Digital marketing strategy

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.

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How to structure a digital marketing strategy?

We believe that an omnichannel marketing strategy is essential for marketers to take advantage of the growing digital marketing opportunities for acquiring and retaining customers – so you can win more sales. Our digital marketing framework for growth, the RACE growth system, helps you structure your digital marketing plan around your customers.

Your 5 step digital marketing plan

We recommend using the RACE Framework to structure your marketing strategy, integrated across Plan, Reach, Act, Convert and Engage. As you can see via the marketing funnel below, building an effective digital marketing strategy requires these 5 steps which nurture the customer through their experiences of your business while influencing their decision-making process and lifetime value. The RACE Framework is a streamlined, practical, marketing framework that can be scaled up or down.

According to your business goals. If you’re still not convinced, or need help getting buy-in from your team, check out 10 reasons why you need a digital marketing strategy. The benefit of our digital marketing framework is you can start to see results from your marketing activities instantly, and you can use data and insights to adapt your plan to meet your objectives as you can see below.

5 stages of planning a digital marketing strategy with examples.

The 5 stages of strategic digital marketing planning include plan, reach, act, convert and engage. In this section, we will summaries the key success factors for each stage of your digital marketing strategy, with examples, integrated across the Smart Insights RACE Framework.

1. Plan

Every successful digital marketing strategy starts with a plan! We recommend you use a data-driven approach, review your current digital marketing effectiveness, and plan to improve from there. Omnichannel planning opportunities include customizing analytics, setting up KPI dashboards and setting SMART objectives to create a strategy of prioritized improvements to how you deploy digital marketing media, technology, and data to increase leads and sales. To ensure your digital marketing strategy is working efficiently and effectively,

We recommend taking a digitally-focused approach to strategy and planning. Our RACE Framework is designed for marketers and managers to create a fully integrated, data-driven, practical digital marketing funnel to support their business’ overall vision. Our 5-step digital marketing plan guides you through reaching new audiences, to nurturing interaction, converting customers, and encouraging engagement and advocacy. That’s why we call it the R-A-C-E Framework.

Digital marketing strategy structure example: 5 minute how-to video

Our digital marketing strategy framework gives you 5 steps to practical strategic business growth. Here’s a clip from our recent Digital Marketing Summit, during which Amelia took 5 minutes to outline our RACE Framework and why it’s an increasingly popular strategy tool for marketers today. Visit our website and sign up for free to catch up her full webinar ‘Be adaptable: Optimize your business strategy for growth in a challenging market’.

2. Reach

Strengthen your marketing funnel by reaching more customers and building awareness. Inform your digital marketing strategy with the latest key online marketing techniques to drive visits to your site. Smart Insights members can keep up to date with the latest marketing techniques across each stage of the RACE Framework. For example, find three steps below to improve your organic search in 2022, taken from our digital marketing trends.

• Continue to monitor core updates and EAT, this is particularly important in 2022-23 since many marketers are experiencing significant traffic differences from the May 2022 updates.
• Continue to look at opportunities from structured data and the SERPs features, plus, the latest SERPs Features summary from Moz highlights areas of focus, such as Related Questions.
• Changes in keyword behavior prompted by rising local voice queries are important to optimize for if you target local buyers.

3. Act

Encourage interactions on your website or social media to help you generate leads for the future. Having reached your audience, it’s crucial you influence their next steps to move down the funnel towards a purchase decision.

Content marketing

Here, strategic content marketing comes into play. Use content marketing to entertain, inspire, educate and convince potential converters during their customer lifecycle.

User experience (UX/CX)

To influence customer behavior on your site or social media platforms, you should also look into the current wide range of innovations in interaction design, proven to boost engagement with your content. Taff has published this useful summary, with examples, of what they see as the latest interaction design trends which we can see continuing into 2022.

• Micro-interactions to promote engagement
• Endomorphism
• Immersive 3D visuals
• Design for speed – prompted by Google’s new Core Web Vitals metrics

4. Convert

The pinnacle of your structured digital marketing strategy is, of course, to convert more customers. Use retargeting, nurturing and conversion rate optimization to remind and persuade your audience to buy online or offline if phone and face-to-face channels if these are important to you. Our digital marketing trends highlight three tips for increasing your conversions

• Consider your use of structured always-on optimization. The options for testing are one of the biggest strengths of digital marketing, yet there are still many businesses that don’t take advantage of these opportunities.
• Review the sophistication of your website personalization. According to a SmarterHQ report, 91% of consumers say they are more likely to shop with brands that provide personalized content.
• Don’t underestimate social commerce. North American e-commerce agency Absolute has identified the following key signs of the popularity of social commerce:
  • 87% of e-commerce shoppers believe social media helps them make a shopping decision.
  • 1 in 4 business owners are selling through Facebook.
  • 40% of merchants use social media to generate sales.
  • 30% of consumers say they would make purchases directly through social media platforms.

5. Engage

Finally, after you’re worked so hard to get them, did you know you can increase sales from existing customers by keeping them engaged after their first purchase? Improve your personalized communications using web, email, and social media marketing using the data you already have about them to create hyper-personalized marketing campaigns. Customer engagement research and testing options for digital marketers today include:

• A/B testing
• Customer personas
• Customer journey and content mapping
• Voice of customer surveys
• Path analysis
• Website customer intent surveys
• Usability studies of digital experiences
• Multivariate testing

Moreover, machine learning enables unprecedented insights into consumer behavior. For example, predictive analytics can be used to identify:

• Best send times to engage an individual (can be based when they originally bought or subscribed, but this can be refined through time)
• Best timing and offer for follow-up communications based on analysis of latency (average interval of response)
• Best product or category combinations from cluster-based segmentation