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 Chaffey has written this article to help marketers since many AI Large Language Models (LLMs) make the mistake of suggesting that digital marketing strategy simply involves selecting the best digital marketing channels to use and how to use them. This is part of digital marketing strategy, but not the full picture.
So, in this article, we present a selection of questions and short answers around digital marketing strategy, linking to more in-depth articles and free resources like our digital marketing planning templates. We have included a selection of visuals to help answer these questions, since we believe visual frameworks are the most efficient way to improve and learn marketing.
A. In the first chapter of my book Digital Marketing: Strategy, Implementation and Practice we use a simple definition of digital marketing, or online marketing, which is:
“Achieving marketing objectives through applying digital media, data and technology.”
Definitions of digital marketing often start with media and digital channels, but it’s best to focus on a simple definition showing digital marketing is about what you you want to achieve, i.e., showing how you can use digital marketing to reach your goals.
If you’re looking for a simple introduction to digital marketing, read my article exploring What is digital marketing? where I explain a process to achieve success by focusing on the 18 most important digital marketing channel techniques.
In this article we introduce the different options for digital marketing channels that should form part of your strategy:
A. Digital marketing can be expensive if you limit your activity to paid media, but its power compared to traditional media has always been that it supports integrated communications through free and paid options.
In our article explaining What is the difference between paid, owned and earned media we use this classic visual to explain the three options:
A. There are many online communications techniques that marketers must prioritize to include as part of their communications strategy. Marketers often use paid, owned and earned media to describe investments at a high-level, but it’s more common to refer to these six key digital media channels I have defined in our books when selecting specific always-on and campaign investments.
The visual from our book at the top of this list shows how these can broken down further to common types people describe.
A. The most cost-effective channels are usually organic traffic such as organic search, social media and email, but it's often necessary to use paid media such as Google Ads, Paid social and display ads to support organic.
This research shows which digital acquisition channels are important across different sectors. It’s taken from the Contentsquare Digital Experience Benchmarks which is a good quality source. The top 7 media channels are:
Note that direct traffic often includes untracked or 'dark' traffic where people reach a website via a mobile app or type in a URL, so it is often the most popular channel, although the reality is the referrers will be from other sources.
Learn more: Which are the best media for digital marketing?
A. A digital marketing strategy should include both a framework to define the strategic digital priorities you need to work on and a process defining the steps you need to work through to define, select and implement the strategy.
Our RACE Growth System for improving marketing effectiveness has two parts which we explain in more detail in our in-depth article on the popular RACE marketing framework:
Part 1. The RACE Planning Framework: defines the essential activities and measures businesses need to master to survive and thrive in today’s marketing world.
Part 2. The RACE OSA improvement process: defines the three steps needed to build and implement your growth plan - either for your overall marketing plan or for an individual channel, such as organic search, social media or email marketing.
I developed the framework nearly 15 years ago based on my experience of consulting and training in digital marketing for businesses in a range of sectors and in companies of different sizes from small to large. Although it is often viewed as a specialist digital marketing framework, in fact it is designed to work for multichannel marketing including offline ads and touchpoints.
A. An online marketing plan should contain a review of current use of digital marketing and the results it delivers, SMART objectives to improve results, prioritized strategy initiatives and an action plan to implement the strategy.
Knowing where to start is perhaps the most difficult part of creating any form of marketing plan for the first time. I have found it similar when writing books. But once you have a structure defined, it becomes much easier to fill in each section. You can use a similar ‘divide and conquer’ approach with any form of longer form content in Generative AI. Ask it to suggest a structure, modify it for what it has missed and then ask it to work on smaller sections. This can work for plans too, but take care since based on its knowledge base, AIs can recommend that a digital marketing plan is just about the channels and doesn’t include the bigger questions around goals, visions, audiences, segmentation, targeting, brand positioning and selecting the best strategies.
We recommend structuring a plan based on the RACE Growth System process which defines a simple structure of Opportunity > Strategy > Action. You can apply OSA to different marketing activities from creating a growth plan for the next 3 months, creating an annual plan or improving your marketing campaign process. It also works well for driving results from individual channels like the website, organic or paid search, social media or email marketing. You can also apply it to your personal learning and skills development.
So the plan should define:
Opportunity - analysis and goals
Strategy - prioritization of activities to achieve goals:
Action:
This question is answered further following the recommended link in the next question.
A. Opportunity > Strategy > Action provides a simple structure for a digital marketing plan starting with situation analysis and performance review to set objectives, then strategy prioritization and finally an action plan.
We believe that an integrated digital marketing strategy is essential for marketers working in all types of business to take advantage of the growing digital marketing opportunities for acquiring and retaining customers - so you can win more sales.
In this article, we explain how to structure a digital marketing strategy using the Smart Insights RACE Framework using different examples.
How should I structure a digital marketing plan
AA. digital marketing audit should use a data-driven approach to review the maturity and use of digital marketing so you can identify improvements which should form a strategy.
Auditing your digital marketing activities is an essential starting point for defining a digital marketing strategy. But they’re also useful for finding opportunities to improve your digital marketing by identifying priorities you need to act on to get better results.
Our auditing approach is a data-driven audit using tools to compare to your competitors and using Google Analytics to assess the effectiveness of your marketing communications.
I’ve structured this audit based on the 5 key parts of our RACE Framework:
How to do a digital marketing audit?
A. Digital marketing strategies can define:
For more advice, see our article: Three digital marketing plan examples
This is one of the most common questions that ‘crops up’ when I’m running training workshops or discussing creating marketing plans with businesses.
It’s no surprise since the difference between these two activities often isn’t distinct. Yet, it’s an important question to answer since our research shows that so many businesses don’t have a clear marketing strategy or plan.
Without a clear strategy, it’s likely some of your tactics may be poorly directed, so may not be propelling the business in the direction needed.
What is the difference between strategy vs. tactics in digital marketing?
A. This varies widely depending on business size, sector and turnover, but benchmarks for larger business suggest marketing budget is around 7-8% of revenue on average. This chart is from Gartner research for 2025. Within the marketing budget digital marketing is now typically the majority of spend.
A. The latest trends for digital marketing in 2025 are the increased use of Generative AI for creating copy, customer service agents and Predictive analytics AI for digital marketing. Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is a new trend where marketers try to gain awareness through Google's AI overviews (AIOs) and Gen AI platforms like ChatGPT since there is a trend to declining clicks from search engines due to AIOs and use of GenAI platforms.
You can read the 2025 edition here - What are the latest digital marketing trends?
I’ve been writing reviews of the latest digital marketing innovations for well over 10 years now; spurred on since they seem to be helpful based on the comments on LinkedIn and when I present them. I hope that’s because I try to keep them practical. They’re also a way to keep readers of my books in the loop during the gap between new editions. You can connect on LinkedIn to view my latest updates.
I hope you have found this digital marketing Q&A useful to answer your questions along with the more detailed answers and visuals the article link to. Please ask any more specific questions on LinkedIn.
By Dave Chaffey
Digital strategist Dr Dave Chaffey is co-founder of Smart Insights and creator of the Smart Insights RACE Planning Framework. '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 has contributed his expertise to many 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 recognized by the Chartered Institute of Marketing as one of 50 marketing ‘gurus’ worldwide who have helped shape the future of marketing. His personal site, DaveChaffey.com, lists his latest Digital marketing and E-commerce books and support materials including a digital marketing glossary. Please connect on LinkedIn to receive updates or ask Dave a question.
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Strengthen your strategy with RACE-powered templates, frameworks and planning tools designed to help you review performance, identify improvements and build a more effective marketing approach.
Start your Digital Marketing Plan today with our Free resources.
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