Digital Marketing Strategy Guide

Your companion to creating or updating your online marketing strategy

Author: Dr Dave Chaffey, SmartInsights.com

Part of the Digital Marketing Strategy and Planning Toolkit

 Managing digital
Digital Marketing Strategy

strategy
Seven Steps to Success Guide

Review your
marketplace
Contents

Define your
future
Introduction. Convincing others you need a strategy......................... 4
Our top 10 reasons why you DO need a digital strategy........................................................5

Targeting
What is a digital marketing strategy? It’s not just marcomms!...............................................6
What should go into a digital strategy?..................................................................................8
Using this digital marketing strategy guide with other resources.........................................10
Digital Transformation programmes for larger businesses.................................................. 11

Proposition
ONE Define your structure for managing digital strategy................. 12
Using SOSTAC® to create and manage a strategy............................................................... 12
Introducing the RACE Planning System..............................................................................16
Relating SOSTAC® to RACE...............................................................................................18
Summarising your strategy to create a brief, focused digital plan........................................19 Getting new
customers

Integrating the different parts of digital strategy...................................................................22

Key components of digital strategy......................................................................................22
Benchmarking your capabilities compared to your competitors...........................................25
Refining your digital strategy - keeping it agile with 90 day planning...................................26
Keeping customers

TWO Review your marketplace opportunity....................................... 28

loyal

Define your marketplace map..............................................................................................29

Review main marketplace influences...................................................................................30
Create a digital or multichannel SWOT................................................................................34

THREE Define your future: Vision, Objectives and KPIs................... 38

Introducing the 5S goals for digital marketing......................................................................39

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 5S: Sell – Set goals to grow sales?......................................................................................39
5S: Speak – Set goals to get closer to customers............................................................... 41
5S: Service – Have we set goals to online customer service goals?..................................42
5S: Save – Set cost-saving goals........................................................................................43
5S: Sizzle – Adding value to your brand online...................................................................43

Managing digital
strategy
Define vision........................................................................................................................44
Define specific SMART objectives in your performance improvement framework for digital
marketing ............................................................................................................................47
Define your measurement framework..................................................................................48

FOUR Strategy: Targeting..................................................................... 55

Review your
marketplace
A Set strategic segmentation...............................................................................................55
B. Owned media targeting options.......................................................................................59
C Paid media targeting options............................................................................................61
D Earned media targeting options.......................................................................................61

Define your
FIVE Strategy: Proposition................................................................... 63

future
Communicating the core features of your brand..................................................................63
Differentiate!.........................................................................................................................66
Adding value to your brand online with your OVP(s)............................................................68
Options for mixing-up your marketing mix for online channels............................................70

Targeting
SIX Strategy: New customer acquisition............................................ 74
REACH: Building awareness and visibility online to boost customer acquisition................. 74
Set acquisition goals............................................................................................................75
Define channel mix..............................................................................................................75
Prioritising your online media investments...........................................................................77

Proposition
ACT: Improving customer journeys, interactions and leads ................................................87
CONVERT” Increasing conversion rates online and offline.................................................91
Understand your conversion drivers (and barriers)..............................................................92
Use your analytics system to identify broken customer journeys.........................................95
Getting new
SEVEN Strategy: Keeping customers engaged and loyal................. 97
customers

ENGAGE: Improving customer retention using digital marketing.........................................97

Understand current levels of online brand engagement......................................................98
Set goals to improve engagement.....................................................................................100
Understand your loyalty drivers (and barriers)................................................................... 101
Keeping customers

Encouraging online brand engagement.............................................................................104

loyal

Encouraging customer advocacy.......................................................................................105

E-CRM and data profiling approach reviewed?.................................................................105
Refine Ecommunications strategy .................................................................................... 107
Create a content hub.........................................................................................................108
Your next steps?................................................................................................................109

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 Introduction
Convincing others you need a strategy
Creating a digital marketing strategy and plan is no different from creating any other

Managing digital
marketing plan, in fact it’s increasingly strange to have separate plans for ‘digital’ and ‘offline’

strategy
since that’s not how your customers perceive your business.
However, we’re often required to separate plans to “create a digital strategy” based on the
way teams and reporting are managed and to help the transformation to digital organisations
– before digital marketing becomes integrated as “business as usual”.
At the start of this guide we have to face the reality that many organisations don’t have a
Q9

Review your
marketplace
Does your organisation have a clearly defined
digital marketing strategy at all. Many organisations are doing digital marketing, but few
digital marketing strategy?
have a strategy. That’s what our recent research showed1. We found that a majority of
organisations responding to the survey do use a planned approach to digital marketing, but
many still don’t.

Does your organisation have a clearly defined

Define your
future
digital marketing strategy?

Targeting
Yes - it's integrated into our
34% marketing strategy
Yes - it's defined in a separate
50% document
No - we are doing digital
marketing, but no defined strategy

Proposition
16%

The chart shows that over a third of companies (34%) now have an integrated digital marketing Getting new
customers

strategy. That’s what you should aim for, but a practical, first, intermediate step for many is to
create a separate specific document defining the need for investment in digital marketing and
defining a long-term roadmap to transform the business using digital media and technology.

Strategy Recommendation 1  Create a specific digital marketing plan and roadmap!

Keeping customers

Short on time? Yes we all are! To help here, go straight to Step 1 where we explain a one
page grid format - see “Summarising your strategy to create a brief, focused digital plan”.
loyal

The high proportion of businesses doing digital marketing without a plan suggests to us that,
in many organisations, senior marketers and directors may not understand the need for a
digital strategy; why not “Just Do It” as they used to say in the Nike ads, keeping digital as

1  Smart Insights: Managing Digital Marketing Research report

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 part of your marketing strategy. We have seen many companies, large and small who get this
wrong. Rather than strategy, they simply use a series of poorly integrated tactics, like search,
social or email marketing, but without a coherent plan and missing the opportunities to create
new forms of value for their customer by reviewing the marketing mix.
A lack of structured planning for digital marketing is evident in relatively unsophisticated

Managing digital
adopters of digital channels. For early E-commerce adopters, it is best to create a separate
digital marketing plan to provide focus and aid transformation, but for more mature

strategy
organisations, digital marketing activities should be integrated into annual planning.
Equally, it’s important that creating a separate digital plan or separate resource to focus on
digital marketing doesn’t create a silo of digital resources and practice. So we see a digital
plan as a short-term tool to define your digital future and help transform your business until it
becomes part of planning for business as usual.

Review your
marketplace
Strategy Recommendation 2  Ensure your plan is integrated
Although you need a separate digital plan to help you create a strategy it’s important to
keep it well integrated. That means supporting common business goals and consistent
with brand and communication strategy.

Define your
future
Not convinced of the need for a separate digital plan or need to convince your colleagues?
Try out these arguments... We have often seen these 10 typical problems in organisations
where detailed plans for digital marketing have not been created or managing the plans do
not have clearly defined ownership.
These are risks that can be managed through having a strategy defined in a digital channel

Targeting
plan:

Our top 10 reasons why you DO need a digital strategy

Typical problems when companies don’t have a clearly defined digital marketing strategy
include...

Proposition
ýý 1. You’re directionless. We find that companies without a digital strategy (and many
that do) don’t have clear strategic goals for what they want to achieve online in terms of
gaining new customers or building deeper relationships with existing ones. And if you
don’t have goals you likely don’t put enough resources to reach the goals and you don’t
evaluate through analytics whether you’re achieving those goals.
Getting new
ýý 2. You won’t know your online market share. Customer demand for online services
customers

may be underestimated if you haven’t researched this. Perhaps more importantly you
won’t understand your online marketplace – the dynamics will be different to traditional
channels with different types of customer profile and behaviour, competitors, propositions
and options for investing in marketing communications to target online audiences.
Keeping customers

ýý 3. Existing and start-up competitors will gain market share. If you’re not devoting
enough resources to digital marketing or you’re using an ad-hoc approach with no clearly
loyal

defined strategies, then your competitors will eat your digital lunch!

ýý 4. You don’t have a powerful online value proposition. A clearly defined online
customer value proposition will help you differentiate your brand and online service
encouraging existing and new customers to engage initially and stay loyal.

ýý 5. You don’t know your online customers well enough. It’s often said that digital is
the “most measurable medium ever”. But Google Analytics and similar tools will only tell

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 you volumes not sentiment. You need to use other forms of customer feedback to identify
your weak points and then address them.

ýý 6. You’re not integrated. It’s all too common for digital activities to be completed in
silos, whether that’s a specialist digital marketer, sitting in IT or a separate digital agency.
It’s easier that way to package digital marketing into a convenient chunk. But of course

Managing digital
it’s less effective. Everyone agrees that digital media work best when integrated with

strategy
traditional media and response channels.

ýý 7. Digital doesn’t have enough people/budget given its importance. Insufficient

resource will be devoted to both planning and executing e-marketing and there is likely to
be a lack of specific specialist e-marketing skills which will make it difficult to respond to
competitive threats effectively.

Review your
marketplace
ýý 8. You’re wasting money and time through duplication. Even if you do have sufficient
resource it may be wasted. This is particularly the case in larger companies where you
see different parts of the marketing organisation purchasing different tools or using
different agencies for performing similar online marketing tasks.

ýý 9. You’re not agile enough to catchup or stay ahead. If you look at the top online

Define your
brands like Amazon, Dell, Google, Tesco, Zappos, they’re all dynamic – trialling new

future
approaches to gain or keep their online audiences.

ýý 10 You’re not optimising. Every company with a website will have analytics, but many
senior managers don’t ensure that their teams make or have the time to review and act
on them. Once a strategy enables you to get the basics right, then you can progress to
continuous improvement of the key aspects like search marketing, site user experience,

Targeting
email and social media marketing.

Recommended resource?  Making the business case for digital marketing

For more detailed advice on persuading colleagues to invest in digital marketing see our
short Making the case for investment in digital marketing guide by Mike Berry.

Proposition
What is a digital marketing strategy? It’s not just marcomms!
The term “digital marketing strategy” is often used loosely when talking about future plans,
but what exactly is it and what should be its scope? You may have your ideas, but others Getting new
customers

won’t always share them, so it’s worth briefly scoping it out so your vision is clear and agreed
with colleagues in your organisation.
For us, the key thing to decide when creating a digital marketing strategy for your business is
whether it is limited to creating a plan for more effective digital marketing communications,
or whether you broaden the scope to look at potential new business and revenue models.
Keeping customers

For example, retailers should consider each of the 7Ps of the marketing mix such as Product,
Pricing, Place, Promotion and service to see how they can best be refined.
loyal

You can see there is a risk that the Internet and digital media are treated as ‘just another
channel to market’ without review of the opportunities to offer improved, differentiated online
services and content. We recommend that your digital marketing strategy is wider than just
digital marketing communications to fully reap the benefits of digital marketing.

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 Strategy Recommendation 3 Define the scope and labelling of digital strategy
Define which customer touchpoints and channels need managing as part of a digital
strategy so the scope of digital marketing is clear amongst your co-workers and with
your agencies. Depending on your type of organisation and terminology you may label
the strategy differently, we have seen of all these working with different organisations, for
example:

Managing digital
þþ Digital strategy, digital business or e-business strategy – a strategy for using

strategy
digital technology and digital media to support goals across an organisation. This may
explore new business models, varying elements of the marketing mix like Product,
Pricing and Place (Distribution).
þþ Multichannel, omnichannel marketing or e-commerce strategy – A broader
strategy typical for retail or transactional companies integrating web and mobile site

Review your
marketplace
sales with distribution through physical stores or catalogue phone sales. This will again
look at options for varying propositions in different channels.
þþ Digital marketing or e-marketing strategy – Typically a marketing communications
focus seeking to grow a business through improved digital communications across
different touchpoints integrating customer journeys across different touchpoints
including website, mobile marketing and digital communications channels for customer
acquisition and retention.

Define your
future
It seems crazy to have so many ill-defined terms floating around, but these have evolved
over the years, so it shows the importance of defining your scope. Many just think digital
strategy is about marcomms and tactics like Search, Social or Email. Wrong!

We can’t state that one scoping is superior to the other since it will vary by the type of

Targeting
organisation. If the options of new business models are already established within the
business strategy then digital marketing strategy will just focus on communications.
In this guide we focus on creating a digital channel plan using integrated digital
communications to grow a business. We explore options for using digital media to add to a
brand proposition, but without looking at the options of varying pricing and creating digital
products since they’re not relevant in all sectors.

Proposition
What is it?  Digital marketing strategy
Creating an integrated digital communications strategy for a brand which requires
specific channel targeting, channel propositions and channel partners based on customer
preferences.
Getting new
customers

This is how we see digital strategy should be tackled since it’s a channel strategy. Today the
channel breaks down into desktop and mobile platforms. This means that you should:
þþ Understand the channels. Your strategy should be informed by customers’ online
behaviour and preferences. In particular, understand which intermediary sites influence
purchase and how your customers switch between the channels.
Keeping customers

þþ Set objectives for future channel contribution. This includes specific monthly targets
loyal

for both direct (online) sales and indirect (offline) sales.

þþ Identify and prioritise target audiences. As with traditional marketing, targeting the
right audiences is key. Digital media enable you to micro-target.
þþ Encourage usage of the channel. You still need to communicate the benefits of using
desktop and mobile propositions to encourage switching and enhance your brand.
þþ Create propositions to emphasise the differences. This includes differences between

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 online channels and other channels.
þþ Support integration between channels. Although you want to emphasise the
differences, that doesn’t mean the channel shouldn’t be integrated. Customer journeys
should be seamlessly integrated.
þþ Review how competitors use the channel. Understand their targeting and propositions,

Managing digital
where do they excel?

strategy
þþ Develop channel partners. Find the key players and influencers in the value chain or
ecosystem and form strategic partnerships.

Best Practice Tip 1  Use integrated strategies for individual digital platforms and tools
Whether it’s a mobile website, a mobile app, a social media platform or an email
newsletter, to get consistency of integration use a common audience segmentation,

Review your
marketplace
targeting, differentiation and proposition, but vary it to suit the platform and audience.

What should go into a digital strategy?

Since digital impacts all marketing activities across the customer lifecycle, the unfortunate
reality is that there are a LOT of communications activities that need to be managed and

Define your
included in your plan.

future
Given the many activities involved in digital marketing it’s important to emphasise the
need to focus. You can’t and shouldn’t try to do everything and try to be all things to all
people. It’s important to decide which strategies and tactics NOT to pursue actively and
which functionality is not suitable to implement. The essence of strategy is prioritisation in
investment to get the best results you can with the resources available. Avoid spreading

Targeting
yourself too-thin!
Get focus by creating a simple summary of your strategy. To help this, in Step 1 we explain a
one page grid format - see “Summarising your strategy to create a brief, focused digital plan”.

Strategy Recommendation 4  Give your strategy focus with a one-page summary

You won’t be able to do everything, so your strategy should focus on strategic digital

Proposition
marketing initiatives that will make the biggest difference. Focus! We recommend a
one-page strategy summary format to help achieve focus.

In our e-learning course we have simplified the whole of digital marketing to 25 key
techniques across the lifecycle that will drive your future growth, but that’s still a lot! To
simplify it more review this checklist of the BIG digital strategy questions which we will Getting new
customers

cover and those which you should think about and aim to answer within your plan:
rr 1. Define opportunity as % growth. How can we use digital channels to grow our busi-
ness, to increase market share, aligned with our business goals to give a vision and set
SMART objectives for our digital channels?
rr 2. Which audiences are we targeting? Who are the priority audiences?
Keeping customers

rr 3. How do we create a compelling online value proposition (OVP)? How to add value
loyal

and help position and differentiate to our brand online from competitors?
rr 5. How do we achieve sales growth across customer lifecycle tactics (RACE)? What
are the main initiatives for acquisition, conversion and retention. These include these
further questions...
rr 6. How do we reach our audience using desktop and mobile devices to get visibility
and awareness? Which marketing channels do we prioritise to drive website visits and

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 offline interactions (if relevant)?
rr 7. Partners and influencers? How do we increase our reach to generate awareness and
site visits through intermediaries, partners, influencers and publishing sites?
rr 8. Encourage interaction? How do we encourage our audience to participate online on
different devices and then convert online or offline by integrating channels?

Managing digital
rr 9. Customer interaction? How do we improve customer communications, experience

strategy
1
and service to retain customers and encourage repeat purchase?
rr 10. How do we resource, structure and manage digital marketing? As part of a digital
transformation programme including staff digital skills, marketing technology platform or
stack? The aim of this should be to prevent creating ‘digital silos’ in larger organisations.

Review your
marketplace
Mapping ‘always-on’ digital strategy initiatives to the customer lifecycle
In the pre-digital era marketing activities have been planned in campaign ‘bursts’ around
new product launches and promotions. Digital marketing needs a change in mindset so
businesses invest sufficient time and budget into ‘always-on’ activities which can be used in
an integrated way to maximise visibility and conversion through the customer lifecycle.

Define your
What is it?  ‘Always-on’ digital marketing activities

future
Always-on or inbound digital marketing aims to maintain continuous visibility and
persuasion and engagement online 365 days a year as consumers and businesses show
their intent to buy by searching online for information about products and services using
search engines, social media, reviews, comparison sites and their preferred influencers.
Always on activities also include marketing automation to follow-up on interested through
email marketing, messaging, on-site personalisation and off-site re-marketing.

Targeting
To help keep your strategy actionable and integrated we recommend you review marketing
activities across the customer lifecycle. Mapping current digital activities and future activities
across the lifecycle will help show opportunity to invest in ‘always-on’ activities.

