The ‘digital’ opportunity is enormous, with staggering growth in all territories and sectors

Along with the opportunities come some significant challenges as you adapt to highly demanding digitally-savvy customers. These challenges are caused by the pace, complexity and the degree of change.    This shifting environment means that digitally-led business transformation is a complex and on-going journey - an evolution to transition and optimise your business. Even digitally native companies know that they have to innovate and stay ahead of the game because of growing disruption and rapid technological change.

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Smart Insights members can also use…

Use our RACE framework to discover your ability to Plan, Reach, Act, Convert and Engage

Two years ago we launched our free interactive marketing benchmarking tool to help members rate their 'digital readiness' for digital marketing as a whole and for the key channels like Search, Social media and Email marketing. Well, it's proved popular since it helps members score where they are now and then gives recommendations of how to improve in the future - to take their skills or marketing results to the next level. So in our recent UX members refresh - we have made it more prominent and put all the benchmarking tools in place.  We also renamed it to 'capability grader'.

Introducing our upgraded, free interactive tool!

I'm also writing this post to let members know about a simplification to the most popular digital strategy grader which you may want to try - it's here (available if you're signed in): …

5 tools for assessing your online competitors

Site audience comparison tools provide marketers with industry and competitor intelligence to help inform decisions (e.g. new markets, new content strategies). Some of these tools also provide powerful segmentation capabilities. Typically, they do this either by aggregating Internet Service Provider data, panel data or a mixture of the two. Whether you’re launching a new product, entering a new market or wishing to understand what’s driving competitor growth, these tools can provide the relevant information to help inform key decisions. They’re often used to support business cases, helping to identify opportunities and threats in the competitor landscape. So if you are looking to map your competition, build a case for a new product line or more investment in your website, these tools can be extremely useful.

Key things to consider before purchasing and when using these tools:

Discover your business's ability to Plan, Reach, Act, Convert and Engage

Applying the many digital channels and technologies to your business is no easy task. The industry moves fast, and there are a large number of different disciplines to master (see our list of the top 20 digital marketing skills). Email marketing, SEO, Social Media Marketing, Conversion Rate Optimisation, the list goes on, and each one requires a very different set of skills and awareness of the success factors for different platforms. Amongst the many different skills we need to master for digital marketing, it's easy to lose sight of the big picture of how a business is using digital marketing to compete.  Our research shows that many businesses don't have a digital marketing plan, so knowing how to structure a plan can be difficult. To help provide a structure for creating a strategy, when Smart Insights first launched, we developed this Excel digital…