Actionable Marketing Advice
Includes templates, ready-to-use strategy documents, step-by-step guides and resources that will help you create optimized strategies that deliver HUGE results.
- Opportunity
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About this template
This Excel spreadsheet template will help you complete a quick ‘strategic gap analysis’ which steps you through around 40 strategic questions you need to ask to help review how well a business is making use of digital marketing now so you can plan and implement improvements in the future. There are two separate Excel worksheets suitable for different levels of review:
- Worksheet 1 – Audit : A detailed checklist to prioritise and action 25 key digital marketing activities in the RACE planning system
- Worksheet 2 – Healthcheck: A higher level review for quickly scoring your current strategy to identify improvements
Template structure
The review and recommendations are structured around the Smart Insights RACE Planning system which is broken down into 5 key areas defining the 5 essential activities within each:
- Plan – shows what needs to be included in a digital marketing strategy
- Reach – techniques to grow your audience and increase targeted traffic on your website
- Act and Convert – improve customer journeys and content marketing to increase online and offline conversion
- Engage – approaches to increase long-term value of customers through social media, email and website improvements
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About this guide
This guide provides you with a template to follow for the key issues to include in your benchmark report as well as a table of KPIs and qualitative criteria for benchmarking in the RACE framework. This will help you undertaken efficient competitor benchmarking. It also gives you a comprehensive listing of free and paid tools to help with benchmarking structured within the RACE framework.
Guide structure
- Introduction to competitor benchmarking
- Step 1: Define purpose and scope of benchmarking
- Step 2: Identify benchmarking criteria and KPIs
- Step 3: Select your benchmarking targets
- Step 4: Gather data on your competitors using tools and sources
- Step 5: Measure your current performance
- Step 6: Create your action plan
- Step 7: Create an ongoing process
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About this guide
This Microsoft Excel spreadsheet has been created by Dr Dave Chaffey of Smart Insights to help you define an annual budget to improve leads and sales. The spreadsheet will enable you to set a budget and then optimise your investment in search engine marketing, display advertising, affiliate marketing and online PR to achieve targets for leads, sales and profit.
Template features
The spreadsheet will help you
- Set your overall budget and adjust the % investment in different media channels
- Set investment and define returns from key digital channels including SEO, Adwords, Ad networks (Cost-per-click), Display (CPM), Sponsorship, Email marketing and owned media
- Automatically calculates response, leads, sales and profit based on media investment
- Specify different response rates for different media channels
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About this guide
When we speak to our members, many mention PR Smith’s SOSTAC® as being really useful for structuring plans, so we talked to Paul about collaborating to create a guide applying it to online marketing planning and its now available to download by Smart Insights Expert members.
This planning guide is naturally structured around SOSTAC®:
- Introduction – Why and how to use SOSTAC®
- 1. Situation Analysis
- 2. Objectives
- 3. Strategy
- 4. Tactics
- 5. Actions
- 6. Control
In each section Paul blends explanations, examples and checklists to help you learn how to apply it.
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About this guide
This interactive online course with optional assessments and certification for continuing professional development (CPD) will help you rapidly learn the fundamentals of successful digital marketing and step you, or your team, through creating a plan to grow your business using digital marketing.
Guide structure
- Module Introduction and Benchmark
- Introduction to RACE Planning
- PLAN – Situation Analysis
- PLAN – Set Objectives
- PLAN – Create Strategy
- REACH – Customer Acquisition Strategy
- ACT – Audience Interaction Strategy
- CONVERT – Convert to sale
- ENGAGE – Customer Retention and Advocacy
- Final Assessment for Qualification
- Strategy
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About this guide
Our most popular guide, based on field-tested, proven approaches to create a plan used by businesses, large and small. Our online strategy guide will show you How to structure your digital plan using the Smart Insights RACE Digital Planning system and PR Smith’s SOSTAC® planning approach and much more.