Proposition
Getting new
customers
Keeping customers
loyal

The popularity of search engines, social media and review sites to inform purchase decisions
mean that online customers are looking for products, services and experiences throughout

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 the year, not only when your campaigns are live.
Many businesses haven’t yet adjusted to create an ‘always-on’ marketing machine that
use digital marketing techniques to continuously tap into daily consumer intent. Yes, we will
still need campaigns for demand generation and to push promotions, but these need to be
balanced against always-on activities which we have seen sadly neglected way too many

Managing digital
times.

strategy
1
Best Practice Tip 2  Define strategic initiatives across the customer lifecycle
We recommend you map current and future online AND offline ‘always-on’ marketing
activities across the lifecycle. This will help identify activities you may miss out on if you
haven’t planned projects to set them up or optimize them, e.g. re-marketing or marketing
automation.

Review your
marketplace
Using this digital marketing strategy guide with other resources
Smart Insights resources are designed to support the trend to always-on marketing activities
using the RACE planning system by defining 25 key activities that every business needs.

Define your
Recommended resource?  5X5 = 25 techniques in our Digital marketing strategy course

future
To ensure that our recommended structure for a digital plan is comprehensive, we
created the RACE Planning framework which we explore more in Step 1. For full practical
recommendations on these techniques we recommend our online RACE Digital Marketing
Planning E-learning course which has modules covering all touchpoints across the Smart
Insights RACE Planning framework, that’s Plan-Reach-Act-Convert and Engage.

Targeting
Proposition
Getting new
customers

These are the essential companion Smart Insights resources to this guide and the
e-learning course which will help you develop a strategy:
þþ Digital marketing workbook to prepare a customised plan for your business or your
Keeping customers

clients. The workbook contains blank MS Word templates (plus Excel and Powerpoint)
for you to amend to help form a plan for your business or your clients’ businesses
loyal

þþ Example digital marketing plan - A worked example to inspire you to create your plan.
þþ RACE Digital Planning guide for startups, small and medium businesses - If you prefer
to download more details on the 25 techniques for implementing a digital strategy
shown in the visual above, then download this practical guide which focuses on
examples from startups and small and mid-size businesses, but will be useful to all!

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 Digital Transformation programmes for larger businesses
Since the adoption of social and digital media and technology have made huge differences
to how people buy, in medium and large organisations digital demands huge changes in how
marketing is structured and managed. Our Managing Digital Marketing research showed that
typically, in larger businesses more than a third of marketers specialise in Digital Marketing.

Managing digital
Digital Transformation is the term often now used to describe the changes needed.

strategy
What is it? Digital Transformation 1
A staged programme of business improvements to People, Process and Tools tools used
for more effective and efficient integrated digital marketing communications which maximize
the potential business contribution of digital technology and media. Transformation may
also include updating Business and Revenue models. Most relevant to medium and larger

Review your
marketplace
businesses with many in their marketing teams.
Creating digital transformation programmes is a common trend in larger organisations who
Assessment of digital marketing capabilities in organisation
recognise the importance of digital media and technologies to their future survival and
prosperity and seek to accelerate the rate of change to integrate digital marketing into their
business. To discover the level of commitment to Digital Transformation in our Managing
Digital research2 we asked about use of Digital Transformation programmes.

Define your
future
Adoption of Digital Transformation programmes in business

11% We have had a digital transformation process

Targeting
in place for more than 2 years
37% We have just started a digital transformation
19% programme (within the last 2 years)
We are planning to introduce a programme
within the next 12 months
We have no plans to run a digital
transformation programme

Proposition
33%

The chart shows a mixed picture of the adoption of Digital Transformation programmes. Getting new
Over one quarter (30%) of businesses already have a transformation programme in place,
customers

with many businesses (33%) still looking to launch their digital transformation programme. A
significant proportion of organisations have no intention to implement a programme because
they feel it is inappropriate for their type of business, for example, startups and smaller
businesses or businesses who are online pureplays.
Keeping customers

Recommended resource?  Managing Digital Transformation

Since Digital Transformation isn’t needed for all types of organisation and is more relevant
loyal

for larger businesses, we created a separate guide for business-level members: Managing
Digital Transformation guide. If you work for a transactional business take a look at this
P.R.I.C.E. multichannel retail proposition audit from E-commerce specialist Chris Jones
which shows how to review and improve the effectiveness of Ecommerce propositions.

2  Smart Insights: Managing Digital Marketing Research report

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 ONE
Define your structure for managing digital strategy

Managing digital
rr Q. Approach to process for creating and managing digital strategy defined?

strategy
Knowing where to start is often the hardest thing when creating and implementing a digital 1
marketing plan. So once you have a structure / framework to follow in a table of contents it’s
then almost a matter of filling in the gaps... 
Creating a strategy that works needs an effective overall framework and process to create
the strategy. So your first step is straightforward – thinking about how you manage and
create your strategy.

Review your
marketplace
A workable strategy:
þþ Is based on what’s happening in a company’s marketplace, i.e. it’s customer-centred and
reviews the importance of potential partners, influencers and competitors
þþ Has clear objectives to achieve a vision for the future - particularly important for
digital marketing

Define your
þþ Gives clear strategic direction and focus to achieve the objectives

future
þþ Has a method of tracking and review to keep the strategy on track when you’re
implementing it. We recommend 90-day planning as a method to continuously review and
refine your strategy. We’ll discuss this at the end of this section.
In all marketing strategies, it’s important to focus on building a plan around the customer -
not your products and tactics. But this is particularly true online since digital marketing often

Targeting
involves taking advantage of new digital technologies and platforms according to how people
interact with them.

Strategy Recommendation 5  Ensure your strategy is customer-centric

Put customers’ current use of technology and how they will interact with your brand at the
heart of your strategy.

Proposition
Using SOSTAC® to create and manage a strategy
rr Q. Do we have the right strategy process framework in place, e.g. SOSTAC® defined?
Getting new
To make sure your digital strategy has these essential features of a workable strategy,
customers

we recommend a simplified version of the SOSTAC® structure developed by PR Smith,

Dave Chaffey’s co-author of the the printed book Digital marketing Excellence. SOSTAC®
is a great framework for structuring business, marketing or digital marketing plans since
it’s relatively simple and logical, so it’s easy to remember and to explain to colleagues or
agencies.
Keeping customers

SOSTAC® is a strategic planning process framework that gives you a clear structure to work
loyal

through to create and manage your plan.

Recommended resource?  SOSTAC® Planning Guide

Since many members tell us they love SOSTAC® we asked Paul Smith to include a guide
for Expert members. If you want to know more about each stage of SOSTAC® you can
download it here. Its main focus is on situation analysis, but it covers all elements.

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 What is it?  SOSTAC®
SOSTAC® is a planning process framework to help structure and manage implementation of
plans. It stands for Situation, Objectives and Strategy, Tactics, Action and Control originally
developed by PR Smith for marketing communications planning. In Digital marketing
Excellence Dave Chaffey and Paul Smith have adapted the SOSTAC® framework to apply it

Managing digital
to digital marketing as shown in the diagram on the next page.

strategy
1

Note that each stage is not discrete, rather there is overlap during each stage of planning –
previous stages must be revisited and refined, as indicated by the reverse arrows.

Strategy Recommendation 6  Create your strategy using a planning process framework

Review your
marketplace
like SOSTAC® combined with RACE
Use the stages in the planning framework to help create the different parts of your plan.
You should also assess and improve the capabilities of your organisation in each aspect
of creating and implementing the plan. We recommend reviewing how you can generate
value at each customer stage of customer interaction from RACE: Reach-Act-Convert-
Engage as we will explain next in this section.

Define your
future
Control is a key part of SOSTAC® since it links to the objective setting where you create a
budget model and you use it to check that your strategy – and tactics are on track.

Best Practice Tip 3  Iterate through the stages of SOSTAC® to refine your strategy
You don’t have to work through the model in a linear sense. If anything, working through

Targeting
the process might require you to make refinements to earlier position in order to create a
strategy that works for you.

The elements of SOSTAC® planning to help develop digital marketing strategy are:
þþ 1. Situation Analysis means ‘where are we now?’ Planning activities involved as this

Proposition
stage include performing a digital channel-specific SWOT analysis reviewing the different
aspects of the micro-environment including customers, competitors and intermediaries
forming the online marketplace. We cover situation analysis in Step 2.
þþ 2. Objectives means ‘where do we want to be?’ This can include a vision for digital
channels and also specific numerical objectives for the digital channels such as
projections of sales volumes and cost savings. The 5Ss are used here as a simple Getting new
customers

mnemonic for the range of objectives that should be considered. We cover objective
setting in Step 3.
þþ 3. Strategy means ‘how do we get there?’ Strategy summarizes how to achieve
the objectives for the different decision points explained in this chapter including
segmentation, targeting, proposition development. We cover strategy and tactics in steps
Keeping customers

4 to 7 of this guide.
þþ 4. Tactics defines the usage of tactical digital communications tools. This includes
loyal

specific details of the marketing mix, E-CRM and digital communications.

þþ 5. Actions refers to action plans, change management and project management
skills. We refer to the issues of modifications to organizational roles and structures later
in this guide.
þþ 6. Control looks at keeping plans on track against target. The use of Management
Information including web analytics to assess whether strategic and tactical objectives are

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 achieved and how improvements can be made to enhance results further. This is closely
related to goal setting as described.
Since we’re big fans of SOSTAC® we have created two infographics to help explain to
members the main elements, plus for printing and social sharing of course! The Growth
Wheel summarises the recommended structure of a digital plan incorporating the main

Managing digital
activities we recommend at each stage of creating a plan. We called it the Multichannel
Growth Wheel to show the need to consider multichannel integration at all points.

strategy
1

Review your
marketplace
Define your
future
Targeting
Proposition
Getting new
customers
Keeping customers
loyal

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 This SOSTAC® visual is a higher level view of the planning activities we cover in this guide.

Managing digital
strategy
1

Review your
marketplace
Define your
future
Targeting
Proposition
Getting new
customers
Keeping customers
loyal

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 Introducing the RACE Planning System
We created the RACE Planning system to give a simple framework to help small and large
businesses alike plan their use of digital marketing. For members to apply the full details,
remember that our e-learning and workbook downloads with 25 (5X5) essential activities.

Managing digital
strategy
1

Review your
marketplace
Define your
future
Targeting
Proposition
Getting new
customers
Keeping customers
loyal

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 Why use RACE for planning and managing digital marketing?
RACE is a practical framework to help manage and improve results from your digital
marketing. Ultimately it’s about using best practice across digital marketing techniques to get
more commercial value from investments in digital marketing. We hope it will help simplify
your approach to reviewing the performance of your online marketing and taking actions to

Managing digital
improve its effectiveness.

strategy
Although SOSTAC® provides a superb framework for structuring a plan, we recommend that 1
a digital marketing plan combines it with the Smart Insights RACE planning framework since:
þþ RACE is practical and action-oriented – it focuses on tactics you can implement in your
digital marketing communications and on your website and mobile apps
þþ RACE is customer-centred – it follows the established customer lifecycle of relationship

Review your
marketplace
building or marketing funnel from creating awareness; generating leads from new
prospects; converting prospects to sale online or offline and encouraging loyalty, repeat
sales and advocacy such as social sharing.
þþ RACE integrates performance evaluation – It defines KPIs that digital marketers should
include at each stage for setting target and reviewing results using analytics and
summary dashboards.

Define your
future
What is RACE?
RACE covers the full customer lifecycle or marketing funnel from:

(Plan) > Reach > Act > Convert > Engage

Targeting
There is also an initial phase of Plan involving creating the overall digital strategy, objective
setting and plan, so sometimes members call it PRACE, but we prefer RACE Planning for
simplicity!
RACE consists of four steps or online marketing activities designed to help brands engage
their customers throughout the customer lifecycle.

Proposition
þþ 1 Reach. Reach involves building awareness and visibility of your brand, products and
services on other websites and in offline media in order to build traffic by driving visits to
different web presences like your main site, microsites or social media pages. It involves
maximising reach over time to create multiple interactions using different paid, owned and
earned media touchpoints. Getting new
customers

þþ 2 Act. Act is short for Interact. It’s a separate stage from conversion since encouraging
interactions on websites and in social media. For most businesses the main aim of Act
is to generate online leads.  So, it’s about persuading site visitors or prospects take the
next step, the next Action on their customer journey when they initially reach your site or
social network presence. It may mean finding out more about a company or its products,
searching to find a product or reading a blog post. You should define these actions as
Keeping customers

top-level goals of the funnel in analytics. Goals can include “Viewed product”, “Added
to Basket”, “Registered as member” or “Signed up for an e-newsletter. Act is also about
loyal

encouraging participation. This can be sharing of content via social media or customer
reviews (strictly, part of Engage).
þþ 3 Convert. This is simply conversion to sale, online or offline. It involves getting your
audience to take that vital next step which turns them into paying customers whether the
payment is taken through online Ecommerce transactions, or offline channels.  

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 þþ 4 Engage. This is long-term customer engagement and communications that is,
developing a long-term relationship with first-time buyers to build customer loyalty as
repeat purchases using communications on your site, social presence, email and direct
interactions  to boost customer lifetime value. It can be measured by repeat actions such
as repeat sale and sharing content through social media. We also need to measure
percentage of active customers (or email subscribers) and customer satisfaction and

Managing digital
recommendation using other systems.

strategy
1

Relating SOSTAC® to RACE

Our members have asked in our Answers forum, what is the best way to relate SOSTAC®
to RACE3. Good question! But there is no right or wrong answer. It’s a case of selecting and
using the framework that works best for you in your situation.

Review your
marketplace
The answer will depend on the depth of analysis and recommendation you are looking to
include in your digital strategy. For a comprehensive strategy, you may want to apply RACE
within each of the stages of SOSTAC® to review the opportunities for engaging and selling to
customers across different types of customer touchpoints whether on web, mobile, email or
social channels.
In response to the question we created this template to show how they relate as a checklist

Define your
future
for a comprehensive SOSTAC® plan.

Recommended resource?  SOSTAC® – RACE review checklist

Download this SOSTAC® – RACE checklist template [This is a direct download so you
need to be signed in to Smart Insights in your browser to download] as a checklist showing
how the two relate if you are creating a long-form plan based on SOSTAC®.

Targeting
Proposition
Getting new
customers
Keeping customers
loyal

That said, in many cases, particularly for smaller businesses, I think combining SOSTAC®
with RACE in this level of detail is overkill. If you are creating a rapid plan, I recommend
using the summary in the next section.
Opportunity, Strategy, Action is a simplified alternative approach.

3  Smart Insights forum: SOSTAC vs RACE

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 Summarising your strategy to create a brief, focused digital plan
SOSTAC® is a great general planning tool, but it can lead to long plans that take too long
to create and lack focus. It perhaps isn’t always the best approach for smaller businesses
or communicating the focus of your plan to colleagues. So we recommend you consider a
shorter, alternative strategy summary using the RACE Objectives > Strategies summary grid.

Managing digital
strategy
Strategy Recommendation 7  Create a brief, focused digital plan integrating opportunities, 1
strategies and measures
To make your digital plans clearer and more actionable in companies of all sizes we
recommend creating a single table to communicate to colleagues linking objectives with
strategies and showing what informs these targets.

Review your
marketplace
We recommend you use the grid below as an efficient way to ensure linkage between
objectives, the situation analysis used to inform them; the strategy to implement them and
the KPIs used to track performance towards targets.
This single page summary format helps create focused, integrated plans.
For each part of RACE Planning, use this table to summarise the key points of your plan:

Define your
future
þþ Opportunity. Quantifiable SMART objectives based on your analytics and market
analysis insights. State your assumptions and what informs your objectives.
þþ Strategy. Where you will focus your resources and investment to hit your targets.
þþ Action. Managing tasks to implement your strategies.

Targeting
RACE activity Opportunity Strategies Actions and Control
(from Situation)
1. Plan. rr rr rr
rr rr rr
rr rr rr
2. Reach. rr rr rr

Proposition
rr rr rr
rr rr rr
3. Act. rr rr rr
rr rr rr
rr rr rr
4. Convert. rr rr rr Getting new
customers

rr rr rr
rr rr rr

5. Engage. rr rr rr
rr rr rr
rr rr rr
Keeping customers

Examples of a digital plan summary

loyal

Our members have asked for more examples of digital plans to show what a completed plan
looks like and to make it quicker to create their own.
We’re big fans of one page summaries of strategies which are covered in our workbook.
Download our blank RACE Objectives > Strategies summary grid and example shown on the
next page to help create your digital plan.

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 Recommended resource?  SMART RACE objectives > Strategies grid and example
The Smart Insights digital marketing workbook download contains a blank SMART Ob-

Managing digital
jectives-strategies grid (see template 1.3.1) for you to amend for your business or your
clients.

strategy
1
Download our digital marketing plan example for a worked example for ‘Wow Accessories’,
a consumer business shown below (from the Executive summary):

Review your
marketplace
Define your
future
Targeting
If you want to summarise this summary even further the Smart Insights digital marketing
toolkit contains a one page SOSTAC® Word template example to create an initial or
summary plan. It also contains a completed example for a fictitious company, Perfect

Proposition
Lawn.

