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…
An example of reviewing your marketing capabilities using the McKinsey 7S framework
The McKinsey 7S model is a useful framework for reviewing an organization’s marketing capabilities from different viewpoints. Developed by Tom Peters and Robert Waterman during their tenure at McKinsey & Company in the 1970s, this model works well in different types of business of all sectors and sizes, although it works best in medium and large businesses.
The 7S model can be used to:
Review the effectiveness of an organization in its marketing operations.
Determine how to best realign an organization to support a new strategic direction.
Assess the changes needed to support digital transformation of an organization.
What are the elements of the McKinsey 7S model?
In summary, the McKinsey 7Ss stand for:
Strategy: The definition of key approaches for an organization to achieve its goals.
Structure: The…
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.
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 of the report with the infographic is published annually and I have been monitoring them and sharing them for over…
Why use a framework to create an integrated marketing strategy?
I believe that implementing a digital marketing strategy framework to follow is essential to ensure the success of your integrated marketing strategy. Importantly by agreeing on a marketing plan structure during the planning phase, you can ensure the buy-in from your team and business to support your integrated marketing strategy.
Applying a strategic framework creates a system to make your plans easier to understand and gives a way to assign specific metrics to monitor, manage and measure the performance of your integrated marketing strategy.
The RACE Framework
We've created the RACE Framework and subsequent RACE marketing training to empower marketing leaders to take a data-driven, customer-centric approach to planning, managing, and optimizing their marketing strategies. By using this structure for your planning, you can integrate all your marketing activities across your key omnichannel customer touchpoints, to strengthen your reach, interaction, conversion, and engagement.
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Are you practicing always-on marketing, and if not, why not?
In the pre-digital era, marketing activities were planned in campaign ‘bursts’ around new product launches and promotions. My belief is that to be effective, digital marketing needs a change in mindset so businesses invest sufficient time and budget into continuously optimizing ‘always-on’ activities which can be used in an integrated way to maximise visibility and conversion through the customer lifecycle.
What is always-on marketing?
Always-on marketing: A working definition
Always-on marketing means a planned approach to scheduling and optimizing continuous marketing activities which support customer acquisition and retention throughout the customer lifecycle.
Consider the main types of digital marketing. Think about these key digital media I define in my Digital Marketing: Strategy and Implementation book. If you operate in a market where your potential customers are continuously searching for new products and services that you offer then you can't be competitive unless you continuously…
An integrated marketing strategy means every element of your marketing plan must contribute towards your goals and objectives, or be cut out of the day-to-day workload
Lack of integration between strategic vision and the tactics needed to get there is a problem I often find when reviewing marketing strategies. That's why I created the RACE Framework as a simple structure to unify your marketing strategy through goals, objectives, and KPIs. You can see table with an example of integrated marketing goals and objectives planning below.
This is true whether I'm reviewing student assignments or mentoring marketers creating real-world marketing strategies. More often than not, I find myself reading about different aspects of marketing objectives and tactics that just don't line up with each other - and leave you questioning why.
These issues can be magnified by marketing strategy structure - the way the document is split up into separate sections. Without a unifying…
Using capability maturity models to audit your digital maturity and set targets to improve digital marketing effectiveness
We've been adding to our visual tools to help all members assess how well their businesses are adapting to using digital media and technology and to set targets to improve their results from digital marketing.
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3 different types of benchmarking
We have collected these visuals together in a single download so that you can easily review them and print the most relevant for you. We've designed them So members can use them for different scales of business and roles. There are more than 10 templates which cover:
Digital marketing for small and medium businesses using our RACE framework
Digital transformation for larger businesses
Digital channel marketing activities including SEO, Social media, email and content marketing
You can see one example, which I designed for reviewing digital marketing effectiveness with senior leaders in small and medium…
Examples and definitions of integrated marketing today. Find out why integrated omnichannel marketing is essential to the success of your business
Without getting too Aristotelian, with marketing, the whole is most certainly more than the sum of its parts - when it's done right that is. But what is 'Integrated Marketing done right'? The goal of practicing integrated marketing is to align your multichannel marketing mix. As channels and platforms continue to evolve, the concept has extended to include a structured approach to:
Search
Social media
Display
PR
Landing pages
Product catalogs
Email marketing
Direct marketing
At Smart Insights, we define Integrated Marketing as follows:
"Integrated Marketing is a strategic approach to integrating communications and interactive experiences targeting defined audiences and individuals which coordinates all aspects of marketing of a brand, including:
Paid media (offline advertising, direct marketing and online display and programmatic);
Earned media (Organic search fuelled by content marketing, PR…
Our guide to creating a SWOT matrix analysis to prioritize digital marketing strategy with the TOWS technique
A SWOT analysis is an essential part of any business or marketing plan. It allows you to create a plan of action based not on what you’re interested in doing or on your gut-feel, but what you need to do given the situation in the marketplace. It considers your capabilities for marketing against competitors plus looks at opportunities created as new technologies are introduced.
What is a SWOT?
As you’ll know it’s a planning tool summarising the internal Strengths and Weaknesses against external Opportunities and Threats. These external opportunities and threats are available to all competitors in the marketplace. Our technique recommends a 2 X 2 matrix for SWOT and TOWS analysis, you'll find examples below.
Why is SWOT analysis useful?
When creating a digital marketing plan, SWOT analysis is an essential step. I think it’s sometimes seen as…
Mapping the most effective AI technologies for marketing across the customer lifecycle in the coming year
Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology is a hot topic in marketing at the moment, with the huge interest in ChatGPT (see our articles on using ChatGPT for marketing).
But AI is a broad term covering a wide range of different technologies, many of which have been available for some time. We originally wrote this article based on the opportunities for using AI for marketing in 2017 and have updated it since with examples.
Artificial intelligence means any technology that seeks to mimic human intelligence, which covers a huge range of capabilities such as voice and image recognition, machine learning techniques and semantic search.
That's why, in our AI and Machine Learning briefing for members, we have identified fifteen artificial intelligence techniques that businesses of all sizes can implement, rather than techniques that only major tech giants can devote…