Guide structure
- Introduction: Convincing others you need a digital strategy
- Step 1: Structuring your strategy
- Step 2: Review your marketplace opportunity
- Step 3: Defining your future: Vision, objectives and KPIs
- Step 4: Targeting
- Step 5: Proposition
- Step 6: Getting new customers
- Step 7: Keeping customers engaged and loyal
Note: Our digital marketing strategy guide focuses on creating a digital marketing strategy. If you’re looking for a practical guide to improving your website and all online communications, don’t miss our RACE Digital Marketing Guide for Startups and small and medium businesses. It covers the 25 essential integrated digital marketing techniques you must work on to compete online.
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About this guide
Our digital plan workbook is designed to help you define a digital marketing strategy as quickly as practical by filling in blank templates in Word format. The template tools in the workbook are tables and charts designed for quick analysis and summary of current use of digital marketing and future digital strategies to improve the contribution of digital marketing in the future.
Guide structure
- Step 1: Define Opportunity
- Step 2: Create Strategy
- Step 3: Take action
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About this template
This Powerpoint template is designed for analysing performance and discussion of online strategic alternatives in strategy workshops – that’s how we use it! Create summaries of your digital strategy that you can present to colleagues or clients.
Template structure
This PowerPoint is structured around different templates within each part of the Smart Insights RACE Planning framework:
- Reach
- Plan
- Act
- Convert
- Engage
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About this guide
Smart Insights Expert members using the planning templates in our Digital Strategy Toolkit asked us for examples of digital marketing plans to inspire them when creating their own plans based on the blank templates. So, we have created this example plan initially to help support the process when members create their own plans.
Guide structure
- Opportunity – Review current business contribution of digital channels
- Strategy – Define an overall digital channel strategy or specific strategy focused on customer acquisition
- Action – Details of specific tactics to implement
- Action
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About this guide
We designed this comprehensive guide as a ‘one-stop’ reference for busy owners and marketers in small and mid-size businesses or startups.
It will also help managers in larger businesses who don’t have the time to drill-down into the detailed recommendations in a 7-step guide, but just want to know the basic success factors.
How is the guide structured?
The guide covers all the key marketing issues you need to get right structured around the Smart Insights RACE planning framework.
The sections in this guide are:
- ONE. Plan: What are the essentials of your digital strategy?
- TWO. Reach: Boost site traffic with these success factors for SEO and AdWords
- THREE. Act: How to use content marketing to boost leads.
- FOUR. Convert: How to design your site to increase sales.
- FIVE. Engage: Success factors for gaining repeat business online.
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About this guide
These simple templates show how you can manage continuous improvements to your marketing and ‘always-on’ digital marketing by focusing on defined activities across the Smart Insights RACE customer lifecycle.
Guide structure
- Part 1: 90-day mapping of objectives to “always-on” activities
- Part 2: Commercial 90-day planning – defining targets for KPIs
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Nine Infographics to help you with planning your marketing, created by Smart Insights and First 10
- Statistics to inform strategy
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About this guide
This guide gives you a single source of the latest and most reliable sources of online statistics to save our members the time of looking through poor quality sources and infographics.
It’s presented in a Powerpoint slide deck format so you can copy and paste relevant visuals into your presentations for making the case to your colleagues or clients.
Guide structure
Adoption rates in different countries are include for
- Overall internet adoption
- Mobile platforms – smartphone vs tablet vs desktop
- Search engine popularity
- Social Media popularity and growth
- E-commerce conversion rates
- Purchase path
- B2B
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About this resource
To save you time in searching for the latest, most reliable online marketing benchmarks, this Powerpoint template gives you a single source of the latest and most reliable sources to help you compare your investments in digital channels and your performance against others.
It’s presented in a Powerpoint slide deck format so you can copy and paste relevant visuals into your presentations for making the case to your colleagues or clients.
Resource structure
- Reach: Media Mix i.e. % referrers, Display and search CTRS
- Act: Site interaction, lead generation
- Convert: Conversion rates for E-commerce, Mobile E-commerce
- Engage: Email Marketing open and clickthrough rate benchmarks, Social Media