Getting new
customers
Keeping customers
loyal

Here is another example of how objectives can be linked to strategies and KPIs, this time
grouping the objectives as acquisition, conversion and retention:

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 Objectives Substantiation (informed Strategies to achieve Key performance indi-
by situation analysis or goals cators (critical success
insight, example) factors)
1. Acquisition Based on growth forecast Start affiliate marketing Overall CPA for online sales.
objective. Acquire based on current sales of programme and improve SEO. Incremental number and % of
50,000 new online 40,000 sales per year, but with Existing media mix based sales from affiliate marketing

Managing digital
customers this incremental sales arising from on pay-per-click and display programme. Number of

strategy
financial year at an new affiliate programme and advertising supported by strategic keywords ranked 1
average cost per SEO development offline media for in top positions in natural
acquisition (CPA) of search results page
£30 with an average
profitability of 5%

Review your
2. Acquisition (or Extrapolation of current Direct marketing campaign Number and percentage of

marketplace
conversion) objective. natural migration coupled with using direct mail, phone existing customers registering
Migrate 40% of existing increased adoption from offline prompts and online persuasion to use online service. Number
customers to using direct marketing campaign to encourage adoption. Use of and percentage of customers
online ‘paperless’ bill incentive to encourage change actively using online services
payment services and at different points after initially
e-mail communications registering

Define your
within 3 years

future
3. Conversion Growth estimated based on Use of new merchandising % of site visitors responding to
objective. Increase the current AOV of £35 plus model system to show users related merchandising / cross-selling
average order value of suggesting 20% increase in ‘next best product’ for different messages
online sales to £42 per AOV product categories
customer

Targeting
4. Conversion Model showing separate Combination of strategies: Variations in conversion rates
objective. Increase site increase in conversion for new rr Incentivized e-mail for new and existing customers
conversion rate to 3.2% and existing customers based follow-up on checkout in different product categories
on strategies shown on the abandonments for new
customers
right
rr Introduction of more
competitive pricing

Proposition
strategy on best sellers
rr AB and multivariate
messaging improvement of
landing pages
rr Refinement to quality of
traffic purchased through
pay-per-click programme
Getting new
5. Retention objective. Business case based on rr Delivery of personalized rr Increased conversion rate
customers

Increase annual limited personalization of offers product offers by e-mail of retention e-mail contact
rr 5% second purchase programme
repeat new customer to encourage repeat purchases
discount voucher rr Conversion to sale for
conversion rate by 20% via e-mail.
second purchase discount
campaigns
Keeping customers

6. Growth objective. Model based on encouraging Supported by direct mail rr Response rate to direct mail
Increase new prospects 2% of customers to and e-mail recommendation campaign
loyal

recommended by recommend friends annually programme

friends (viral marketing (based on trial scheme)
or ‘member get
member’) by 10,000
per annum

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 Integrating the different parts of digital strategy
rr Q. Our digital marketing strategy aligns with business strategy?
The reasons for integration are straightforward, your goals for digital should support your
wider marketing strategies. Often, when digital exists as a separate strategy document there
isn’t good integration with wider business strategies.

Managing digital
strategy
Strategy Recommendation 8  Show alignment of your digital strategy with core business or
marketing initiatives for the current year.
Create a table showing how your digital strategies support current strategic business
initiatives. Proving this alignment to colleagues will help get buy-in from senior manager
colleagues since they will see directly how investment in digital marketing will support what

Review your
marketplace
they are trying to achieve.
2

Key components of digital strategy

As you’re constructing your overall strategy, it’s worth thinking about the main thrusts of
your strategy. We will cover these from Step 4 onwards, but we thought it would be useful

Define your
to introduce the main parts here and you can start outlining a longer-form digital marketing

future
plan in a Word document if you want to use this approach rather than the shorter summaries
mentioned so far.
You will recognise many of these from traditional marketing planning. In many ways, digital
strategy is about revising existing marketing communications approaches which suit the
unique character of digital media and communications.

Targeting
Recommended resource?  Word Strategy planning template
The Smart Insights digital marketing toolkit contains a Word Strategy planning template.
This is a simple template using the SOSTAC® planning headings and prompts to help you
create a long-form Word planning document.

Proposition
Getting new
customers

A. Targeting and segmentation

rr A company’s online customers have different demographic characteristics, needs and
behaviours to its offline customers. It follows that different approaches to segmentation
Keeping customers

may be required and specific segments may need to be selectively targeted though
loyal

rr specific content and messaging on your site or elsewhere on the web. This capability for
“micro-targeting” is one of the biggest benefits of digital marketing.

rr Specific targeting approaches to apply online include: demographic, value-based,

lifecycle and behavioural personalisation.

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 B. Positioning
rr How do you position your online products and services in the customer’s mind?

rr Reinforcing your core proposition. How do you prove your credibility?

rr Define your online value proposition. This should flow from your positioning and be what

Managing digital
the customer sees immediately when they interact with you online.

strategy
rr Define these in key messages for different audiences, e.g. prospects against existing
customers, segments with different value.

rr You need clear messaging hierarchies to effectively communicate your positioning both in
online and offline media.

Review your
marketplace
C. Proposition and the marketing mix 2
Think about the digital marketing mix - how can you provide differential value to customers
through varying the 4Ps online through Product, Price, Promotion and Place and how
can you add value through service. And don’t forget what PR Smith calls the Eighth P of
“Partnering”. We see creating strategic partnerships with complementary businesses and
publishers as an essential low-cost ‘contra’-deal method of modern marketing.

Define your
future
Particularly if you sell online, you will want to explain how you will modify the marketing mix.
For example:

rr Product. Can you offer a different product range online. How can you add value to
products through additional content or online services?

Targeting
rr Price. Review your pricing and consider differential pricing for online products or
services.

rr Place. Identify your online distribution issues and challenges. Should you create new
intermediaries or portals or partner with existing sites?

rr Promotion. Discuss the problems and opportunities of the online communications mix.

Proposition
These will be detailed in the acquisition and retention communications strategies. Review
approaches for online promotions and merchandising to increase sales. You may want to
include exclusive promotions to support the growth of different digital channels, i.e. email,
mobile, Facebook, Twitter.

rr People. Can you use automated tools such as FAQ to deliver “web self-service” or
should you provide online contact points through Live Chat or Phone Call-back?
Getting new
customers

rr Processes. List the components of process and understand the need to integrate them
into a system.

rr Physical evidence. Identify the digital components that give ‘evidence’ to customers of
your credibility such as awards and testimonials
Keeping customers

rr Partners. The eighth P. So much of marketing today is based on strategic partnerships,

loyal

marketing marriages and alliances that we have added this ‘P’ in as a vital ingredient in
today’s marketing mix.

D. Brand strategy
Gaining ‘street cred’ online is now paramount to success, how and where are you going to do
that - brand favourability follows credibility and trust. So you need to understand the reasons
to engage with your brand, why will people interact and recommend, or not? How will you

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 demonstrate credibility online?

E. Online representation or presence

This includes your “owned media” which we explain at the start of step 2. It includes your
web site strategy (one site or four, sub-domains, what are the site goals and how will they

Managing digital
be achieved...) and priorities for social presences. Our digital marketing radar (http://bit.ly/

strategy
smartradar) and the Bullseye Media framework help you prioritise your online presence to
reach and engage your audience.

F. Content and engagement strategy

Ask which content will feature to gain initial interest, support the buying process (text and
rich media product content and tools) and stickiness and to promote return visits (blogs

Review your
marketplace
and community). Remember user-generated content too, such as reviews, ratings and 2
comments. You will have to prioritise content types and ensure you devote sufficient resource
to it to create quality content which helps you compete. All effective online companies see
themselves as publishers!

G. Digital channel acquisition communications strategy

Define your
future
Outline how you will acquire traffic, what are the main approaches you will use? Don’t forget
to consider how you drive visitors through offline media and integrated campaigns.
Key digital media channels for traffic acquisition include:

rr Search engine marketing (natural and paid)

Targeting
rr Social media marketing and online PR (think brand strategy)

rr Partner and affiliate marketing

rr Display advertising

rr Email marketing to leads database

Proposition
Here for reference are the key digital channels we’ll review in Step 6 and our other guides.

Getting new
customers
Keeping customers
loyal

H. Digital channel conversion strategy

How does the user experience, which depends on information architecture, page template
design, merchandising, messaging and performance help you make it easy for visitors to

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 engage and convert?

I. Digital channel retention communications strategy

Often neglected, what will be the main online and offline tactics to encourage repeat visits
and sales? Again integrated campaigns involving offline touchpoints are crucial here.

Managing digital
strategy
J. Data strategy
What are your goals in permission marketing and data capture - what/where/how/when/why,
what tools and value adds are you going to use? You might alternatively reference these in
the conversion strategy. Some of the practical implications here are covered in steps 6 and 7.
How do you improve the quality of your customer data across channels to help increase the

Review your
marketplace
relevance of your messages through personalisation
2
K. Integration strategy
How you integrate traditional and digital channels should run through every section of your
strategy since it’s key to success. One way to structure this is to map customer journeys
across channels as channel chains.

Define your
future
L. Social media marketing strategy
We would argue that social media marketing is part of a broader customer engagement
strategy plus brand, acquisition, conversion and retention strategies, but many organisations
are grappling with how they get value from this, so it may help to develop an overall social
media marketing strategy.

Targeting
M. Digital marketing governance strategy
In larger organisations how you manage digital marketing is a big challenge. Questions
that the governance strategy seeks to answer are how do we manage internal and external
resources through changes to structures and skills needed for digital and multichannel
marketing.

Proposition
Benchmarking your capabilities compared to your competitors
rr Q. Marketing capabilities scored and compared to competitors?
We’re big fans of scoring the current digital marketing capabilities of a company, so you can
show your colleagues how your different digital marketing activities rate now and how they
Getting new
customers

need to be improved in future. This is a core technique for arguing for additional investment
in digital marketing and for reporting on progress.

Strategy Recommendation 9  Score your digital capabilities to review how you can improve
and to win the case for investment
Keeping customers

Use the stages in the planning framework to help create the different parts of your plan.
You should also assess and improve the capabilities of your organisation in each aspect of
loyal

the plan. Scoring your current use of digital marketing can help persuade colleagues that
you need to take action and where you need to invest more.

You may be interested to know that this approach originated via software process capability

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!
 maturity models devised by Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute4. These are used
to help organizations improve their software development practices by evaluating them using
different criteria of how well their processes work, for example:
þþ Level 1. Unmanaged.
þþ Level 2. Managed.

Managing digital
þþ Level 3. Defined.

strategy
þþ Level 4. Quantitatively Managed.
þþ Level 5. Optimizing.

Recommended resource?  Smart Insights Benchmarking Tools

We have developed a series of tools to help members review and develop strategy and to

Review your
marketplace
make the case for more investment in digital marketing:
2
þþ Digital Marketing Healthcheck. Use our interactive scoring for each of PRACE to score
your company or clients in the 5 key areas of PRACE. You will find this in the members
area home page if you open the Digital Marketing toolkit which is at the top of the page:

Define your
future
Targeting
A similar quick, 7 question benchmark is available for the 8 core digital marketing
tactics like search, social, email and creating a digital experience.

Don’t forget to return to these benchmarks as you implement plans and best practices

Proposition
so that you can see your scores improve. Also recommended for benchmarking:
þþ Digital marketing audit spreadsheet. A more detailed Excel spreadsheet based
technique for assessing a company in 6 key areas. More suited to use by consultants
and for scoring by different stakeholders in larger organisations.
þþ Business case template. Improvements needed can be justified through this template Getting new
and the companion Ebook.
customers

Refining your digital strategy - keeping it agile with 90 day planning

rr Q. Approach for managing and updating strategy defined?
Keeping customers

Once you have created your digital strategy defined in a plan, you should ensure it’s kept
loyal

dynamic and agile not static. There will be new opportunities as social and digital technology
platforms evolve and threats as competitors revise their marketing approach.

4  CMMI Institute: Benefits of CMMI

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!
 Strategy Recommendation 10  Create an agile plan and a process to review and update
You shouldn’t deviate from your core strategic focus, but your performance against target
will vary and your marketplace will change. so building in a method of adjustment is
essential.
We recommend you revisit your main strategic plan annually as part of annual planning,

Managing digital
but have a system of 90-day planning where you review performance using a RACE

strategy
dashboard and KPISs as explained in Step 3. .

Creating and reviewing a 90-day plan table helps create a process where companies can
focus on activities which support strategic objectives. This can include digital marketing
optimization activities that should be completed every month, but after often neglected due to

Review your
marketplace
a focus on campaign activities like price promotions which are planned separately.
2
The idea is have a single page summary which gives clarity on a manageable number of
initiatives you will work on in the 90 day period to boost performance. These will cascade
down to more detailed activities, for example in a project management system – we use
Basecamp or Liquid Planner. You can read more on the process in this article by Chris
Soames5.

Define your
future
Use the 90-day plan to define activities using these tactics to improve sales by working
across RACE: SEO, AdWords, Advertising, Conversion Rate optimization, content marketing,
email marketing and social media marketing

Recommended resource?  90 day planning

The 90 day planning template is available for download in our digital marketing toolkit.

Targeting
Proposition
Getting new
customers
Keeping customers
loyal

5  Smart Insights: Turning a Strategy into Action

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!
 TWO
Review your marketplace opportunity

Managing digital
rr Q. Marketplace reviewed for growth opportunities and threats?

strategy
To develop a sound ‘always-on’ digital marketing strategy taking advantage of consumer
intent searching for products to buy involves understanding a more complex, more
competitive buying environment than ever before. Previously, marketers talked about
marketplace or situation analysis, but these hark back to previous times when life and
commerce were simpler. Today, it’s becoming more common, to talk about ecosystems
and customer journeys describing the different types of media, websites and other digital

Review your
marketplace
platforms that digital channel users interact with.
2
What is it?  Online marketplace or ecosystem
Dynamic consumer journeys and interactions between different digital media using
different digital technology platforms such as mobile. These form the media options for
reaching and interacting with online audiences.

Define your
future
So, we start Step 2 with an introduction to the different media options for the modern digital
marketplace. Understanding these options is essential to reach and influence your audience.
With the rise in importance of social media and online PR, we’re seeing more companies
change their method of budgeting and reporting to reflect the types of sites where audiences
spend their time online.

Targeting
The trend is for businesses to review their investments in media buckets of Paid, Owned and
earned, which each give opportunities to reach and influence audiences.

Strategy Recommendation 11  Get the investment balance right between POE media
Digital marketing communications strategy requires you to set the right balance of
investment across POE media. It poses questions about how best to measure the returns

Proposition
from social media and PR and set investments at the right level.

The intersection between these new “channels” is shown by this diagram. It’s a great way to
think about your online representation:
Getting new
customers
Keeping customers
loyal

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!
 The main types of media channels you need to plan investment for today as part of a digital
strategy are:
þþ 1. Paid media. Simple. Paid or bought media are media where there is investment to pay
for visitors, reach or conversions through search (Google AdWords), display ad networks
(Programmatic) or affiliate marketing. Online re-targeting investment is important to

Managing digital
persuade people to convert who have already interacted with your website or social

strategy
media to take the next step and buy. Offline traditional media like print and TV advertising
and direct mail remain important, accounting for the majority of paid media spend.
þþ 2. Earned media. Traditionally, earned media has been the name given to publicity
generated through PR invested in targeting influencers to increase awareness about a
brand. Of course, it’s still an investment. Now earned media also includes word-of-mouth
that can be stimulated through viral and social media marketing and includes

Review your
marketplace
conversations in social networks, blogs and other communities. It’s useful to think of 2
earned media as developed through different types of partners such as publishers,
bloggers and other influencers including customer advocates. Think of earned media
as different forms of conversations between consumers and businesses occurring both
online and offline.
þþ 3. Owned media. This is media owned by the brand. Online this includes a company’s

Define your
own websites, blogs, mobile apps or their social presence on Facebook, LinkedIn or

future
Twitter. Offline owned media may include brochures or retail stores.
It’s useful to think of a company’s own presence as media in the sense that they are an
alternative investment to other media and they offer opportunities to promote products using
similar ad or editorial formats to other media. It emphasises the need for all organisations to
become multi-channel publishers.

Targeting
You can see on the diagram above that there is overlap between the three different types
of media. It is important to note this since achieving this overlap requires integration of
campaigns, resources and infrastructure. Content on a content hub or site can be broken
down (atomised) and shared between other media types through widgets powered by
program and data exchange APIs such as the Facebook API.

Proposition
Define your marketplace map
rr Q. Marketplace reviewed?
Your online marketplace where you compete for engagement and commerce is shaped by
the needs of customers and how services are provided to them through the competitors,
intermediaries, influencers.
Getting new
customers

A business owner or marketing manager who has worked with a company for a while will
know their traditional marketplace inside-out, but perhaps not their online marketplace.
This can be quite different in terms of customer needs and behaviours, influencers and
competitors for interactions and sales.
Keeping customers

Since the online marketplace is less familiar and constantly evolving we suggest you
create a marketplace map to understand your main customer behaviours, competitors and
loyal

influencers. This is essential for consultants and agencies working with a new client or new
marketplace.

Strategy Recommendation 12  Create a marketplace map to summarise your

understanding of the dynamic online marketplace and customer journeys
Put the customers’ current use of technology and how they will interact with your brand at
the heart of your strategy.

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 This visual explains the main players in the marketplace you need to review.

Managing digital
strategy
Review your
marketplace
Define your
future
3

Source: Chaffey et. al. (2015) Digital Marketing: Strategy, Implementation and Practice
FT-Prentice Hall. 6th edition. With permission. Pearson Education.
Then you need to drill-down to review the different marketplace influences in more detail.

Targeting
Review main marketplace influences
rr Q. Main marketplace influences reviewed?

A. Our customers

Proposition
Always start with the customer, their characteristics, behaviours, needs and wants. Your
analysis should define:

rr Options for segmenting and targeting. You should apply your traditional segments, but
also consider the new micro-targeting options available online.
Getting new
customers

rr Ideal customers. Characteristics summarised in named personas (covered in the

targeting section) are useful to get started, think about demographics, searching and
product selection behaviours and unmet needs - detail here is very useful to talk about
“What would John do.. or think about...”. Also consider what your data tells you in regard
to your most profitable, and potentially profitable customers.
Keeping customers

rr Target search behaviours. Search marketing is still really important as a driver of leads
and sales so make sure you have good quality keyphrase analysis and an idea of how
loyal

you are reaching demand - your share of search.

