Improve your Digital marketing strategy with our hub page
Use our hub pages as a reference to get up-to-speed on all the main digital marketing techniques. They will help you quickly understand how to make the most of the technique through definitions and recommendations on our member resources and blog articles covering strategy, best practices and the latest statistics.
We believe that a digital marketing strategy is essential to take advantage of the growing opportunities from digital marketing, yet even in 2017, many companies don’t have a digital marketing strategy!
Yet our Managing Digital marketing research report (a free download) showed that half of companies don’t yet have a planned digital marketing strategy:
An integrated digital strategy will give you a foundation for all the key online marketing activities we recommend in the Smart Insights RACE digital marketing planning framework.
This page groups our key recommendations on creating a digital strategy. Register as a Basic member to access our free resources.
Top 5 Recommended resources resources
1. Free download – Digital marketing strategy template – structured around our RACE planning template
2. Free report – Managing Digital marketing research report
3. Article – Digital Marketing statistics 2017 – our pick of the top 10 free sources
4. Paid report – Digital marketing healthcheck – a rapid audit of your digital marketing
5. Paid report – Digital strategy guide – 7 Steps to create a successful strategy
Digital marketing strategy quick guide
Digital marketing strategy success factors
An effective digital strategy will help you take the right decisions to make a company successful online. A strategy process model provides a framework that gives a logical sequence to follow to ensure inclusion of all key activities of strategy development and implementation. We recommend the SOSTAC planning approach.
A Digital Marketing Strategy should involve a review to check that all of your capabilities are in place to help your organisation manage all of the digital touchpoints. But which capabilities are important, which do you need to review?
In our Managing Digital Transformation Guide for Paid subscribers we show these in our capability visual:
You can download this visual and others all the main online marketing channel in this free digital marketing templates download.
A successful Digital Strategy should be built on reviewing 7 core capabilities which are strategic approach, performance improvement process, management buy-in, resourcing and structure, data and infrastructure, integrated customer communications and customer experience.
Digital marketing strategy definition
A digital marketing strategy is a channel strategy which means that it should…
- Be informed by research into customer channel behaviour and marketplace activity = intermediaries, publishers and competitors
- Based on objectives for future online and offline channel contribution %
- Define and communicate the differentials of the channel to encourage customers to use it,
- BUT, need to manage channel integration
So put another way, digital marketing strategy defines how companies should:
- Hit our channel leads & sales targets
- Budgets for Acquisition, Conversion, Retention & Growth, Service
- Communicate benefits of using this channel “ enhance brand
- Prioritise audiences targeted through channel
- Prioritise products available through channel
Recommended member resources for Digital marketing strategy
Toolkits on
Ebooks on Digital marketing strategy
Online training on Digital marketing strategy
How to videos on Digital marketing strategy
Marketing templates on Digital marketing strategy
Best websites on Digital marketing strategy
There are surprisingly few quality digital marketing strategy sites since most focus on the strategy. We like to think we’re different in our focus on strategy too. These are our top 10 sites to learn more about digital marketing strategy:
- 1. BCG Perspectives – The Boston Consulting Group of “BCG Matrix” fame has recently improved its articles and research on multichannel marketing and customer insight
- 2. Econsultancy reports – The Econsultancy blog mainly covers tactics, but there are sound research reports on managing digital channels and ecommerce teams.
- 3. Figaro Digital. Unusual since it’s an offline magazine, but these editorial articles often cover digital strategy and are accessible by industry.
- 4. Forrester Marketing Blog. Forrester analysts write about developments in technology and consumer behaviour .
- 5. [email protected]. The Marketing section often covers online marketing issues and cases.
- 6. Financial Times Connected Business. Monthly articles based on case studies.
- Harvard Business Review blog. Quality commentary on the intersection of marketing and technology strategy, but unfortunately, not a well tagged blog.
- 7. McKinseyQuarterly. Articles regularly cover digital marketing strategy.
- 8. The Web Strategy blog. A personal blog by Jeremiah Owyang, previously a Forrester analyst, now at Altimeter. Mainly covers social media strategy.
Key techniques for Digital marketing strategy
These are the related techniques which we recommend as important for managing Digital marketing strategy effectively. View these hub pages giving details on best practices, statistics and examples for these techniques: