From digital marketing strategy to persona research, here are the top 10 marketing guides you’ve found helpful throughout the year
This year has seen us create great new digital marketing advice guides and update existing ones to make sure you always have the best up-to-date information, advice and best practice tips to follow. In fact, our guides have had well over a million page views so far this year, so we’ve helped a lot of people improve their marketing in 2018.
Whatever your needs or membership, we have a great selection of guides to choose from, offering knowledge, examples, templates and more across a range of marketing types and business sectors. From individual marketers to SMEs and global corporations, our guides include information that can be made to work for your needs.
To help you see how our guides could benefit you as an individual or your larger business – whether you’re creating a strategy or looking to upskill yourself – here are 10 of our most popular guides of the year.
Digital marketing strategy guide
Our Digital marketing strategy guide is the most popular guide we’ve ever written, which is definitely not an accident. The guide is full of great practical, actionable and step-by-step guidance, allowing you to create an effective marketing strategy that gets results.
No matter what industry sector you work in, our guide will help you prioritize your activity and define how you are measuring success. Most importantly, the guide really will help you take your results to the next level. In fact, many smaller companies have grown their business by more than 50% by using this resource.
Free digital marketing plan template
Built on our RACE planning system, the Free digital marketing plan template is one of our most popular resources. It provides a helpful and versatile template to help you structure your marketing efforts and create an integrated digital marketing plan for your business – no matter how big or small your brand is.
Based on Dr Dave Chaffey’s extensive experience of creating and reviewing digital marketing plans for companies across various sectors, the plan includes a simple structure and key strategic activities to manage each part of your digital efforts.
If you’re involved in the shaping of your business’ future digital marketing direction, this business template is a must-have.
Customer persona guide
Personas are a vital aspect of your marketing strategy, after all, how do you create a successful marketing plan without knowing exactly who you are marketing to? Customer personas are essential to your online branding and are a brilliant conversion tool that can help you create a website that is customer-centric.
To help you make the most of the benefits that personas afford, we’ve compiled our Customer persona guide. The guide will take you through good practices, examples and what you need to watch out for, as well as where to find out more.
Use our guide to improve your personas, how you use them and to specify your business requirements from personas.
B2B startup digital marketing plan example and case study
Our B2B startup digital marketing plan example and case study is part of our digital marketing example plan series and looks at a startup SaaS business, although it is applicable to other B2B organizations.
The resource includes a realistic case study that looks at the journey of a B2B SaaS company building their digital marketing plan. We’ve also included a blank Word template to act as your workbook, which will take you through each of the steps required to build a digital marketing plan or your B2B business.
Finally, the resource comes with a dashboard template to help you with goal setting and monitoring growth.
10 digital marketing megatrends 2019
Keeping ahead of the trends is one of the best ways to make sure you’re using the best tools and techniques in your digital marketing. This is why we take a look at the megatrends you need to know about every year.
Our free 10 digital marketing megatrends 2019 guide is free for all our members and reviews key marketing trends that are set to be big in the coming year. We take a look at specific digital marketing techniques to help your business become more competitive.
As well as helping you stay ahead of the competition, our guide will help you review aspects of marketing that are likely to affect your business in 2019. This means you can amend your strategy accordingly and be prepared for what’s to come.
Digital marketing job description templates and role definitions
To really make your marketing amazing, you need the best team possible. This is where our Digital marketing job description templates and role definitions resource comes in.
Coming with 15 practical job description templates for 15 key digital marketing roles, as well as practical advice from some leading recruitment agencies, the resource will support you in hiring the right people for your company. Even better, the templates will help save time when recruiting for existing roles or creating new job descriptions for new positions.
On top of this, the tips and advice in the guide will help you identify personal career and training goals. They could also better prepare you for interviews.
Essential marketing models
Marketing models are effective tools when it comes to reviewing strategic options and choosing the best direction for a company. However, many models are not well-known or they are used incorrectly, meaning you might not get the best results.
Our Essential marketing models guide includes 15 classic marketing planning tools to inform your strategy development. Find the right framework for your project or business with our free guide, which includes a simple explanation for each model, examples of how, when and why to use each model and best practice tips.
Content marketing strategy guide
Engaging content is one of the most powerful online marketing techniques available. Content helps with a number of inbound marketing techniques, including SEO, social media marketing, paid search marketing, conversion rate optimization and email marketing.
However, simply producing content isn’t enough, you also need an effective strategy to ensure it is implemented correctly. This is where our Content marketing strategy guide comes in.
A content marketing strategy is beneficial in that it isn’t all about improving one channel in isolation, instead, it provides a multi-channel engagement strategy. This means that all of your digital marketing communications can support the same goals.
Our guide will take you through how to develop your strategy, as well as how to employ it across all your digital marketing, whether you’re a B2C or B2B business.
10 common social media marketing mistakes
As well as getting things right with your social media marketing, it is really easy to get it wrong. Social media mistakes can mean you limit engagement with your target audience, experience low conversion and get very low ROI.
However, following a planned, strategic approach, you can avoid the pitfalls that can see your strategy fail. Our 10 common social media marketing mistakes guide takes you through some of the mistakes that get made a lot, so you know exactly what not to do.
For each of the 10 mistakes we cover, we’ll give you specific advice on how to avoid the mistake by approaching your social media marketing with a more strategic plan. It’s practical and actionable so you can really make the most of social media.
Marketing campaign planning guide
The approach used to plan a marketing campaign usually depends on a lot of different things. The structure and culture of your business can have an impact, but as can whether your marketing campaign process has been updated to integrate modern, inbound marketing campaign techniques – such as content marketing and digital marketing.
No matter what approach you use, our Marketing campaign planning guide will help you review and refresh it to create a more structured process that integrates the latest digital marketing techniques better.
It looks at a number of aspects of your marketing campaign planning process, including campaign goals and tracking, campaign insight and targeting and key campaign messages and offers so you can get the best possible results.