What is it?  Keyphrase analysis
Keyphrase analysis involves identifying the keyphrases your customers are likely to
use when searching for your products or services and the sequence they use before
conversion. Potential keyphrases to be used for promotion are then selected.

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 Strategy Recommendation 13  Ensure you have good visibility of customer search behav-
iour against results delivered.
Define target groups of target keyphrases and develop content strategies to reach these
audiences.

Managing digital
strategy
The marketplace map layout below is our suggestion on how you can summarise
customer interactions with online players, particularly when search is a big part of their
customer journey.

Review your
marketplace
Define your
future
3

Targeting
Proposition
Source: Chaffey et. al. (2015) Internet Marketing: Strategy, Implementation and Practice
FT-Prentice Hall. 6th edition. With permission. Pearson Education. Getting new
customers

We recently saw this marketplace mapping visualisation presented by Rich Kirk at Brighton
SEO which we love since it overlays different types of touchpoint point on the customer
journey against Paid Owned and Earned media. Great for agencies or consultants and
clients to discuss for opportunities to expand reach. You can download a larger version6.
Keeping customers
loyal

6  Smart Insights: Online Marketplace mapping

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 Managing digital
strategy
Review your
marketplace
Define your
future
3
B. Our market
rr Market description. Focus on actionable needs and trends - are you meeting them,
what are they - this insight is useful for other teams and you should find out what other
teams know, what exactly is growing in the market, is there evidence you can draw from.

Targeting
C. Our competitors
rr Benchmark online marketing mix. Benchmark against competitors for your customer
personas (covered in the targeting section) and scenarios against the criteria given in the
strategy section, in particular their marketing mix.

Proposition
rr Benchmark digital communications channel. For key digital tactics like SEO and
social media marketing, it’s also important to benchmark against competitors.

Recommended resource?  Competitor benchmarking guide

See our competitor benchmarking guide for tools and techniques to complete competitor
benchmarking and free and paid data sources. Getting new
customers

D. Intermediaries, influencers and potential partners

rr Customer use of online intermediaries. Review customer use of different types of sites
which may influence their decision for example, search engines, specialist news sites,
Keeping customers

aggregators, social networks and bloggers.

loyal

rr Influencer strength. You can monitor your reputation across different influencers using
http://bit.ly/smartreputation. We have a guide on influencer outreach in our library.

E. Wider macro environment

These are the big picture strategic influences. We recommend you don’t go into too
much depth on these, instead review the influence of the main macro factors for digital,

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 that’s social, legal and technology in the context of customer analysis and competitor
benchmarking.

rr Social - how have consumer attitudes changed?

rr Legal - checking your online marketing activities comply with privacy and online trading

Managing digital
laws before problems arise?

strategy
rr Environment - is your approach ethical and sustainable.

rr Political - can you take advantage of government funding schemes?

rr Technology - review of the latest technology.

Review your
marketplace
F. Our own capabilities
Once you have looked outwards (often missed), only then should you turn inwards and look
at your own capabilities which can be summarised as part of the strengths and weaknesses
on a SWOT. Using capability review frameworks is a great technique to summarise the
current use of digital marketing in an organisation and where you want to be. Since they are
a key tool for managing change, we cover them in our Digital Transformation guide.

Define your
However we recommend you do a top-level review using the chart on the next page or the

future
3
more detailed, Excel-based review in our Digital Healthcheck audit.

Recommended resource?  Excel Digital Marketing Healthcheck audit

You can download the Health check audit Excel document here. This Excel spreadsheet
template steps you through around 40 strategic questions you need to ask to help

Targeting
review how well a business is making use of digital marketing now in order to define
improvements for the future using a digital strategy and roadmap. Updated in 2016 with a
new tab for audit and recommendations for consulting around the 25 RACE activities.
We developed the spreadsheet to use collaboratively when completing interviews with
digital stakeholders or in a group review session, for example between agency and client.
It can also be completed quickly by a manager reviewing the approach for their business.

Proposition
Getting new
customers
Keeping customers
loyal

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 AIMING FOR DIGITAL
Take your digital marketing to the next level with our
capability assessment. Use our visual checklist to audit

MARKETING EXCELLENCE
how well your business or clients are exploiting their digital
marketing and then plan how to take it to the next level.

FIVE. Optimised
FOUR. Quantified
THREE. Defined
TWO. Managed

Managing digital
Digital
Capability ONE. Initial Business-aligned
Agile strategic
Defined vision and approach
strategy and roadmap

strategy
Prioritised marketing strategy
A. Strategic activities
No strategy
Approach

B. Performance Quality-based KPIs Value-based KPIs

Volume-based KPIs Lifetime-value KPIs
Improvement No KPIs ‘Last click’ attribution Weighted attribution
No dashboards Continuous CRO
Process Business dashboards Ad hoc CRO

C. Management Verbal support, but Sponsorship and Active championing and Integral part of
Limited
Buy-in inadequate resourcing increased investment approriate investment strategy development

D. Resourcing

Review your
marketplace
Core skills centralised or Centralised hub and spoke Decentralisation and Balanced blend of
and No specific skills
agencies Dedicated resources reskilling marketing skills
Structure

E. Data
Limited / no Separate data, tools Partially integrated Integrated systems Flexible approach to
and
customer database and IT services systems and data and 360o data sources optimise resources
Infrastructure

F. Integrated Integrated, Personalised,

Core push activities Integrated inbound Media optimised for ROI
Customer Not integrated Paid-Owned-Earned
synchronised approach and to maximise CLV
Communications media

G. Integrated Partially personalised Integrated, Personalised Full contexual personalised

Desktop and mobile
Customer Website not integrated desktop and mobile web, mobile, email and experiences and
support, not personalised
Experience experience social media recommendations

Define your
“Developing “Competent average “Above-sector average “Market leading

future
3
“Laggard” capability” capability” capability”
capability”

Refine your Digital Marketing Strategy Check out our hub page http://bit.ly/smartstrategy Join our Expert members to download digital marketing
with Smart Insights member toolkits. for our free blog articles and planning template. planning templates and our 7 Step guides to digital strategy.

Create a digital or multichannel SWOT

Targeting
rr Q. Digital channel specific SWOT created?
A digital or multichannel channel SWOT summarises your online marketplace analysis
findings AND links to strategy. It’s specific to the Internet and digital channels rather than a
more general SWOT.

Proposition
In a large organisation, or for a more complete summary, complete a separate SWOT for:
þþ Customer acquisition and conversion and customer development
þþ Different brands
þþ Different markets
þþ Different competitors – direct and indirect Getting new
customers

þþ We recommend using a TOWS matrix for SWOT since this helps integrate your analysis
with your strategy rather than the analysis being placed on the shelf and forgotten.

Strategy Recommendation 14  Create a TOWs digital or multichannel SWOT matrix

When we develop SWOT, we find the less well known ‘TOWs matrix’ approach invaluable.
The power of the TOWS matrix format is in the way it not only provides a great summary of
Keeping customers

the current situation, but also helps you define strategic options to help you compete in the
loyal

future. In comparison SWOT is just backward looking.

Here’s more detail on how we approach SWOT analysis on consulting projects. You’ll want to
skip this part if you’ve completed lots of digital SWOT analyses.
A SWOT analysis is an essential part of any business or marketing plan. It allows you to
create a plan of action based not on what you’re interested in doing or on your gut-feel, but

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 what you need to do given the opportunities and threats in your marketplace. It considers
your capabilities for marketing against competitors plus looks at opportunities created as new
technologies are introduced.

What is a SWOT?

Managing digital
As you’ll know, it’s a 2 X 2 matrix summarising the internal Strengths and Weaknesses

strategy
against external Opportunities and Threats. These external opportunities and threats are
available to all competitors in the marketplace.
When creating a digital marketing plan, SWOT analysis is also an essential step. We think
it’s sometimes seen as an academic exercise and there’s the feeling that the time should be
spent on improving the execution of the tactics like email or search marketing or improving
the site.

Review your
marketplace
The example below shows how it reviews not only the situation in internal strengths and
weaknesses and external opportunities and threats around the edge, but also shows 4 box
for creating strategies to succeed in the marketplace.
So make sure your Digital SWOTs are:
þþ 1. Based on existing SWOT for the business as a whole.

Define your
future
þþ 2. Uses a TOWs matrix approach 3
þþ 3. Created specifically for digital marketing channels, media and martech, but including
offline touchpoints for media and customer service too - so it’s a multichannel SWOT
þþ 4. Considers key digital marketing activities
þþ 5. Have further details on specific markets as required by the size of the company

Targeting
þþ 6. Include both external factors and internal digital capabilities

Recommended resource?  SWOT Multichannel TOWs matrix (1.1.1 in workbook)

The Smart Insights digital marketing workbook contains a Multichannel TOWs with
Powerpoint and Word examples for you to amend for your business or your clients.

Proposition
Getting new
customers
Keeping customers

The SWOT analysis will give you the strategic view of the main opportunities and challenges
loyal

available from online marketing. The high-level view will help you see the most important
issues which need to be managed for your online success.

Best Practice Tip 4  Generate your SWOT across the full range of the customer lifecycle
Use the 4 parts of our RACE framework plus brand positioning and governance to review
all the digital strategy issues to be managed across the lifecycle activities in Chapter 1.

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 Managing digital
strategy
Review your
marketplace
While any form of SWOT analysis is much better than none, we have found through working
on many SWOT, that the technique works best for digital marketing when these 7 issues are
reviewed when creating the SWOT. RACE covers activities across the customer lifecycle and

Define your
should include traditional offline comms and touchpoints too.

future
3
You can mark up issues on your multichannel SWOT as follows.
þþ R: Reach. Reaching prospects and customers, and raising awareness on your site or
other online presences to encourage site visits.
þþ A: Act. Achieving interaction and participation to achieve leads.
þþ C: Convert. Conversion to sale online or offline.

Targeting
þþ E: Engage. Build long-term relationship building with customers.
þþ B: Brand. Positioning and perception of the brand. Marketing mix.
þþ M: Multichannel. How the digital channel integrates with traditional channels.
þþ G: Governance. Issues which affect capability to deliver like resourcing.
þþ T: Technology and Data. Marketing Technology and data quality integration.

Proposition
Here is a specific example of a digital marketing SWOT (without this coding):
As is often the case with SWOT analysis, the opportunities available to a company are the
opposites of the threats presented by other companies. The strengths and weaknesses will
vary according to the company involved, but many of the strengths and weaknesses are
dependent on the capacity of senior management to acknowledge and act on change. Getting new
customers

Best Practice Tip 5  Create a “key issues” summary from your SWOT
If you’re like us, you’ll pack a lot into your digital marketing SWOT, so identify 4-8 key
issues that are important to future for success so that you can stress these to colleagues.
Keeping customers

The next page shows an example of the TOWs format of SWOT (but without the
RACEBMGT coding applied).
loyal

An example of strategic digital channel options developed using a TOWs matrix.

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 Managing digital
strategy
Review your
marketplace
Define your
future
3

Targeting
Proposition
Getting new
customers
Keeping customers
loyal

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 THREE
Define your future: Vision, Objectives and KPIs

Managing digital
rr Q. Goals, vision and objectives for digital marketing channels defined?

strategy
You should start with a simple way of looking at your future. Ask ‘Why’ and ‘What’? Why are
you using digital platforms now and into the future? What do you want to achieve?
When developing your future vision and target for digital marketing, we suggest you think
about different levels of measurements for setting goals and reviewing performance by
different people. For example, strategists and managers won’t be interested in the full range
of measures like page bounce rates or dwell times – they are interested in the commercial

Review your
marketplace
measures. But for the ‘hands-on’ marketer reviewing landing pages for an Adwords campaign
these measures will be important to getting more from their Adwords budget.

Define your
future
3

Targeting
Strategy Recommendation 15 Define different levels of measures for managing digital mar-
keting activities for a common understanding within an organisation

Proposition
Definitions of Goals, Objectives and KPIs are often hazy within a business since depending
on previous experience of team members, the terms may change in meaning. For example
sometimes “Goals” are described as SMART, on other occasions “Objectives”, the approach
we prefer. Clear definitions with a hierarchy as shown in the diagram will help.
Getting new
customers

Start by thinking about the 5Ss which are a great, simple framework for thinking through
the goals of your digital channels. Then look at longer-term vision - we’ll show you some
examples of companies who have developed a vision to communicate their long-term
ambitions for digital media. Only then should you drill down into the details of specific
goals you want to achieve. Look out for our detailed grid of KPIs which we structure within
Keeping customers

our RACE framework. This will give you a comprehensive set of KPIs you can use to help
develop your own dashboard.
loyal

To define your future we suggest this hierarchy of measures may help in larger organisations:
þþ 1. Mid-long term vision to help communicate the transformation needed in a larger
organisation
þþ 2. Top-level broad goals to show how the business can benefit
from digital channels

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 þþ 3. Specific SMART objectives to give clear direction and commercial targets
þþ 4. Key performance indicators (KPIs) to check you are on track
You’ll see all of these in this step.
We hope you agree that the reasons for setting objectives are obvious; if you don’t know
where you’re going and when you hope to get there, you won’t know your progress on the

Managing digital
journey and so make adjustments when you go astray.

strategy
So, it’s best to start with the top-level goals which help inform the vision before going onto
specific objectives. This is where the 5S goals can help!

Introducing the 5S goals for digital marketing

The 5Ss of digital marketing is a good, simple starting point to help check you’re covering the

Review your
marketplace
whole of digital marketing, not just sales!
I developed the 5Ss of digital marketing with PR Smith, my co-author on Emarketing
Excellence around 2000, and although it’s a basic top-level review of goals, it’s still used by
many when planning their digital marketing strategy.
As we run through each of the 5Ss, I’ll show some questions you should be asking in each

Define your
area and look at some examples of how these broad goals have translated into strategies

future
3
and tactics for online retailer ASOS.com.

5S: Sell – Set goals to grow sales?

rr Q. Sales goals set?

Targeting
Start with goals for your most important transactions which will lead to revenue and profit!
That’s sales, or if you don’t sell online, the leads that your online marketing will deliver, which
will convert through to sales or donations if you’re a not-for-profit.
As you’d expect, ASOS are all about selling, but it’s worth looking at how this translates to a
clear sales offer delivered across the whole site below the navigation bar, and at the bottom
of this page.

Proposition
Getting new
customers
Keeping customers
loyal

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 Here are some key questions to answer to help increase the quality of your sales goals:

Create conversion model to help define realistic goals

rr Q. Conversion model used to calculate realistic targets for goal volume?

Managing digital
Strategy Recommendation 16  Develop conversion funnel models to set

strategy
realistic online channel goals
Conversion models help you set realistic goals from online marketing they show the
number of leads and sales you can generate for investment in different online media
channels.

Review your
marketplace
A conversion model helps set quantitative targets to hit. Use this spreadsheet we have
developed to help set the right goals: http://bit.ly/smartdownloads.

Look at options to increase sales through expanding our reach

rr Q. Options to extend reach reviewed?
Often online marketing can focus on selling to existing markets without looking for new

Define your
future
opportunities. Use benchmarking and search demand tools to prove how it’s possible to 3
increase sales beyond your typical customer base.

Review options to increase sales through conversion enhancements

rr Q. Options to increase conversion rate possible?

Targeting
We have said it’s worth looking at how to add more prospects to the top of the funnel, but
there are also opportunities to increase sales through increasing the efficiency of customer
journeys on the site, both at the top of the funnel as they navigate to find relevant services
and further down the funnel in the add-to-basket and checkout processes.

Set separate sales goals for existing and new customers

Proposition
rr Q. Separate goals and tracking defined for new and existing customers?
To manage online sales, it’s useful to isolate incremental online sales and new sales.
Keeping incremental sales volume trending right is most important. You can use analytics or
ecommerce sales systems to deliver this insight.
Getting new
customers

Tracked goals through analytics

rr Q. Goal types and value defined in analytics?
We have a more detailed section explaining how to do this in our guide to Google Analytics
or online here7.
Keeping customers

Define multichannel goals

loyal

rr Q. Online channels goals defined as online contribution of revenue or profit?

Sales might be direct if the product can be sold online or indirect where they are generated
offline. Still many people research online and then purchase offline, so it’s key for many
companies to think how they use online channels to influence offline sales.

7  Smart Insights: Customise tracking in Google Analytics (sign-in required)

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 Strategy Recommendation 17 Ensure your goal-setting reflects channel switching
Users switch channels during the purchase process, so make sure you set goals,
measures and support these cross-channel behaviours.

Here’s one example8, showing the importance of offline purchase (37% of mobile phone

Managing digital
contracts after online research):

strategy
Review your
marketplace
Define your
future
3

5S: Speak – Set goals to get closer to customers

rr Q. Communications goals defined?

Targeting
Digital channels are not only sales channels, they excel as communications channels to
engage your audience. We say engage since we don’t mean SHOUTING, we mean getting
the balance right between communicating your offer and interacting with your audience.
ASOS is a fantastic example of a brand that has a coherent approach to communicating
through it’s blog and communities. It has developed a content marketing strategy to help
think about it’s online communications in a more strategic way. Read our content marketing

Proposition
strategy guide for more depth on how you can approach this.

Getting new
customers
Keeping customers
loyal

8  GFK-Ropo-Vodafone multichannel ROPO study

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 We recommend creating detailed conversion or budget models, which allow you to set goals
by digital channel for reaching and influencing your audience.
On a website, it’s useful to know how many people are at the top of the funnel who are
searching, and browsing products in different categories. We’ll look at some examples of
these models at the end of this report.

Managing digital
strategy
Strategy Recommendation 18 Set goals and track engagement for visitors at the top of the
purchase funnel
Set goals for how many visitors search for and engage with products at the top of the
purchase funnel.

Review your
marketplace
Since digital channels work best when joined with other channels, the goals here should also
include online visits prompted by traditional offline media.

5S: Service – Have we set goals to online customer service goals?

rr Q. Are goals set for customer care, service and satisfaction?

Define your
The company website and social customer service sites are a natural place for customers to

future
go to get their questions answered or to complain. Paying attention to the quality of service 3
you offer is also key to support your capability to Sell, Speak, Save and Sizzle.
Again ASOS has thought this through with a separate Twitter channel for responding to
customer service.

Targeting
Proposition
Getting new
customers

So you need customer satisfaction goals to assess how you good you are at customer
Keeping customers

service and then improve it further.

loyal

Give customers extra benefits online, and guide new product development with online
dialogue and feedback. There are lots of excellent tools we list at http://bit.ly/smartfeedback.

Strategy Recommendation 19 Build in feedback mechanisms to your sites

Get feedback on online experience and experience of the brand into your site and then
prioritise and improve.

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 5S: Save – Set cost-saving goals
rr Q. Goals set around cost savings?
Less glamorous than the sizzle of building your brand and social media engagement, but you
can also show the value you gain through using online cost savings to reduce service costs
and save on traditional media like print and post.

Managing digital
strategy
This is most relevant for a multichannel retailer or service company who can set goals for
number of catalogues downloaded or number of service transactions compared to other
channels.
If you’re fighting for budget for online channels, the savings you can demonstrate to your
finance director or budget holder will improve your cause.

Review your
marketplace
5S: Sizzle – Adding value to your brand online
rr Q. Goals set for brand engagement and advocacy?
Putting the sizzle into your digital marketing will really help your sales and speak goals, but
it’s not to easy to set goals for and then to track. So what is the “Sizzle in your Sausage”?

Define your
Sizzle is about building your brand online. Think about what makes for a positive online

future
brand experience for your audience and you. 3

Targeting
Proposition
Getting new
customers
Keeping customers
loyal

We have already said it’s important to set goals and track the quality of the experience
online, but you should also check the temperature of your sizzle through how shareable and
likeable your brand is.

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 Strategy Recommendation 6 Encourage and measure sharing of your brand
Provide tools to support and track viral sharing and recommendations about your brand.
You will also want to track positive and negative sentiment.

If the experience is effective, the benefits of engaging with your digital presence will be clear;

Managing digital
the interactions within the site and with other channels will be smooth and the visitor will want

strategy
to use your online services again, and tell their friends and colleagues about it.
So, key goals here are about levels of satisfaction and recommendations or advocacy. ASOS
have invested heavily in community platforms and social media to deliver the sizzle!

Define vision

Review your
marketplace
rr Q. We have a defined mid-long term vision for the future contribution of our digital
marketing channels?
We believe that developing a specific vision or mission statement for your digital channels
can really help explain the need for digital channel initiatives within a company. They also
show where the focus of digital marketing activities and investment should be.

Define your
future
3
Strategy recommendation 20  Define a vision for how digital channels will support your
customers and brand
A longer-term vision and planning horizon will highlight the changes to process, platforms
and structure needed for the long-term transformation needed to make the most of digital
marketing.

Targeting
You’re probably thinking ‘we’ve already got a corporate mission statement that everyone
pokes fun at, so why would we want to define a vision statement?’ or ‘why should we bother?
It’s too corporate and we’re just a small
business, we just get on with selling our
products.’ Good questions! But we still think it’s

Proposition
helpful to have a vision for your online marketing
for all different types of organisation. We say this
since the opportunities from digital marketing are
too big to not have a vision of how you will use
digital media in the future. If you don’t define the
opportunity you won’t be able to grasp it because Getting new
customers

there will be too many other distractions. They

may also take time to be achieved. Look at how Dell9 set their long-term vision, both for their
online channel as a whole and how online analytics will support it.
A good vision statement for your digital marketing activities can help:
þþ Show how digital marketing or Ebusiness can transform your organisation in the future if
Keeping customers

you innovate and invest

þþ Show where you need to focus your effort – is it customer experience and service to build
loyal

loyalty or are you also looking to expand your reach into new markets?
þþ Energise colleagues by showing the future potential of digital marketing and
communicating that it’s a strategic priority through a senior manager or director who is a
sponsor of digital marketing

9  Smart Insights: Dell case study

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 þþ Set top-level goals without going into detailed KPIs.
We’re not talking about mission statements of what your company currently is, instead, a
vision is an inspiring, ideal future state. A vision is almost certainly not going to be 100%
attainable, but you must feel as if it is possible.
Let’s look at some examples of inspiring vision statements taken from the US SEC filings for

Managing digital
these companies:

strategy
þþ Amazon.com
Our vision is to be earth’s most customer centric company; to build a place where people
can come to find and discover anything they might want to buy online.
þþ Dell
Dell listens to customers and delivers innovative technology and services they trust and

Review your
marketplace
value.
þþ eBay 
eBay pioneers communities built on commerce, sustained by trust, and inspired by
opportunity. eBay brings together millions of people every day on a local, national and
international basis through an array of websites that focus on commerce, payments and
communications.

Define your
þþ Facebook 

future
3
Facebook is a social utility that helps people communicate more efficiently with their
friends, family and coworkers. The company develops technologies that facilitate the
sharing of information through the social graph, the digital mapping of people’s real-world
social connections. Anyone can sign up for Facebook and interact with the people they
know in a trusted environment.
þþ Google 

Targeting
Google’s aim is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and
useful.
Note that some of these examples are better described as mission statements and for use
beyond a company. Remember that mission and vision statements are two very different
things and we’re focusing on digital vision statements here. At a corporate strategy level,

Proposition
a company should have a vision statement, and a mission, and goals by which to achieve
these. The mission is what your company currently is; a vision is an inspiring, ideal future
state.
We give more examples and why it’s important to have a long-term vision in in our
goal-setting guide.
Getting new
customers

Some examples of vision statements for digital channels

Here’s a real example of a BHAG10 digital vision statement for a multichannel company.
þþ 1 x 2 x 3:
þþ Largest online audience share (No.1) in Europe by XXXX
By XXXX, 1 in 2 of total sales will be generated on-line
Keeping customers

þþ 1 in 3 of our people and our customers love our online services and will recommend them
loyal

to a friend
þþ 2 in 3 customer service contacts will be electronic by XXXX

10  Smart Insights: BHAG examples

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 Best Practice Tip 6  Set BHAG: “Big Hairy Audacious Goals”
These ambitious targets are used to gain attention for an initiative and attract investment
and resources to it. They were popularised in a 1996 Harvard Business Review article by
James Collins and Jerry Porras on Building Your Company’s Vision.

Managing digital
You can see this is simple yet specific enough to link to future targets unlike many vague

strategy
mission statements.
Here’s another example of a vision statement for a retailer which is less specific about goals
but emphasises the strategic focus:
“Our digital channels will make it easy for shoppers to find, compare and select products
using a structured approach to merchandising and improving conversion to produce an

Review your
marketplace
experience rated as excellent by the majority of our customers.”
Different aspects of the vision statement can then be expanded upon when discussing with
colleagues, e.g.
þþ Digital channels = the web site supported by email and mobile messaging
þþ Find = improvements to site search functionality

Define your
þþ Compare and select = Using detailed product descriptions, rich media and ratings

future
3
þþ Merchandising and improving conversion = Through delivery of automated merchandising
facilities to present relevant offers to maximise conversion and average order value.
Additionally, use of structured testing techniques such as AB testing and multivariate
testing will be used.
þþ Experience rated as excellent = We will regularly review customer satisfaction and

Targeting
advocacy against direct competitors and out-of-sector to drive improvements with the web
site
You can see this example focuses on the online experience, but is not so good at highlighting
channel integration.

Best Practice Tip 7  Define a simple label which triggers the focus on digital amongst your

Proposition
colleagues
It’s useful to apply a simple reminder to staff of the importance of a focus on digital in
strategy and implementation. We have seen this used type of label successfully in several
different companies, for example:
þþ Digital by default Getting new
customers

þþ Digital First
þþ Digital DNA

Checklist - creating your vision statement

Keeping customers

We think you should include these features in your vision statement. Check yours:
loyal

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 rr 1. Shows how digital channels will help the customer. What value will you provide?

rr 2. Shows the benefit to the company in terms of efficiencies or profitability?

rr 3. Link vision to specific goals in the future?

rr 4. Is simple and memorable?

Managing digital
strategy
rr 5. Is inspirational?

Define specific SMART objectives in your performance

improvement framework for digital marketing
rr Q. Right measurement frameworks and dashboards defined?

Review your
marketplace
Measurement frameworks are essential to give you focus – rather than reviewing hundreds
of measures you can just focus on top-level performance measures which are critical to
improve performance. These are summarised on dashboards.

Strategy Recommendation 21 Define the right measurement framework and dashboards

You can’t measure everything, far from it! So define the measures and KPIs that you

Define your
can review regularly to really drive your business and develop an automated method of

future
reporting via dashboards.

And remember that dashboards count for nothing if they’re not reviewed and actioned.
Avinash Kaushik, the web evangelist at Google famously said :

Targeting
“If you have $100 to make smart decisions on the web, invest $10 in tools, spend $90 on
people. This is the 10/90 rule.” 4

Strategy Recommendation 22 Invest sufficient time in the people, process and tools to sup-
port performance improvement
If you don’t invest sufficient in the supporting processes and people your careful

Proposition
specification of goals and objectives will have been pointless. So make sure you put in
place the right approaches to review and take action depending on your numbers.

We talk more about how to make this happen in our guide to improving results through
goal-setting and keep it brief here. Check that:
Getting new
customers
Keeping customers
loyal

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 rr Q. There is a defined measurement framework to review and take action?

rr Q. Our KPIs are aligned to business success?

rr Q. The dependencies between KPIs is clear?

rr Q. Individuals are responsible for KPIs?

Managing digital
strategy
rr Q. Our measurement framework includes the right efficiency measures?

rr Q. Our measurement framework includes the right effectiveness measures?

rr Q. Measures can be distributed and reviewed in a top-level report or dashboard?

Review your
marketplace
Best Practice Tip 8  Identify your “critical few” KPIs - make sure they’re SMART
Use the SMART mnemonic to review your measures to define the KPIs that matter to
improve results.

Measures you consider should be simplified to a dashboard to limit the information that

Define your
needs to be reviewed to the “critical few” or the “measures that matter”.

future
SMART stands for:
þþ Specific – Is the objective sufficiently detailed to measure real-world problems and
opportunities?
þþ Measurable – Can a quantitative qualitative attribute be applied to create a metric?

Targeting
þþ Actionable – Can the information be used to improve performance? If the objective
doesn’t change behaviour in staff to help them improve performance, there is little point in 4
it!
þþ Relevant – Can the information be applied to the specific problem faced by the manager?
þþ Time-related – Can the information be constrained through time?

Proposition
Define your measurement framework
We have found that still, many companies don’t have a clear objective setting and reporting
system summarized as digital marketing dashboards. But there seems to be a hunger to
create and use these.
In our guide to improving online results we consider 3 different performance management Getting new
customers

frameworks. But here, we’ll will just use our RACE framework since this has the fullest range
of KPIs for different managers.
We’ve developed “RACE” as a practical framework to help manage and improve the
commercial value that companies can gain from digital marketing. It will help simplify your
approach to reviewing the performance of your online marketing and taking actions to
Keeping customers

improve its effectiveness.

RACE consists of four steps designed to help engage prospects, customers and fans with
loyal

brands throughout the customer lifecycle.

þþ Stage 1 Reach – Build awareness of a brand, its products and services on other sites and
in offline media and build traffic by driving visits to web presences
þþ Stage 2 Act – Engage audience with brand on its website or other online presence
þþ Stage 3 Convert – Achieve conversion to marketing goals such as new fans, leads or

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 sales on web presences and offline
þþ Stage 4 Engage – Build customer relationships through time to achieve retention goals

Best Practice Tip 9  Use a grid of RACE vs seniority to define your goals.
In the rows, it isolates more detailed metrics that drive performance from the

Managing digital
customer-centric KPIs and Business value KPIs, so it identifies the measures that really
matter or Key Key Performance Indicators (KKPIs) at the bottom of the matrix. More senior

strategy
managers will review the performance drivers at the bottom of the grid.

This Acquisition, Conversion, Retention approach is adapted from an approach

recommended by analytics specialist Neil Mason on his courses.
You can see it is most practical to use in a larger organisation with different tiers of

Review your
marketplace
management. The idea is to select the most relevant KPIs to form dashboards for different
people as shown in the left column.

Metric Reach Encourage Convert Engage

audience Action and Leads to Sale customers to
Retain & Grow

Define your
future
Tracking rr Unique visitors rr Online opportunity rr Online sales volume rr E-mail list quality
metrics rr New visitors (lead) volume rr Offline sales volume rr E-mail response
(Digital rr Visits rr Offline opportunity (online influenced) quality
specialists) (lead) volume rr Transactions
rr Conversation
(online
volume
influenced)

Targeting
Performance rr Share of audience rr Bounce rate rr Conversion rate to rr Active customers
drivers compared to and duration Sale % (site & e-mail 4
(diagnostics) competitors measures rr E-mail conversion rate active)

(Digital rr Share of search rr Macro-conversion rr Active social

managers) rr Brand / direct visits rate to followers
opportunity and rr Repeat conversion
micro-conversion rate
efficiency

Proposition
Customer rr Cost per Click and rr Cost per rr Cost per Sale rr Lifetime value
Centric per Sale Opportunity rr Customer satisfaction rr Customer loyalty
KPIs rr Brand awareness rr Customer index
rr Conversation satisfaction rr Customer advocacy
(Brand and
Polarity (sentiment) index
Product
managers) rr Products per Getting new
customers

customer

Business rr Audience share rr Goal value per visit rr Revenue per visit rr Retained sales
Value rr Share of rr Online product rr Online originated sales growth and
KPIs conversations requests revenue and profit volume

(Business (n, £, % of total) (n, £, % of total) rr Revenue per 1000

managers) emails sent
Keeping customers
loyal

Recommended resource?  RACE KPI grid (1.2.2 in workbook)

The Smart Insights digital marketing workbook download contains a RACE KPI grid with
examples for you to amend for your business or your clients.

Let’s look at the key performance indicators for each of the four steps and where you can find

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 the reports in Google Analytics.

Stage 1 Reach KPIs

Reach involves building awareness of a brand, its products and services on other sites and
in offline media and building traffic by driving visits to web presences. KPIs include:

Managing digital
þþ Unique visitors. The size of your audience at the top of the funnel with the potential

strategy
to convert. This measure is available on your dashboard. You may want to review your
reach into social network sites like Facebook and Twitter also if you’re active on these.
þþ Audience share. You can benchmark this through comparing your unique visitors to
competitor sites using Google AdPlanner. Share of audience is particularly important for
search marketing which often accounts for 50% or more of a catalogue site’s audience.

Review your
marketplace
You should compare visits from search in your keywords report against the potential
demand for search engines using a gap analysis to see where your missing.
þþ Revenue or goal value per visit. As described above, these measures enable you
to see the value that each referring campaign, site or keyword is generating. Through
reviewing how you promote your site through these traffic sources you can aim to
increase revenue per visit. Of course increasing conversion rate will also help increase
revenue per visit.

Define your
future
Stage 2 Act KPIs
Act stands for interact, your aim is to achieve the initial engagement of your visitors when
they enter your site. KPIs include:
þþ Bounce rate. Bounce rate is a great measure to use as part of your aim of increasing
sales. Review the top sources of traffic report and keywords reports to identify traffic

Targeting
sources with the highest bounce rate and aim to reduce this figure. Oftentimes more 4
than 50% of visitors will bounce meaning the investment in media is wasted. Likewise
review the landing page or entrance page reports to identify pages that aren’t effective in
engaging visitors.
þþ Pages per visit. If you can encourage more browsing and searching, you are likely to

Proposition
increase conversion rates. The average figure for visits which involve a search is around
30% in the UK for retailers, according to Coremetrics. Check how you compare and then
look to increase the proportion of searches and searches that are followed by an exit
because the right product is unavailable.
þþ Product page conversion. Conversion rates for some products will naturally be higher
than others so work on increasing conversion rates where you have “problem products” Getting new
customers

with a relatively high volume of page views, but relatively low conversion rate. You can
use the Advanced filter feature in the reports to help whittle down to these pages.
þþ Conversion to lead. I prefer to include conversion to marketing outcomes other than sale
which such as new fans or leads as part of encouraging interaction.

Stage 3 Convert to Sale

Keeping customers

This is achieving conversion to sale whether it’s online or offline. The well-known KPIs
loyal

include:
þþ Conversion rates. Again it’s worth understanding how these vary for different visitors
sources. So always segment conversion rates further.
þþ Sales transactions. The number and value of sales broken down by category.
þþ Revenue and margin. Revenue is readily reported, but margin will be usually reported
through a back-end system.

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 Stage 4 Engage.
Build customer relationships through time to achieve retention goals. Google is less
satisfactory in this area since it doesn’t have suitable metrics and you may have to derive
these through your sales systems. KPIs include:
þþ % returning visitors. This gives you a simple indication of the importance of returning

Managing digital
visitors to your business.

strategy
þþ % active hurdle rates. These have to be extracted from the CRM database - you should
look at the percentage of customers who make a purchase in a 3 or 6 month period.
ASOS uses a 6 month period to define active customers.
þþ Repeat sales from existing customers. Encouraging repeat purchases.
þþ Repeat conversion rate. This is the proportion of first-time purchasers who buy again.

Review your
marketplace
Best Practice Tip 10  Define dashboards for different team members
You can use Google Analytics custom reports or spreadsheet worksheets to have different
tabs for different levels of seniority and involvement with digital.

This example shows how one Expert member used the “menu” of KPIs in the table above to

Define your
select the most relevant measures for them to put into their reporting.

future
Targeting
4

Proposition
Getting new
customers

Using the VQVC test for using the right digital marketing KPIs
As a starting point for creating a dashboard for digital marketing activity based on Google
Analytics or another digital analytics system, consider the VQVC measures.
Keeping customers

Best Practice Tip 23 Have you customised your analytics to report VQVC KPIs?
loyal

By using the Volume-Value-Quality-Cost measures you can check you have a balanced set
of measures in a dashboard. In our experience, some dashboards tend to include Volume
measures only. There is a tendency to focus on Volume, but it’s Quality, Value and Cost
that really matter. You should also segment these KPIs by referral channel for example
comparing social media to SEO to AdWords.

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 VQVC defines four types of measures that you should review within your analytics:

rr 1. Traffic volume measures. Google Analytics is great at showing these simple

measures of what we often call “traffic”. You will see these in the standard audience
overview report. Key Measures include:
þþ Unique visits - the number of individuals who visit the site in the specified period.

Managing digital
þþ Visits - the total number of times the site was accessed by different individuals.

strategy
þþ Pageviews - the total number of pages viewed by individuals.

rr 2. Quality measures. For meaningful use of analytics to improve digital marketing it’s
essential to go beyond volume measures to understand the quality of traffic on the site.

Review your
marketplace
The reason? It’s really challenging to deliver relevance to web users, they’re impatient
if the content, design and experience doesn’t match their intent as they search for a
product or service, or their expectations based on visits to other sites. These traffic quality
measures give an indication of how a visitor has engaged with a site, these examples of
site engagement benchmarks show typical range for these metrics.
þþ Bounce rate - The percentage of visitors who leave immediately after viewing only one

Define your
page. Generally, unless they’re on the site for specific information such as a support

future
question, a high bounce rate is a sign of poor quality traffic and/or experience.
þþ Duration - The dwell time - measured as Average Time on Page or Average time on site.
þþ Pages per visit - I find this more useful than dwell time since it gives you an idea of
how many pages your visitor views on average. It’s opportunities for a marketer to
communicate their messages.

Targeting
þþ Conversion rates to lead and sale. These are the most important of the quality measures
4
since they show what proportion of visits convert to commercial outcomes.
While these don’t vary much from one week to the next unless there is a big change to the
content or design of a site, they become really important to review for different site visitor
segments. For example, if you’re paying for Google AdWords and your bounce rate for
this traffic source is 90%, then you’re not getting great value from your ad investment. If

Proposition
you’re involved in managing search day-to-day you will know this, but if you review search
marketing with an agency or team, you do need to get into how traffic quality varies for
different types of search marketing. But yet still more important are…

rr 3. Value measures. Value shows the communications effectiveness and commercial

contribution of our digital marketing to a business. Here we’re looking for outcomes Getting new
customers

which show intent to purchase or purchase itself. For an Ecommerce site this is straight-
forward, we can look at measures like sales transactions and average order value.
However, it’s less obvious for the many non-transactional sites, like many B2B sites.
Here it’s necessary to setup goals for customised for the business in Google Analytics for
when user actions are completed for qualified leads. Taking the example of a brochure
or whitepaper download, you specify the thank you page address, give the goal a name
Keeping customers

and your goal is set up. Many will do this, but often not set a value against it based
on the conversion of brochure download to sale and their average order value. Since
loyal

it’s so crucial to have Goals customised for a business I have inserted an example.
Most agencies will get this right as part of their onboarding for new clients, but many
businesses still don’t have this right I find.
Once you have Ecommerce or Goal tracking setup you can then use these Value measures.
It’s vital to review these if you’re serious about improving marketing effectiveness by seeing
which online campaigns and site pages are working best for you in terms of value rather than

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 visits and those that aren’t.
þþ Goal value per visit. If you assign a value to a goal such as a download, you can then
compare how different visitor sources contribute value to the site. For example, how does
social media marketing compare to Email, is LinkedIn more or less valuable than Twitter -
this is very powerful for checking your marketing investments.

Managing digital
þþ Revenue per visit. For sites with Ecommerce tracking, Google will report Revenue per

strategy
visit which enables you perform similar analysis to that for goal value.
þþ Page value. If you review this measure for your pages you can work back to see which
pages are prompting the creation of value enabling you to improve customer journeys
and messaging.

rr 4. Cost measures. Cost measures are historically limited in Google Analytics, although

Review your
marketplace
you can now import Google AdWords costs and using Google’s new Universal Analytics
you can import information about product costs.
Here’s a summary of some of the key VQVC measures you should include from analytics.

Volume KPIs Quality KPIs Value KPIs Cost KPIs

þþ nVisits þþ Bounce rate þþ Total revenue þþ Cost per click, cost

Define your
þþ nNewsletter þþ Time on site þþ Average order value per sales, e.g. from

future
signups AdWords
þþ Average page views þþ Revenue per visits
þþ nContent shares þþ % visitors sharing þþ Value from
þþ n new and content non-E-commerce
returning visitors þþ Conversion rate goals, e.g.
þþ n mobile and (visits to order) Newsletter signup,
desktop visitors Leads
þþ Conversion rate

Targeting
(baskets to order) þþ Margin % for 4
Ecommerce site
þþ Conversion rate
(bounces filtered)
þþ Conversion rate to
offline sales

Proposition
Here’s a summary of VQVC to conclude this step:

Getting new
customers
Keeping customers
loyal

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 Note that the VQVC checklist is mainly related to a dashboard for traffic to a site, so it can’t
cover everything like satisfaction, so here’s an additional checklist to consider. You also need
to check you have the right range of digital marketing KPIs.

Recommended resource?  RACE interactive Digital marketing dashboard

Managing digital
The purpose of the Smart Insights RACE Google Analytics dashboard is to help managers
to complete a regular weekly or monthly review of the current effectiveness of their digital

strategy
marketing using the Google Analytics API to display and access your data via Google
Docs Spreadsheets. It’s strength compared to GA is that it will rapidly enable you to review
month-on-month and year-on-year changes much more clearly - we should know - we built
them for our monthly performance review meetings! There are two views:
1. Overview of RACE KPIs across funnel (see previous page).

Review your
marketplace
Define your
future
Targeting
4

2. Digital media channel performance

Proposition
Getting new
customers
Keeping customers
loyal

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 FOUR
Strategy: Targeting

Managing digital
rr Q. Customer segmentation and targeting approach defined?

strategy
Digital channels offer exciting potential to target customers more closely. For a long-time
marketers have talked about the nirvana of one-to-one marketing enabled by technology.
While there are opportunities for smart targeting with technology, the reality is that many
communications aren’t targeted at any level! Yet ‘Relevance, Relevance, Relevance’.
should be the mantra that underpins your online marketing. Without delivering relevant
communications you’re ‘dead in the water’.

Review your
marketplace
In this step we show you can target these groups of customers or segments to help grow
your audience referencing the types of media we introduced at the start of step 3.
þþ A Overall targeting approaches - strategic segmentation
þþ B Owned media targeting approaches - main audiences and web design personas
þþ C Paid media options for targeting through different digital media channels

Define your
future
þþ D Earned media targeting options
You can see that these targeting approaches are closely related to the next 3 steps: the
propositions you offer to these segments; how you grow your reach and how you engage
existing customers.
At a practical level, you can target specific audiences either through your website and other
owned media like your social presence, bought or earned media, so we will look at the

Targeting
targeting options in each of these areas.

A Set strategic segmentation

rr Q. Strategic market segments defined?

Proposition
Before we dive into the tactical segmentation of how to target existing audiences better, we
should look at the bigger picture of the main markets you’re targeting. This is your strategic 5
segmentation.

What is it?  Strategic segmentation

A definition of the main markets and audiences you are targeting. Getting new
customers

Define core audiences to target

rr Q. Core audience demographics defined.
Keeping customers

You can’t be all things to all people, you need to focus to offer a targeted proposition, so you
should specify who are your core audiences. These will be likely 2-6 main audiences. Online
loyal

media like ad networks give opportunities to buy media by demographic criteria, so clearly
define different groups by age, gender and social groupings.
These audiences will form the web design personas we describe in the next section.

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 Checklist – audiences by priority
List audience by priority of volume or by value to the organisation.

1. ____________________________________

Managing digital
strategy
2. ____________________________________

3. ____________________________________

Review your
marketplace
4. ______________________________________

5. ______________________________________

6. _______________________________________

Define your
future
Define international audiences to target
rr Q. International marketing options defined?
We all know the web is global and indeed, thanks to the search engines, every site will

Targeting
receive visits from many different countries. But certain markets will be much more important,
so you have to identify these and group them in a meaningful way such that you can tackle
them. Of course, your primary market may be in your local country simply because you can
only deliver products or services locally, in which case you will need to exclude all other
countries in analytics unless people buy from abroad. Our International Marketing Toolkit has
the low-down on how to best run international campaigns and localise websites.

Proposition
5
Best Practice Tip 11  Group international target markets in a meaningful way
To help manage markets you should group them into three or four tiers according to the
amount of business they generate or based on future potential, e.g. emerging markets.
Getting new
customers

Define opportunities to reach new markets and audiences

rr Q. Options to reach new markets and audiences reviewed?
Through reviewing strategic segmentation, you can think through the opportunities available
to sell into new markets through online channels. These could involve taking advantage
Keeping customers

of the low cost of advertising internationally without the necessity for a supporting sales
infrastructure in the customer’s country. For example, the Internet has helped low-cost
loyal

airlines such as easyJet and Ryanair to enter new markets served by their routes cost-
effectively. This is a relatively conservative use of the Internet but is a great opportunity for
SMEs to increase exports at a low cost, though it does require overcoming the barriers to
exporting.

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 Strategy Recommendation 24  Review opportunities of digital media to target new audi-
ences and new markets
Don’t limit your online ambitions to sell into existing markets. Instead, review opportunities
to reach new audiences - either completely different to those that exist already or through
micro-targeting

Managing digital
strategy
There may also be opportunity to sell to new market segments or different types of
customers. For example, B2B company RS Components, a supplier of a range of MRO
(maintenance, repair and operations) items, found when it first launched its site that 10%
of the web-based sales were to individual consumers rather than traditional business
customers. It also uses the website to offer additional facilities for customers placing large
orders online. The UK retailer Argos found the opposite was true with 10% of website sales

Review your
marketplace
being from businesses when their traditional market was consumer-based. EasyJet also
has a section of its website to serve business customers. The Internet may offer further
opportunities for selling to market sub-segments that have not been previously targeted.
For example, a product sold to large businesses may also appeal to SMEs that they have
previously been unable to serve because of the cost of sales via a specialist sales force.
Alternatively a product targeted at young people could also appeal to some members of

Define your
an older audience and vice versa. Many companies have found that the audience and

future
customers of their website are quite different from their traditional audience.

Common online targeting priorities

Let’s look at some examples of how we can select segments for targeting online that
are most attractive in terms of growth and profitability. These may be similar or different

Targeting
compared with groups targeted offline. Some examples of B2C and B2B customer segments
that you should think about reaching or influencing through your site and ecosystem include:

rr The most profitable customers. Using digital media and technology to provide tailored
offers to the top 20% of customers by profit may result in more repeat business and
cross-sales;

Proposition
rr Customers that are difficult to reach using other media. An insurance company 5
looking to target younger drivers could use the web as a vehicle for this;

rr Customers that are brand-loyal. Services to appeal to brand loyalists and influencers
can be provided to support them in their role as advocates of a brand, as suggested by
Aaker and Joachimsthaler (2000); Getting new
customers

rr Customers that are not brand-loyal. Conversely, incentives, promotion and a good
level of service quality could be provided by the website to try and retain such customers.

rr Larger companies (B2B). Think about how you can reach these audiences through
digital media and then how you appeal to them on your site through specific site sections
Keeping customers

or messages on a web page;

rr Smaller companies (B2B). Large companies are traditionally serviced through sales
loyal

representatives and account managers, but smaller companies may not warrant the
expense of account managers. The Internet, especially through the software-as-a-service
(SaaS) model can be used to reach and serve smaller companies more cost effectively;

rr Specific members of the buying unit (B2B). Again, the site can provide detailed
information for different interests which supports the buying decision, for example

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 technical documentation for users of products, information on savings from
e-procurement for IS or purchasing managers, and information to establish the credibility
of the company for decision makers;
As we will see at the end of this step, the digital media channels like affiliate, search and
social media also give opportunities to reach to smaller segment sizes, this is micro-

Managing digital
targeting.

strategy
Tactical segmentation methods review
rr Q. Tactical segmentation reviewed?
The next two sections also review tactical segmentation options. Before we look at these,
one other segmentation method to consider is psychographic segmentation. In plain

Review your
marketplace
language this is how audiences think about products and brands and how they behave
through the buying process. It involves understanding their buying criteria and behaviour.
For example, laser eye treatment company Ultralase discovered that leads on their website
were generated through two distinct behaviours. First some leads were generated rapidly
within a day of the first visit, but another group of visitors took much longer, using a more
considered approach involving many visits over a longer time period.

Define your
Don’t forget that at a practical level, your options to target your email list will be based on

future
your customer knowledge. Since we are looking to learn more through time, we need a
structured approach to customer data capture. This can be achieved through a common
customer profile.

What is it?  Common customer profile

Targeting
A definition of all the database fields that are relevant to the marketer in order to
understand and target the customer with a relevant offering. It is best if different
levels,1-3 of profile can be defined to encourage more customers to sign-up.

Once defined, the common customer profile can then be used as a means of
structuring e-permission marketing and refining understanding about the customer. A plan

Proposition
with targets for each level can be created about how to learn more about the customer. 5

Best Practice Tip 12  Identify key profile fields

Identify the profile fields you really need to be able to understand your audience and target
them with future messages. These are level 1 or 2 of the common customer profile. Getting new
customers

A structured approach to customer data capture is needed otherwise some data will be
missed, as is the case with the utility company that collected 80,000 e-mail addresses, but
forgot to ask for the postcode for geo-targeting!
The customer profile can have different levels to set targets for data quality:
Keeping customers

þþ Level 1 is contact details and key profile fields only

loyal

þþ Level 2 includes preferences

þþ Level 3 includes full purchase and response behaviour

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 B. Owned media targeting options
rr Q. Owned media targeting options reviewed?
The company website is still the main owned media option for most companies to interact
with prospects and customers. It’s important to think of methods of personalisation to use.
But for some, such as FMCG brands social platforms are becoming more important - often

Managing digital
their Facebook pages are larger than their website by audience and interactions. For others,

strategy
mobile platforms like the mobile website and mobile apps are becoming ever more important.
We’ll look at each of these in this section.

Define company website targeting approach

rr Q. Website audience targeting approach defined?

Review your
marketplace
We discuss company website targeting options in detail in our 7 Step Guide to Improving
Results from your Website.
The main point we emphasise here is to think about using personas to help make the site
more customer-centric.

Define your
Strategy Recommendation 25  Create web personas to help define your site audience

future
Personas can help improve your site so it’s based on the psychology and needs of the
visitor. In short, it makes pages more customer-centric.

Web design personas are a powerful method of thinking about your audience needs and
priorities. You can read more about approaches to creating them in this post: http://bit.ly/
smartpersonas

Targeting
What is it?  Web design personas
A thumbnail summary of the characteristics, needs, motivations and environment of typical
site users.

Proposition
Recommended resource?  Persona and customer journey mapping guide (Workbook 1.4) 5
See our Personas guide showing key issues to consider when creating personas and with
examples of different styles of personas.

Getting new
customers

Define social presence targeting approach

rr Q. Social media platform targeting approach defined?
You can apply the approach of personas to your website social presence. You will likely find
that the demographics and preferences of users of your social presences are quite different
from those of your main website. There will also be differences between different social sites
Keeping customers

like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn for business users.

loyal

Best Practice Tip 13  Audit users of your social presence to create a social profile
for each site
Review a sample of profiles and comments on your social media presence to understand
the types of audiences and their preferences.

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 Targeting using email marketing
rr Q. Options for targeting through email house-list reviewed?
Email is most effective for marketing when using your in-house list. Your capability here for
targeting will be part of your wider E-CRM strategy. But at a practical level it will depend on
the fields you have available on the database for your audience and whether they have been

Managing digital
populated.

strategy
In our 7 Steps Guide to Excellent Email Marketing, we run through 5 options for email
targeting. Of these, we think the customer lifecycle and activity levels are particularly
important levels of targeting to consider.

Checklist – 5 email targeting approaches

Review your
marketplace
rr 1. Customer profile characteristics (demographics).
rr 2. Customer value (current and future).
rr 3. Customer lifecycle groups.
rr 4. Customer behaviour in response and purchase (observed and predicted).
rr 5. Customer multi-channel behaviour (channel preference).

Define your
future
rr 6. Customer personas including psychographics.

Best Practice Tip 14  Summarise your segmentation in a layered form

It can be useful to summarise different targeting options for colleagues through a layered
segmentation as shown in this approach used by eBay UK shared at a recent email

Targeting
marketing conference.

Proposition
5

Getting new
customers
Keeping customers
loyal

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 C Paid media targeting options
rr Q. Paid-media audience targeting approach defined?
We will look at the paid media targeting approaches in more depth in Step 6, but for com-
pleteness we have a quick review of the targeting options here.

