Use our digital marketing strategy template integrated across the RACE Framework to plan and get ahead in your digital marketing
We all know the old saying “if you fail to plan, you are planning to fail”, but when it comes to digital marketing, this really is the case. It has never been more important than it is now to create a digital marketing strategy template so you can plan, manage and optimize your online activities.
Today, digital media is vital when it comes to driving leads and sales, meaning marketers need to understand how best to engage and convert online audiences. Despite this, our research into digital marketing trends for 2024 shows that many businesses (around 40%) still don’t have a digital marketing plan. As a result, companies are missing out on the benefits of having a digital marketing plan integrated into their overall marketing plan or as a separate roadmap…
What are the six essential parts of a campaign planning template?
Today's marketing campaigns are complex since they need to reach and engage audiences across a range of digital and traditional channels as shown by our RACE growth system visual.
In this article, we'll step you through an effective structure for briefing marketing campaigns to an agency or in-house team that has been used by tens of thousands of businesses in different sectors including financial services, retail, travel and consumer brands. I will also answer some of the key questions about marketing campaigns.
I originally developed the template for structuring one-day training courses on Creating Effective Marketing Campaigns that I ran for the Chartered Institute of Marketing in the UK. We emailed the Word template to course participants after the training so that they could adapt it to their planning process. For…
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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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…
Structure your next big marketing campaign using the 5-step RACE Framework to inform your strategy. Integrated across plan, reach, act, convert and engage, our marketing solutions are proven to win more customers and accelerate your ROI
Have you got an up-to-date marketing campaign planning process? Creating ad-hoc campaigns, or re-using previous successful approaches, can be the time-saver you need to get a new campaign up and running.
But, without understanding the wider PESTLE issues before planning a campaign, you could target the wrong audience with incorrect messaging, or even cause offense. Keep reading for examples of marketing campaigns that do just that, plus our recommended tools for your marketing campaign PR management.
What is the RACE Framework?
The RACE Framework supports managers and marketers to integrate all their key channels and tactics into one plan. Apply the RACE Framework to streamline your marketing strategy today, so you can clearly track and manage your campaign…
Set your Key Performance Indicators, make them SMART KPIs, and align your objectives using our RACE Framework to achieve YOY growth in key metrics for your business
KPIs are a useful way for digital marketers to set expectations and prove that their work is having a positive impact. To outsiders, the success of digital marketing activity can be seen as difficult to measure but this really isn’t the case. In fact, it’s normally easier to measure progress metrics for a digital campaign than an offline one.
The aim of this post is to help you set digital marketing KPIs to measure what really matters at the moment, in a way that all parties can agree on. Smart marketing planning is essential for measuring and tracking your progress, and demonstrating value. We’ll cover negotiating KPIs, budgeting, and how to tie your KPIs into the Smart Insights RACE Digital Marketing Framework.
What are digital…
Without setting clear marketing objectives, you’re basically directionless – and working to achieve vanity metrics that don’t necessarily help you achieve your overall business goals
Digital marketing objectives underpin all marketing strategies. After all, how do you know what you're working towards without clear, actionable, and achievable metrics? Setting marketing goals should always be the priority as they will be the basis of your entire strategy.
By achieving your digital marketing objectives, you’re also helping reach your overall business goals, whether that’s boosting your overall sales or improving awareness of your brand.
Setting marketing objectives is, on one hand, a great way to motivate yourself and your team and work towards achieving better results for your business.
On the other hand, objectives and KPI-setting is about much more than just saying “I want to achieve that and that” – it’s how you can develop a plan or strategy that will help support your vision…
Review your campaigns and learn how you can improve your digital media performance with our marketing campaign analysis tools
The process of setting up, brainstorming, planning, and ultimately delivering digital marketing campaigns is an exhausting, challenging, yet fun and extremely rewarding process.
Once the campaign goes live, you can witness the fruits of your labor. However, all digital marketing campaigns must at some point come to an end and there is always one final step in the process: campaign analysis.
Every company, brand, or agency will approach the end of a campaign differently, with some going into detail and others taking a much broader view. However whilst digital campaigns can be quite simple and straightforward, perhaps with maybe just one or two channels, others may be more complex and multifaceted.
I, therefore, believe it’s always best to err on the side of detail so that you can get a true picture of how different…
Do you think your business is good at writing briefs? Your agency likely disagrees...
Research from Smart Insights exploring best practices for marketing planning has often reviewed the importance of annual marketing planning and how to structure marketing and digital marketing plans.
See, for example, our recent Digital Maturity research report reviewing how many businesses integrate planning for digital marketing into their annual plans.
However, we haven’t explored how marketers approach the process of creating a marketing campaign brief and whether it is effective.
Of course, this is important because of the amount of investment in marketing campaigns that support and must deliver on targets set out in annual marketing plans.
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But, we do recognize the importance of a structured, insights-driven campaign planning process through the templates recommending how to structure a brief in our campaign planning toolkit.
Campaign Planning Learning Path module learning objectives:
Define the essential parts of a marketing campaign…
If you're planning to optimize your branding or rebranding, we have tools to support your brand development at every stage
Have you ever wondered how brands grow as large and as well known as they do? From companies like Google to Starbucks, their names are known, customers know exactly what services and products they provide, and satisfied customers keep coming back for more. Brand development is how this happens, and it is no small feat. It takes time to cultivate a brand, to the point that a company has universal recognition like Gillette and Coca-Cola.
What does brand development involve?
Now that you recognize the importance of branding, what do you need to create a good brand? In a nutshell, brand development means:
Finding your brand’s voice and communicating your value proposition
Implementing your voice and style consistently throughout…
