Over the last year, we’ve updated and created new guides, templates, presentations and Quick Wins in order to help you better develop your marketing skills. We always aim to provide the most up-to-date information and advice to enable you to grow your knowledge, while our practical approach means you can easily put this knowledge to use.
No matter what your membership level, business or personal goals, we’ve aimed to provide you with a broad range of resources to help you achieve them. So, whether you’re trying to improve your skills, upskill your team or grow your business, you’re all set with the support of Smart Insights.
You’re not the only one either, as this year has seen a huge number of people making use of our guides, templates and online learning. To give you some insight into what people have been focusing on in 2019, we’ve taken a look at some of our most popular resources from the last 12 months.
Here are 10 of our most popular guides and Quick Wins and how they could help you individually, your team and your business:
Our Digital marketing plan template is not only our most popular Free guide, but it is also the most popular resource on our website.
Our research has revealed that many organizations don’t have a digital marketing plan despite the fact that they are doing digital marketing. We all know that if you fail to plan, you plan to fail, which is why you need to develop a digital marketing strategy. This is where our planning template comes in.
This template provides you with an easy-to-follow structure for creating an integrated digital marketing plan for your business. It follows our RACE Planning Framework, helping you cover every aspect of planning to ensure you get the best results from your marketing.
It’s all well and good knowing that you need a digital marketing plan, but if you’ve never created one before, it can be hard to know where to start. Our Digital marketing plan example will help create your planning process by showing you the best practice planning for a fictitious company.
The example is for a B2C company and comes as a Microsoft Word download so you’re able to edit it in order to create your own plan following the same format. The example is also nice and quick, with minimal text but helpful tables that summarise the current situation and future actions.
Every business should always consider how they compare to their competitors and the industry as a whole. You also want an idea of what excellence in your niche looks like. This is why you need to incorporate benchmarking into your digital marketing strategy.
Our Digital marketing benchmarking templates are designed to help you quickly review your current performance across digital marketing techniques. They use a five-point scale for different criteria so you can see what you’re doing well and where the gaps in your current capabilities are.
The templates are available for Free Members and will help you better communicate your priorities for improvements to your team or budget-holders.
Our Quick Wins are popular resources, as they help you develop the practical skills you need to do specific jobs. Even better, they are step-based and – as the name suggests – quick, so you can focus on a job that needs to be done in order to improve your marketing results.
Our most popular Quick Win of 2019 is Create a multichannel marketing plan, which uses tried-and-tested frameworks to help you structure a marketing plan across various channels. The Quick Win provides you with a structure that makes the creation of a plan quicker but also ensures it is easy to understand when you present it.
The micro-learning course will show you all the planning activities and outputs you need to create a multichannel marketing plan that is effective and helps you achieve your objectives.
Another great resource for helping you develop your marketing strategy – it seems like a lot of people have been working on doing just that this year – is our Digital marketing plan workbook. The blank Microsoft Word workbook helps you work through a planning structure based on our RACE Planning Framework as quickly as possible.
Featuring five core templates that are essential for all businesses – no matter what their size – you can create or update your existing digital marketing plan easily. It’s also ideal if you are creating plans for clients, allowing you to showcase example strategies to get buy-in and develop in-depth ones that will help your clients get results.
Resources that make use of our RACE Planning Framework aren’t the only popular ones when it comes to creating and updating digital marketing strategies. Many people this year have found our SOSTAC® digital marketing planning guide incredibly helpful too.
PR Smith’s SOSTAC® model provides a planning structure that makes it so much easier to understand a proposed strategy, helping you get the right buy-in from senior decision-makers. Each section of the guide includes explanations, examples, tools and checklists to make your strategy as effective as possible.
It isn’t just B2C content that has been popular this year, our B2B startup digital marketing plan workbook and case study has also been used by many Business Members to help inform their digital marketing strategies.
The template provides you with an example of a plan for an online startup SaaS business, although it can easily be applied to other B2B organizations, while the report spreadsheet is relevant to B2C SaaS companies as well. The resource includes three main aspects, a realistic case study, a blank Word workbook template to take you through each of the steps and a dashboard template to help with goal setting and monitoring growth.
One of our new Quick Wins, How to conduct keyword analysis in Google Search Console has proved incredibly useful for our members. The micro-learning course takes you through how to use Google Search Console – which is a free tool provided by Google – to conduct keyword analysis.
You’ll discover how to use Search Console to see what terms your site is ranking for as well as how you can boost your ranking factors and increase the traffic coming to your site. Even better, because it’s a Quick Win, you’ll be able to do all of this step-by-step and in a short amount of time.
Our interactive online learning course will take you and your team through the fundamentals of successful digital marketing, helping you to improve your skills and knowledge in order to get results. The Digital marketing e-learning course is structured around our RACE Planning Framework so it covers the full customer lifecycle.
The best part of this course is that it is designed to be super practical. The accompanying workbook means that for each completed topic, you’ll create a digital strategy or plan for your or your client’s business. It’s also not a top-level course as it will allow you to drill down into the 25 most important activities you need to get right as part of creating your digital marketing strategy.
Keeping track of all the paid, owned, and earned media channels you’re using as part of an integrated campaign can be difficult. It can also be hard to know exactly what activities you need to schedule in order to create a marketing campaign that is well-integrated and designed to deliver results. Our Campaign timeline/project plan template and example is designed to help with this.
The Excel template provides you with a fully comprehensive checklist so you can easily sequence different activities for various types of campaign. Whether you’re running a promotion, launching a new product or announcing a new site, the template will help you plan all of your activities across every channel. The template also includes a Gantt chart and timeline, which means you can plan campaigns but also always-on marketing activities.
By Expert commentator
This is a post we've invited from a digital marketing specialist who has agreed to share their expertise, opinions and case studies. Their details are given at the end of the article.
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Digital strategyKeyword planningMarketing planningMultichannel marketing planRACE Planning FrameworkSOSTACTurbocharge your results with this toolkit containing 11 resources
The Digital Marketing Strategy And Planning toolkit contains:
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