Digital marketing is more important now than ever. My recommendations on the challenges and opportunities for growth

Digital marketing is deceptively easy if you take the deliberately simple definition from my book Digital Marketing:Strategy, Implementation and Practice where I define Digital Marketing as: "Achieving marketing objectives through applying digital media, data and technology". But in reality, digital marketing is a tough challenge since many businesses know how vital digital and mobile channels are today for acquiring and retaining customers. Yet the research shared below shows that many businesses don't have an integrated plan to support digital transformation and business growth based on engaging their audiences effectively online. In this article, I will explain why a digital marketing strategy is essential for all businesses. If you're looking for an introduction to the scope of digital marketing and what should be included in a plan, see my post explaining What is Digital Marketing. Regardless of the type…

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…

How to streamline your planning and measurement of integrated digital marketing using RACE

Smart Insights created RACE as a practical tool to help marketers and business owners plan, manage, and optimize their digital marketing using a more strategic, structured, and data-driven approach. Our RACE Growth System for improving marketing effectiveness has two parts which we will introduce in this article through two different visuals: 1. The RACE Planning Framework: defines the essential activities and measures businesses need to master to survive and thrive in today’s marketing world. 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. Use our free, planning template download to get started with using RACE to grow your business. These will help you create a 90-day prioritized plan to improve your results…

Evaluating technology options for innovation in marketing - do you know your Hype Cycles?

If you're involved in marketing strategy development, you will be constantly making judgments and reviewing with colleagues which digital technology innovations are most relevant to your organization. The Gartner Hype Cycle, which is published each year, is a good tool to use to find out about both newly emerging innovations and more established marketing technology that could be relevant. It's particularly relevant to large enterprise businesses, but we can also glean trends in technology for small and medium businesses. In this article, we compare different examples of the well-established Gartner Hype Cycle tools which serve to highlight the adoption of new technology services within marketing technology. Gartner publishes many different hype cycles reviewing the adoption curves for different types of technologies, but as a digital strategist, I am most interested in those focusing on digital marketing technologies. A summary…

Audit your MarTech stack and quickly compare 30 different types of digital marketing tools available at different price points for businesses

As marketers today, we’re fortunate to have a huge number of free and low-cost digital marketing tools to give us insight into our customers, competitors, and markets. These strategic digital tools help us to compete to win and retain customers by delivering automated relevant, real-time marketing communications, integrated across digital devices and traditional marketing channels. To help highlight the range of great options available, our updated MarTech essential digital marketing tools infographic recommends 30 categories of marketing technology and our pick of the most popular 5 in each category. In 2024 we added a new category - we have included 5 Generative AI tools in the wheel. As the original break-through AI chatbot, we've put ChatGPT in first place. But you can read a full breakdown of other recommended AI tools below: …

Our recommended free online tools for understanding your customers, competitors and campaign, and how you should use them - across 8 marketing analysis activities

I've found that when running training courses, the tools I recommend to help marketers are always popular content, especially free tools... There's a diverse mix of free tools available, particularly to support marketers gain insight to plan their campaigns, one of the enjoyable aspects of working in digital marketing today. I originally created this list in 2012, but have kept it updated since it's popular and new tools are released, and some features become paid... Revisiting it shows that many of the tools are well established, despite the many lists of essential Generative AI tools. In this article, I'll cover 8 marketing analysis activities that hands-on digital marketers need to follow to optimize their reach activities, kicking off their RACE marketing strategy. There are 25+ links to alternative tools in…

Audit your marketing technology stack with the 6Cs to refine its capabilities and prove its return on investment

Do you know The Stackies? They're an informal contest arranged by Scott Brinker, creator of the Marketing Technology Vendor Landscape Supergraphic, where different companies visualize their marketing stacks in alternative ways to share their approaches. In 2025, Scott shared the latest MarTech stack entries, of which three are featured here, on LinkedIn. They provide a quick, simple way to visualize the use of MarTech in your company to other businesses and get ideas on improvements. With the universal adoption of AI in businesses, the latest entries are interesting since they show alternative approaches to integrating AI into businesses, as shown in this example: For me, part of the beauty of the The Stackies, is that businesses have a free rein to present…

Use our matrix to review your use of media channels to improve content visibility and impact across the customer journey

If you’re a regular reader of Smart Insights, it’s likely you’ve seen - or even better, used - our Content Marketing Matrix (developed with First10). It has proved to be a popular infographic since it’s not just a nice visual of some interesting ‘facts and figures’ about marketing, rather it can actually be applied to get better results since it helps businesses brainstorm the best types of content to create as part of their content marketing strategy.

What is the Content Distribution Matrix?

This infographic follows on from our original Content Marketing Matrix, and is aimed at helping marketers review the effectiveness of different types of Paid, Owned, and Earned media to promote or distribute their content in generating site visits, leads or sales compared to the level of…

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 to select the best digital and traditional marketing channels from 30+ alternatives using 2 practical tools

Naturally, small businesses have particularly limited resources whether it is people or budget, so it's crucial to select the most cost-effective communications to invest in. That means, free and low-cost marketing channels. So considering, Paid vs Owned vs Earned media options, you're going to be best considering the owned and earned options. In this guide, we will help you identify the best channels to use using two simple frameworks, so that you're not starting with a blank piece of paper or screen and can work through the options. We'll review both online and offline techniques starting with 30+ channels to consider and then at the end, as a summary we'll help you zoom in on the top 5 to make it more manageable. Before we look at tools to help you decided on your media,…