Examples of essential questions to ask when structuring a digital marketing audit
Auditing your digital marketing activities is an essential technique to start a digital marketing strategy. But they’re also useful for finding opportunities to improve your digital marketing by identifying priorities you need to act on to get better results.
Knowing where to start and what to include can be difficult since although you may have your own area of expertise such as search, social media or business, you may not know about other topics. In this article, we’ll provide a comprehensive checklist you can use for your business based on the Smart Insights RACE Digital marketing framework. Each of the five parts of RACE is broken down into five to give a comprehensive evaluation of digital marketing for which I outline questions in this post.
I developed this framework…
Our recommendations of the best global online marketing consumer adoption and marketing benchmark statistics
Online marketers love statistics about digital marketing. We do too since they enable us to use a more data-driven approach to inform our future investments. They allow us to review the growth in customer adoption of the latest digital platforms and technologies, make the business case for investment in marketing and allow us to benchmark our growth and performance against competitors.
From reviewing thousands of stats sources over the years, I've found that there are a very small number of quality online marketing statistics sites and sources which are updated at least annually and have a representative sample size from different countries. Here we share our experience of ten of the best, most reliable free and paid sources we use to update our benchmarks. Everyone has their favourites, but I thought it would be…
Use the RACE Framework to review and improve all aspects of your competitor benchmarking
When I train or give talks to marketers on digital marketing, I see that competitor benchmarking tools are popular. Often people will reach for their pens when I mention a tool to help inform their marketing. New, free tools are naturally the most popular!
I thought it would be useful to break down and categorize the most important aspects of online benchmarking, so you can check out tools you could use to support each stage.
Today, there is a great breadth and depth of paid and free benchmarking tools available for marketers. Sometimes it can be difficult to know where to start.
That's why our competitor benchmarking guide and template includes a full list of free and premium online benchmarking tools integrated across the RACE Framework.
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Today, tech marketers and managers advocate for IT and high tech both internally in their businesses and externally to their target markets. We've got the marketing tools and training you need.
Looking to strengthen your technology company's marketing strategy? As marketers, we are all striving to apply data and customer insights to our marketing activities. But in the IT and high tech sector, with competition at an all-time high, this approach is absolutely critical. Our tried and tested tech marketing solutions support IT and high tech marketing professionals to plan, manage, and optimize their marketing strategy, and win more customers.
Why invest in strategic marketing for your tech company?
If you haven't already got an omnichannel marketing strategy in place, now is the time to develop your marketing to compete in the competitive, growing, IT and high tech marketplace.
As McKinsey found in their UK B2B COVID-19 survey, the technology, media…
Benchmarking allows you to see how well you are faring against your competitors, allowing you to pinpoint what you do well and where improvements need to be made.
Measuring your success is more than looking at how much traffic is coming to your site and what your conversion rate is. You can’t really get a true idea of how you are performing unless you compare yourself to your competitors.
‘How do we compare to our competitors?’ and ‘What does excellence look like?’ are questions you should be asking when developing your digital marketing strategy. While many companies are asking these questions, they may not know exactly what answers they are looking for.
In order to benchmark your performance against your competitors, you need to know exactly what you should be comparing and how to structure your review and recommendations. This is where our comprehensive benchmarking templates come in.
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Chart of the Day: Strategies and practical factors that support growth of a business - new research
The Ansoff matrix growth drivers
The Ansoff matrix model is a classic marketing model featured in our free top marketing models guide.
Although developed in the 1960s, Ansoff is still useful for considering, at a top level, the strategic initiatives that a business is taking to increase its competitiveness in a sector through identifying new revenue opportunities.
This new research based on the views of Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) in large US organizations is interesting since it translates the theory of Ansoff into practice, showing how businesses are investing in the four quadrants of Ansoff.
You can see that a market penetration strategy of selling existing products or services into existing markets has the largest investment. This is building on existing strengths and is fine, with the…
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):
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Chart of the Day: New Smart Insights research comparing how businesses manage their email marketing activities
Email marketing remains one of today’s core customer communications channels with analytics showing that, for most types of business, alongside search marketing, it is one of the main drivers of customer acquisition - for generating new online sales and leads. While the beauty of email marketing is that you can quickly start by sending promotional emails and newsletters, businesses will only get the full potential delivered by their email service providers they choose if they deploy marketing automation.
In a major, global research project with our partners GetResponse, Content Marketing Institute and Holistic Email Marketing, we were interested to see how many businesses are taking full advantage of email marketing capabilities. The free research report Email Marketing and Marketing Automation Excellence 2017 was published this week and included the views of over 2,500 marketers - thank…
How does your business compare with others for digital marketing capability to Plan, Reach, Act, Convert and Engage?
Since we introduced our free interactive benchmarking tool to audit digital marketing for Smart Insights members in September 2015, we've expanded it from auditing top-level digital strategy to also review individual channels like SEO, AdWords, Content Marketing, Email and Social media as part of our toolkits on each. This uses a similar approach of selecting a rating from just 7 questions for each - there aren't hundreds like some other audit tools.
Want to try the auditing tool?
If you want to try the audits, but you're not a member, just sign-up here using the form.
http://www.smartinsights.com/howgood/
If you're already a member simply sign-in - top right and click on any of the toolkits on the members home page with…
How does the digital maturity of your business compare?
Although digital marketing cannot be called new with the advent of the web now over 25 years old, this new research from Adobe shows that relatively few companies have mastered digital marketing. Only 19% of North American organizations and 7% of European organizations rate their digital maturity as “Advanced” when reviewing processes, data integration and technical skills.
Digital maturity definitions from the research shown in the figure are.
Advanced: Data mostly integrated, best practices generally followed, automation common, strong technical skills
Focused: Data and processes somewhat integrated, automation common, solid and expanding technical skills
Emergent: Basic data integration, some automation, growing technical capacity
Nonexistent: Limited data in silos, no automation, low technical capacity
This pattern of a low-level of maturity is similar to that we…