Managing digital
Targeting using search marketing

strategy
rr Q. Search marketing targeting approach reviewed?
Of course search marketing involves both paid and owned media, the owned media being
the natural search engine optimisation (SEO). But both share similar targeting options.
At a strategy level, the most important thing to get right is investing time in targeting the

Review your
marketplace
keyphrases that will get you the best results. Methods of keyphrase research and targeting
are covered in more detail in our guides on paid and natural search marketing and a later
section which reminds us that the Google Display Network (GDN) can be used for targeting
on third-party sites.

Targeting using display advertising

Define your
rr Q. Opportunities for reaching audience through display advertising reviewed?

future
Although search marketing is effective at reaching visitors who have a defined need they are
searching, for it is less effective for generating hidden demand through targeted ads on niche
sites or reaching a mass-market audience through larger sites. Many companies don’t invest
in display since they can’t see beyond the low clickthrough rates. But if you check our 7 Step
Guide to Display Advertising you will see that there are other benefits for investing.

Targeting
Targeting using affiliates and partners
rr Q. Relevance of affiliate marketing reviewed?
Marketing via partners is another method of targeting audiences using third-party sites which
can complement your other traffic-building efforts. These can give new potential sources for

Proposition
reaching audiences that aren’t aware of your brand or specific products and services. For
example, retailer Tescos has good levels of brand awareness in many markets, but some 5
offerings like their financial, diet or wine products may be less well known, so they use
affiliate marketing to raise awareness of these services with higher levels of commission.

D Earned media targeting options Getting new

customers

rr Q. Earned-media audience targeting approach defined?

Reaching your audience through online public relations is another tactical method of
targeting. Here we are looking to deliver a message to our audience though editorial
produced by influencers such as bloggers, celebrities or online publications.
Keeping customers

Strategy Recommendation 26  Ensure you invest sufficient in influencer outreach

loyal

Segmenting and then forming relationships with relevant bloggers and content sites is a
key part of influencer outreach, but it’s often an under-resourced part of content marketing.
Our inbound marketing infographic (bottom right) reminds us it’s a key component of using
earned media.

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 Summary checklist – review your options for new targeting techniques
In section 1.4.3 of the workbook we suggest your review your current use of targeting to
identify future techniques using these 10 techniques - which are your future priorities?.

rr 1. Classic profile-based demographic segmentation. – Media targeting or

personalized messaging on site and email based on characteristics disclosed in profile.

Managing digital
strategy
rr 2. Search behaviour (P and O). Target consumer behaviour grouped: SEO+PPC.

rr 3. Content consumption (P). Using ad networks including Google Display Network and
re-marketing available in AdWords.

rr 4. Social Network interest-based targeting (P). E.G. Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn

and Twitter interests.

Review your
marketplace
rr 5. Web personas (WE). Combine other characteristics and behaviours.

rr 6. Customer lifecycle (WE). Target Email and Web messages according to length of
time using online services.

rr 7. Customer value (WE). Review current and future potential value for existing

Define your
customers, e.g. target VIP customers.

future
rr 8. Campaign message response and behaviour (WE). Use “sense and respond”
behavioural targeting in email and site personalisation based on RFM (Recency,
Frequency and Monetary value) and content viewed

rr 9. Buying motivations and behaviours (WE). Evaluation method and sensitivity to

Targeting
pricing against features, benefits, brand value

rr 10. Channel preference (WE). Communicate with customers in their preferred media
e.g. Email vs Print and Phone (and according to value)

POE refer to Paid-Owned-Earned media options. WE = Web or in app personalisation.

Proposition
Recommended resource?  Digital media cheatsheet 5
With the likes of Facebook, Google, Twitter and LinkedIn offering more sophisticated
targeting options every week, you can get an edge if you review these earlier. To help
members here we cover these in our digital media cheatsheet which is updated monthly
with links to the latest major developments on each platform which we think every Getting new
customers

marketing team should know about.

þþ Digital media cheatsheet download
Keeping customers
loyal

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 FIVE
Strategy: Proposition

Managing digital
rr Q. Are we continuously reviewing our digital channel proposition and how we
communicate it?

strategy
Despite all the talk of tactics online, what really helps companies succeed online is the
strength of their brand and what it can offer customers. Since digital channels are still quite
new and many consumers are still switching to use them there are two major issues to get
right when developing and explaining your proposition.

Review your
marketplace
Strategy Recommendation 27  Ensure your online presences communicate both core
brand essence and product features but also channel value
Users of your digital platforms will compare these platforms to your other channels and
to competitors, so you have to communicate these through the interface design and
messaging.

Define your
First, you should think about how you communicate the core features of your brand and,

future
in particular, what makes you different? This is where you aim to position your brand and
its products and services relative to competitors. This is obvious, but working with many
businesses over the years, it’s often the case that they are not communicating the basics of
what they offer well - they are not answering the key questions your visitors will ask.

Targeting
Strategy Recommendation 28  Ensure the key brand offer is clearly defined
Make the basics clear: Who you are? What you offer? Where you offer it? What makes you
different? You also need to think about where these are communicated. Are they hidden on
the ‘About’ or a ‘Product page’ rather than prominent on the home page? Are they clear on
every page of the blog?

Proposition
Second, you should take a channel-based view of your proposition and communicate what 5
your channel offers compared to your own offerings in a channel and others. Through doing
this you can encourage visitors to start and continue using your website, social network
presence, email communications, mobile site or app. This is less obvious, but equally
important! We call this the online value proposition (OVP) and will explore that later in this
step.
Getting new
customers

What is it?  Online value proposition

Each digital channel should have its own OVP defined and there is a collective OVP.
Keeping customers

Communicating the core features of your brand

loyal

rr Q. Have we reviewed how effectively we communicate the core features of our brand
online?
Once we have understood our audiences and what we will offer them, key messages
should be defined which can be communicated to customers on the site itself and in offline
communications. We also need to develop the right content and calls-to-action to encourage
visitors to stay on site and interact.

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 Remember that for your website or social sites, the majority of visitors won’t know you so
well. Think about what we call the “Four Familiarities” for a new site visitor.
They will differ in:

Managing digital
rr Familiarity of the customer with the different digital platforms

strategy
rr Familiarity of the customer with a brand

rr Familiarity with your products and services

rr Familiarity of a customer with your online channels

So, the main brand messages need to explain what you offer to these different groups.

Review your
marketplace
Given that we have this range of familiarity, it’s useful to define the core of what you offer,
particularly for new customers. Check it’s clear your visitors can answer these questions:

rr 1. Who you are? Clear brand names and idents?

rr 2. What you offer? Clear products and services?

Define your
rr 3. Who your offer appeals to? Less important, but this can help define your positioning.

future
rr 4. Where you offer it? Particularly important if you serve local markets!

rr 5. What makes you different? Often missed and the most important! What truly
differentiates you?

Targeting
For example, this B2B brand has a clear “Why Choose Us?” signpost in it’s top nav and then
uses numbers to show it’s scale and expertise to give the audience that doesn’t know the
brand confidence.

Proposition
5

Getting new
customers
Keeping customers
loyal

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 It’s also important that these type of messages detailing the offer and linking to supporting
information are visible over the entire site since not everyone arrives on the home page and
reminders work. :

Best Practice Tip 15  Ensure key brand messages are visible across the site

Managing digital
Use containers above or below the menu or in the sidebars to communicate your key
messages aimed at increasing conversion.

strategy
Here are some more examples

Review your
marketplace
Define your
future
Targeting
These consumer examples we have shared previously use a sidebar to communicate the
benefits, these are less workable with responsive design, so the current 02 responsive site
uses stripes below the top navigation and above the footer to communicate their difference.

Proposition
Getting new
customers

6
Keeping customers
loyal

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 Note also the ‘Help me choose’ CTA which is an interactive tool that is also part of the OVP.

Differentiate!
rr Q. Have we developed a sufficiently distinct positioning?

Managing digital
Marketers know the importance of communicating features and benefits of their products,

strategy
services or platforms well. They also know that it’s the benefits that you should stress rather
than the features. But what is less well known, is the need to really differentiate through the
driver features that are important to customers and differentiated from the competition.

Strategy Recommendation 29  Identify key differentiators

Don’t fall into the trap of only communicating low relevance or low differentiating value -

Review your
marketplace
make sure you identify the key drivers of relevance and differentiation that are right for your
customer segment(s).

Define your
future
Targeting
Source: Adapted from: Better Branding. Aufreiter, Elzinga, and. Gordon, 2003, McKinsey
Quarterly. Issue 4

Proposition
How strong is your brand personality?
rr Q. Have we reviewed how we communicate our brand personality online?
We ask this question since how you differentiate shouldn’t just be based on functional
benefits, but also emotional appeal, which is often the only way to differentiate.
Rohit Bhargava, a VP at Ogilvy New York and author of Personality Not Included stresses the Getting new
customers

importance of developing a brand that is sufficiently distinctive and energetic to encourage

interaction and discussion that will amplify brand messages through word-of-mouth. We 6
recommend Rohit’s book or site (www.rohitbhargava.com) to learn more. For us, this is one
of the most important marketing books of the last few years, this millennium even!

Strategy Recommendation 30  Review and refine brand personality

Keeping customers

Is your brand personality distinct and energetic enough to encourage engagement and
loyal

sharing, if not you will find getting cut-through increasingly difficult.

Rohit nails it when he describes personality as:

“the unique, authentic, and talkable soul of your brand that people can get passionate about”
He goes onto say:

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 “Personality is not just about what you stand for, but how you choose to communicate it. It is
also the way to reconnect your customers, partners, employees, and influencers to the soul
of your brand in the new social media era”.
Rohit and others, like Jay Baer of “Convince and Convert” recommend that you combine your
brand personality with your “one big thing”. Online, this has become particularly important to

Managing digital
communicate since interactions can be so fleeting.

strategy
Best Practice Tip 16  Communicate your “one big thing”
Particularly true for the core differentiating features of a startup business , but valuable for
defining the brand of established companies, communicating your main point of difference
is key.

Review your
marketplace
Entrepreneur Jason Goldberg recommends11 that it’s particularly important for online startups
to answer these questions:

rr 1. What’s the one thing your product will do?

_________________________________________________________________

Define your
future
rr 2. What’s the one thing that your startup will do and do better than everyone else?

_________________________________________________________________

rr 3. What’s the one thing your brand will represent?

Targeting
_________________________________________________________________

rr 4. What’s the one thing you will do day-in and day-out, to the exclusion of all other
things?

_________________________________________________________________

Proposition
He says “The answer to all 4 of those questions should be exactly the same. And that’s your
one thing”. He gives these examples:
þþ Twitter: Share short updates
þþ Foursquare: Check-in Getting new
þþ Instagram: Share pretty photos
customers

þþ Dropbox: Easy cloud storage 6

þþ YouTube: Upload a video
þþ Groupon: One great local deal per day
þþ The original Google: Algorithmic search
Keeping customers

þþ Linkedin: professional networking

loyal

11  Beta Shop

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 Adding value to your brand online with your OVP(s)
rr Q. Have we reviewed our online value proposition for different online platforms?
Really, creating and adding more value to your brand is one of the most powerful aspects
of digital channels, since it will engage your audience and encourage them to share the
proposition, so it’s essential to think this through clearly.

Managing digital
strategy
You can communicate the OVP indirectly through the menu options, design style and tone of
voice of your digital platforms whether that’s a website, blog, mobile app or email campaign.
But’s it’s also useful to formalise and develop specific messaging to explain your proposition,
so we will look at examples of these later in the section.

Strategy Recommendation 31  Define the overall OVP for your digital channels and indi-

Review your
marketplace
vidual channels and communicate them effectively
If you don’t define your OVP, it’s likely you’re not really taking advantage of the unique
benefits of digital channels to provide better experiences for customers. You also won’t be
able to communicate the OVP well if it’s ill-defined or not communicated both online and in
other channels. Use evidence and proof points, like your scale or real customer feedback
to support your OVP and explain what your brand offers its customers.

Define your
future
Checklist - different OVPs

rr Website OVP

rr Social media platform OVP, which content will you use to engage on social media

Targeting
rr Email marketing content OVP, which content and deals will you offer by email

rr Service OVP, how can you give confidence of how consumer concerns will be addressed

rr Mobile platform, app OVPs, e.g. online betting services

Here are a couple more examples. AO.com has a more sophisticated form of the run-of-site
proposition bar where there is a dedicated page for each part of the OVP. Note also how it

Proposition
uses Trustpilot to evidence its service OVP.

Getting new
customers

6
Keeping customers
loyal

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 ETA uses the home page to evidence it’s scale and service in this example:

Managing digital
strategy
Review your
marketplace
Define your
future
Review management of content marketing
rr Q. We have reviewed our content marketing strategy to support our proposition?
You can see that the quality of content and the editorial control of how it is published
underpins many of these OVPs. Mapping content to the right point in the customer journey to
explain the proposition delivering it by email or personalisation is key to implementing OVPs

Targeting
successfully. The content marketing matrix is a useful technique to review current use of
content marketing and identify new types of content.

Proposition
Getting new
customers

6
Keeping customers
loyal

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 Strategy Recommendation 32  Review and improve content marketing capabilities
Content marketing is at the heart of how you reach, convert and engage audiences, so
ensure it is managed coherently. Successful online business have a content marketing
strategy.

Managing digital
strategy
Recommended resource?  Content marketing 7 Steps Guide
Use our content marketing strategy guide to define a plan to develop the most relevant
content to grow your audience through sharing (amplification) and brand appeal.

Review your
marketplace
Options for mixing-up your marketing mix for online channels
rr Q. Options for reviewing marketing mix of digital channels reviewed?
The well known 4 Ps of Product, Price, Place and Promotion is still used as an essential
part of implementing marketing strategy by many practitioners. The 4 Ps are often extended
to the 7 Ps by including three further elements that better reflect service delivery: People,
Processes and Physical evidence.

Define your
future
As part of developing your digital proposition it’s helpful to review each element of the mix, in
particular, product, price and place (promotion is separate and we reference this in the final
two steps).
Here’s a summary of all the elements of the marketing mix. As you review this, the question
to ask is how can we use our digital channels to enhance and differentiate our offering for
different segments?

Targeting
Proposition
Getting new
customers

6
Let’s now look at each element of the main elements of the mix in more detail and I’ll call
out some of the main areas to consider. You’ll see many of these are most relevant for
transactional sites like retail. We’ll look at Promotion in the final two sections.
Keeping customers

Review product options of marketing mix

loyal

rr Q. Product options of marketing mix for digital channels reviewed?

The main issues to review for Product are:

rr Product range - can it be extended or reduced. For example Tesco have launched many
products and services online through it’s web platform from financial services and mobile
to dieting. Other companies have offered a more limited range, perhaps to manage

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 conflicts with other channel partners. For example, 3M Select sell new products and
remaindered products which other distributors can’t support so well.

rr Product partners - can we partner to sell or cross promote partner products?

rr Extended product - can we add value - this is the online value proposition we have

Managing digital
looked at earlier in this section. It can also be development of new brand experiences.
For example: development of a gaming app for a non-gaming company.

strategy
rr New digital versions or service components of products. Example: Garmin has
created Garmin Connect to allow runners and outdoor folks to map and share where they
have been on their activities.

rr New revenue sources from new services. Example: many retailers like ASOS offer

Review your
marketplace
advertising as an additional revenue source.

rr Bundling products. Add value by offering related products or services together to

encourage purchase.

rr Customised products. Example: car manufacturers and clothing manufacturers

have offered options to “mass-customise” products through linking web channels up to

Define your
fabrication and distribution facilities.

future
Review pricing options of marketing mix
rr Q. Pricing options of marketing mix for digital channels reviewed?
The main issues to review here are:

Targeting
rr New payment models. Most relevant to digital products, options include pay per view,
subscription or ad-supported.

rr Dynamic pricing. For online retailers there are options to change pricing more rapidly

rr Price discovery. It is arguably easier to trial different pricing models in the online
channels.

Proposition
rr Auction pricing models. Often auctions will be completed through an intermediary.
eBay is the obvious example.

rr Aggregated buying. Example: Groupon enables companies to promote products at a

lower price-point due to the viral effect of group buying.
Getting new
customers

Review place options of marketing mix

6
rr Q. Place options of marketing mix for digital channels reviewed?
The main issues to review for Place are:

rr Online direct sales channel. A company that has not previously sold direct can sell
Keeping customers

direct, although there will often be channel conflicts to manage.

loyal

rr Increasing sales to international markets. The web enables sales channels to be

opened in countries where this wasn’t previously possible.

rr New direct sales partner distribution channels. Are there new options for partners to
distribute products online. Many companies have opened an eBay or Amazon store to

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 extend their reach to new audiences. 3M Select has again used this approach, but only
for a subset of their product range.

rr Use of online marketplaces. These can use auction or bid based approaches to sales.

rr Referral engine or affiliate model. Nokia trialled the online direct sales channel model,

Managing digital
but instead has found it is more cost effective to build a service to compare deals from
different retailers and network operators.

strategy
rr Virtual organisations. The creation and sale of products through collaboration online by
companies that are physically separate.

rr Multichannel propositions. With multichannel propositions we can offer customers an

experience that bridges the offline and online world. The most common approach is to

Review your
marketplace
encourage offline sales to support site visitors who are researching products online. This
is a ROPO model that we discussed earlier in this guide in the section on goal setting.

Review service options of marketing mix

rr Q. Service options of marketing mix for digital channels reviewed?
The main issues to review for service are the delivery of these forms of customer services.

Define your
future
These aspects of the mix involve balancing the costs of service delivery, but at the same time
maximising service quality.

rr Pre-sales web service. The use of frequently asked questions, chat and phone callback
can all help support sales and often are within the remit of customer service rather than
sales - the areas are now less distinct..

