategy is key to this for many organizations, since the content is what engages your audiences through different channels like search, social, email marketing, and on your blog.
It's all too common for digital marketing activities to be completed in silos whether that's a specialist digital marketer, sitting in IT, or a separate digital agency. It's easier that way to package 'digital' into a convenient chunk. But of course, it's less effective. Everyone agrees that paid, owned and earned digital media work best when integrated with traditional media and response channels.
That's why we recommend developing an integrated digital marketing strategy, so your digital marketing works hard for you! With your integrated plan in place, digital will become part of your marketing activity and part of business as usual. Find out more.
Even if you do have sufficient resources, they may be wasted. This is particularly the case in larger companies where you see different parts of the marketing organization purchasing different tools or using different agencies for performing similar online marketing tasks.
That's why you need to invest in a marketing strategy that works for you and your team, to plan, manage and optimize your digital channels and platforms. Drive the marketing results you need to achieve your business objectives, and boost your marketing ROI.
An effective digital 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.
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?
A successful strategy should be built on reviewing 7 core capabilities which are:
In our Business Tranformation Learning Path for Business Professional members we show these in our capability visual:
First, 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.
A digital marketing strategy is a channel strategy stemming from a marketing strategy. The digital marketing strategy must...
So put another way, digital marketing strategy defines how companies should:
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 sites to learn more about digital marketing strategy:
These are the related techniques which we recommend as important for managing Digital marketing strategy effectively. View these hub pages giving details on best practices, statistics and examples for these techniques:
The Digital Marketing Strategy And Planning toolkit contains:
The Digital Marketing Strategy And Planning toolkit contains:
Start your Digital Marketing Plan today with our Free membership.