Targeting
rr Post-sales web self-service (own site). How can this be encouraged to improve
customer experience and reduce costs?

rr Intermediary site customer service. Sites like Get Satisfaction enable customers to get
feedback from other customers. These must be managed and responded to by company
staff as appropriate.

Proposition
rr Website feedback. Satisfaction with the service and the customer experience can be
reviewed online through surveys and a whole host of feedback tools available from http://
bit.ly/smartfeedback.

rr Social network service. Today customers and prospects will discuss opinions of brands
and their products online. These should be reviewed through the range of reputation Getting new
customers

management tools described in our social media guide and compared at http:/bit.ly/
smartlistening. 6

Strategic initiatives to review OVPs and content mapping for personas

Keeping customers

In this section we have used examples and checklists to show the importance of using the
best brand messaging and content types to engage your audiences.
loyal

As you review or test your own site, you will certainly find it is ‘sub-optimal’. There will be
some ‘quick fixes’, but we believe this is the wrong way to make the improvements needed to
compete. This visual from Chris Goward, author of You Should be Testing That shows how a
continuous, structured approach will work best.

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 Managing digital
strategy
Review your
marketplace
From a digital strategy point-of-view, you should define initiatives to help you compete.

Define your
Strategy Recommendation 33  Define initiatives to optimize your experience and

future
conversion
Strategic initiatives may include:
þþ Research or analysis to understand customer perception and journeys
þþ Creation of personas, customer journey and content mapping
þþ Conversion rate optimization or continuous structured testing products

Targeting
To help with the processes these resources and toolkits are most relevant.

Recommended resource?  Digital experience toolkit

Our Experience toolkit (in members’ area) groups our resources to help you review and

Proposition
improve your website including:
þþ Customer persona and customer journey mapping guides
þþ Improving results from your website using Google Analytics
þþ Design pattern template examples
For more on how to get started with CRO see the guides in our customer lifecycle toolkit. Getting new
customers

6
Keeping customers
loyal

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 SIX
Strategy: New customer acquisition
In previous steps we have showed how to how to develop online propositions to engage and

Managing digital
sell to your audiences.

strategy
In this step, we look at how to get sales from new customers through reaching them and
then converting them to customers. In big organisations, this is called a customer acquisition
strategy.
To gain new customers online, it’s helpful to think about the many and varied methods
available to reach customers today. So we start by looking at where to find and influence

Review your
marketplace
customers on other types of sites and develop customer journeys leading to offline or online
sale. Next we look at how to develop conversion pathways.

REACH: Building awareness and visibility online to boost customer

acquisition

Define your
future
Targeting
This is quite a short section since much of the success of customer acquisition strategies is
based on the execution of the different strategies that are described in other guides in our
seven step series like display advertising, search marketing, social media marketing and
conversion rate optimization.

Recommended resource?  Customer acquisition guides and spreadsheets

Proposition
In larger businesses, customer acquisition is usually managed as a separate activity with
its own team for which a separate customer acquisition team and budget will be required
to prioritise and prove spend. If this is relevant for you and if you have Business-level
Expert membership, we recommend downloading the Customer acquisition guide and
budget planner in the Lifecycle marketing toolkit (sign-in required for Business members).
Smaller businesses can consult the Reach lessons in the E-learning module (sign-in
Getting new
customers

required) which covers budget creation and all the key marketing channels. The 6
recommendations cover:
þþ 2.1 Review digital media effectiveness
þþ 2.2 Search Marketing
Keeping customers

þþ 2.3 Owned and Earned media

þþ 2.4 Paid media
loyal

þþ 2.5 Acquisition budget and plan

To plan a budget for acquisition activities all members can download our modern
marketing budget spreadsheet template.

In this guide, we will focus on answering the BIG questions that you need to answer

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 successfully to get the best results! We start with selecting the right media to drive visitors to
a site or social presence and then look at converting the visitor to the outcome you seek.

Set acquisition goals

rr Q. Do we have visibility of actual against target performance in support of our business

Managing digital
goals?

strategy
There’s the popular marketing mantra – ‘you can’t manage what you can’t measure‘. This
is the place to start from when planning to grow the effectiveness of your digital acquisition.
The benchmarking process starts with a clear understanding of how you perform across a
range of channels, and to then understand the relationship between traffic or reach based
KPIs and their impact on marketing or sales conversions, including lead generation. Try to

Review your
marketplace
map out how KPIs impact on this. eCommera recommend you use this approach - we think
it’s a great way of mapping out Ecommerce KPIs for retailers.

Define your
future
Targeting
Proposition
Define channel mix
rr Q. Appropriate mix of digital media channels reviewed?
Before you go into the details of how to use individual channels better, you need to select the
Getting new
customers

best channels for you and decide how much you should invest in them. How to do this? Well 6
it’s quite a challenge! The best approach is to test and learn from what has worked for you
in the past or others in your sector. This shows what your customers have responded to. Try
varying the mix to see what works best for you, for acquiring different types of offers.
Keeping customers

Best Practice Tip 17  Test varying your mix for different products or campaigns or markets
You won’t learn what works best if you always use the same media. So vary it in
loyal

different situations. Some try an online only launch for certain products to help gauge the
effectiveness of different approaches.

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 Getting the paid, owned, earned media balance right
rr Q. Balance of time and money spend on different media types right?
Before you look at individual channels like search or social media, it’s best to start with
the bigger picture. Do you remember that in Step 1, we reviewed paid, owned and earned
media? Well, it’s worth revisiting this way of breaking down media and considering their

Managing digital
benefits and challenges in your marketing and whether you need to adjust your priorities.

strategy
Successful companies maximise the overlap between the three different types of media.
Achieving this overlap requires the integration of acquisition campaigns. Content on your
blog or hub site can be broken down and re-shared into other media types. It’s useful to also
think of a company’s own presences as ‘media’ in this sense – these being an alternative
investment in time or budget to other media that offer opportunities to promote products

Review your
marketplace
using ad or editorial formats.
The one-line take-away is to ensure that there’s emphasis on a plan to become multi-channel
publishers, and stop separating ‘media’ from ’social or online PR’.
This table will help you think through the options, don’t forget to consider how these different
media types can best be integrated.

Define your
future
Media type Benefits Challenges Strategies KPIs

Paid media rr Predictable reach rr Cut-through rr Use for short-term rr Volume: % Visits,
within budget rr Cost demand-generation audience share
availability supporting of owned/ rr Quality: Conversion
rr Targeting
earned media

Targeting
rr Targeting rate and site
rr Short-term returns
rr Control of reach with rr Use for continuous engagement
rr Needs to integrate presence (e.g. in
budget rr Value: CPC. CPA,
with owned SERPs, niche sites) revenue per visit,
and earned for
LTV
effectiveness

Owned rr Potential lower rr Cut-through rr Use inbound rr As above plus..

media CPA of inbound rr Cost marketing to create rr Value per content

Proposition
marketing (search, continuous targeted unit
rr Targeting
content) demand
rr Short-term returns
rr Influencing existing rr Tactical campaigns
customers at low rr Needs to integrate influence footfall
cost with owned created by brand
and earned for engagement
rr Longer-term
effectiveness
cut-through Getting new
customers

Earned rr Gain additional reach rr Difficult to predict rr Listening and rr Conversation 6

media over search and ROI of PR and response required volume
media guides viral marketing rr Investment in an rr Share of
rr Endorsement by rr Negative mentions influencer network conversation
influencers can and hijacking rr Use of tactical rr Conversation
Keeping customers

boost conversion rr Potential viral campaigns polarity

rr Engagement with cost-efficiency integrated with paid (sentiment)
loyal

audience boost but can require and earned media

brand affinity paid media
investment

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 Using the Marketing Bullseye to identify priorities for investment in online acquisition
Let’s take a quick look at a couple of ‘mind tools’ for reviewing your current and future use of
digital channels which we think is excellent for a quick team review of the options for smaller
businesses.

Managing digital
Best Practice Tip 1 Use the Marketing Bullseye to prioritise channels

strategy
This Bullseye is featured by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Maiers in their book: Traction, it’s
a great way to simplify the choices, but add a level of detail to the 6 digital media channel
options.
Gabriel is founder of search engine Duck Duck Go and as an entrepreneur involved with
this and other startups as a VC, it takes the perspective of startups who are looking to gain
visibility. This article explains a process for gaining traction using the Bullesye Bullseye

Review your
marketplace
visual from the books’ support site.

Define your
future
Targeting
Proposition
Getting new
customers

6
Keeping customers
loyal

Prioritising your online media investments

Within the different types of digital media we have reviewed at a top level, there are many
online media options on each platform that should at least be trialled since they will vary in
effectiveness. For Google, Facebook and Twitter, for example there are many, many options

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 to choose and it’s not easy to ‘get your head around’ the options since they have grown
as the companies look for new ways to grow their ad revenue by providing more targeting
options to deliver relevant ads.
To help simplify the discussion of the choices, we recommend using another tool, the
‘Content Distribution matrix’12 to help review current and prioritise future media investments.

Managing digital
Although we developed the matrix to support content marketing, it also works across all

strategy
digital media.

Strategy Recommendation 34 Review paid media distribution options

Use the POE media effectiveness matrix to review the options for investment.

Review your
marketplace
You should build up a picture of the best-performing paid media options, i.e. lower-cost,
higher volume (the sweet spot in the bottom right) to the worst performing options
(higher-cost, lower volume – top left). Most SMEs will want to avoid this type of investment!
This matrix shows Paid social media marked as red – for danger, AdWords is orange and
owned and earned media are green for low since these are often lower-cost options.

Define your
future
Targeting
Proposition
Getting new
customers

6
Keeping customers

Paid-owned-earned media effectiveness matrix - example

loyal

12
  Available in the Digital Marketing Planning Workbook

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 The four types of media shown on the matrix are:
þþ Wasteful media (Lowest volume, Highest cost). Your aim here should be to reduce
costs through budget reallocation and/or efficiency improvements.
þþ Slow and steady media (Lowest volume, Lowest cost). The least important to act on,
but you need to make sure you are not distracted by these. Here, the aim is to minimise

Managing digital
costs and review potential of techniques for improvement.

strategy
þþ High-cost volume driver media (Highest volume, Highest cost). You should aim to
reduce costs efficiency improvements.
þþ Star performers (Highest volume, Highest cost). Aim is to add more focus to scale
volume further.

Review your
marketplace
You will need to use this template in combination with your analytics or lead reporting
systems to identify which media are driving volume and how cost effective they are.
Note that the types of media plotted here are for one example business, so these will vary by
company type and sector. We hope that the example is more or less self-explanatory based
on the labelling of the axes. We recommend you run a media review and planning session
using this 3 step approach which gives more details:

Define your
future
Step 1. Current use of media for content distribution
Start by marking up the current or past use of different paid-owned-earned media options for
your business. Plot each media type on the horizontal axis based on its importance in the
number of leads or sales you can attribute to it from a low-level of effectiveness on the left
to the highest volume on the right. Next consider cost effectiveness on the vertical axis
based on the time or money spent on promotion from lowest cost (or better overall return-on-

Targeting
investment) at the bottom to highest at the top.
To take a couple of examples, in this case, long-tail SEO, shown in the bottom right quadrant,
is one of the most effective techniques since it produces a high volume of leads or sales at
relatively low levels of investment. Compare this to paid distribution options shown in the top
left quadrant, such as LinkedIn Promoted posts which have a relatively low-level of volume,

Proposition
but highest costs/poorest ROI).
Colour-coding can help distinguish the techniques you use.
Of course, using the matrix requires businesses to be already set up to measure content
marketing effectiveness as explained in our guide to calculating content marketing ROI and
the 7 Steps guide to Google Analytics for marketers. Getting new
customers

Step 2. Review promotion gap against competitor or sector use of content distribution 6
techniques
This step is easier to explain, but harder to mark up in practice. Here you review the full range
of paid-owned and earned media options available to you, in particular. those you aren’t using
now. You have to assess what you think they could contribute in advance of a test to prove or
Keeping customers

disprove your hypothesis.

loyal

In this step you can also consider how other businesses are using content distribution in your
sector. Since you won’t have access to their analytics, this can only be based on an assessment
of the types of techniques you see them using and any results you hear them reporting.

Step 3. Select and prioritise new methods of content promotion

Finally, you can discuss which options could be worth trialling in future tests, based on your

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 discussion. There will likely be several new options, so it’s a case of reviewing and setting up
a schedule of what to trial and test . An additional use of this visual will be to consider new
content partners who can be compared in a similar way.

Best Practice Tip 18 Keep track of all of the digital media options and how you’re improving
them

Managing digital
Details matter in making the most of digital media, you, or your agency could be missing

strategy
options so you should maintain a separate spreadsheet defining how you can improve
effectiveness or reduce costs through efficiency gains for each media.

Guess what? We’ve created a list to keep up with the new developments and maintain it on

Review your
marketplace
site and as a spreadsheet for members.

Recommended resource?  Digital media cheatsheet

With the likes of Facebook, Google, Twitter and LinkedIn offering more sophisticated
targeting options every week, you can get an edge if you review these earlier. To help

Define your
members here we cover these in our digital media cheatsheet which is updated monthly

future
with links to the latest major developments on each platform which we think every
marketing team should know about.
þþ Digital media cheatsheet download

Best Practice Tip 19 Applying the 70:20:10 rule

Targeting
Use the 70:20:10 rule to prioritise investment in the top performing channels (70% of budget),
while looking to improve moderate performers (20%) and trial new approaches (10%)

Do you know the 70:20:10 rule of investing in media? It’s particularly relevant to digital
media since it helps you prioritise budget where it’s effective, but also builds in flexibility.

Proposition
To summarise, you should prioritise on volume, but also practice risk diversification, i.e.
avoid all eggs in one basket?
þþ 70% budget should focus on established channel that deliver volume at acceptable CPA
(High volume, High, ROI on matrix)
þþ 20% budget should focus on optimising potential channels Getting new
customers

þþ 10% of budget should focus on emerging channels

6
Let’s now go on to look at some of the key best practices for the individual media techniques.

Getting the max from the core digital media channels

Keeping customers

We have said that there are the 6 core digital media channels to drive reach and response.
Each has their own set of ‘success factors’, or ‘secret formula’ of ‘best practices’ that, when
loyal

followed, will get you better results than your competitors who don’t follow them. You just
need to be persistent, to ‘test, learn, refine’.
In this guide we want to explain as much as we can so that, even if you’re not involved
‘hands-on’, you can have an intelligent conversion with someone who is. We have much
more details in our toolkits for each of these channels, but realise that you may just want a
summarise of what really matters - that’s what our members tell us.

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 Review your ‘referral mix’ in analytics
rr Q. Site traffic mix reviewed?
Going down to a layer of detail, you can inform your future priorities by checking how well the
channel mix is currently working for you in driving traffic.Though we want more traffic, and
we’re assuming that its commercial value is understood and benchmarked, the traffic mix

Managing digital
is important since it helps manage against weaknesses and highlight new opportunities for

strategy
growth. For example, there’s a risk if “too many of your eggs are in one basket”, particularly
on natural search since then you are too reliant as Google changes it’s algorithms…
There are all kinds of complexities that can affect reporting on traffic mix, where too much is
tagged as “direct” or “other” due to emails or campaigns not being properly tagged. The key
thing is that once traffic mix is on your agenda you can spot changes and start to manage the

Review your
marketplace
mix.
You can spot opportunities to vary your mix if you compare to industry averages like the one
below. This compilation from Google gives a typical breakdown for visitors to a site across all
the sites measured by Google Analytics13. How does your site compare? The “right mix” will
vary drastically between types of sites, for example e-commerce vs publishing platforms, and
of course by industry where the types of users differ.

Define your
future
Targeting
Retailers should check the excellent Custora Pulse which shows the channels that drive

Proposition
sales14

Getting new
customers

6
Keeping customers

To test which media work best for you, with your offers and your audience, there is no
substitute for testing to identify the best mix.
loyal

Best Practice Tip 20  Test varying your mix for different products or campaigns or markets

13  See definitions of the different types of referrer: Smart Insights: Marketing Mix
14  Custora Pulse: A compilation of US retail channels driving sale (includes customers)

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 You won’t learn what works best if you always use the same media. So vary it in
different situations. Some try an online only launch for certain products to help gauge the
effectiveness of different approaches.

Managing digital
Understanding which channels are most effective

strategy
rr Q. Attribution models and conversion models applied?
If you’ve heard of attribution, which you likely will if you’ve managed a budget in the millions,
then you can skip this section. But, I’ve found that many with smaller budgets haven’t and we
think it’s useful to understand the principles and it can help you adjust your mix.
The most common approach to attributing the influence of different online media a customer

Review your
marketplace
consumes before purchase has been the ‘Last-click method’ of digital media channel
attribution, best known as ‘last click wins’. As you can see from this example, this has the
benefit that we don’t credit multiple traffic sources with sale – only Affiliate 2 is credited with
the sale, a process known as ‘Digital media de-duplication’. But it has the disadvantage that
it simplifies the reality of previous influence or digital media ‘assists’ and previous referrals
influenced by other customer touch points on other sites are ignored, such as the natural

Define your
search or display ad.

future
Targeting
Proposition
What is it?  Last-click method of digital media channel attribution
The site which referred a visitor immediately before purchase is credited with the sale.
Previous referrals influenced by other customer touch points on other sites are ignored.

So, for the most accurate interpretation of the contribution of different media, the online
Getting new
customers

marketer needs to use tagging and analysis tools to try to build the best picture of which
channels are influencing sales and then weight the media accordingly.
For example, a more sophisticated approach is to weight the responsibility for sale across
several different referrers according to a model – so just considering the affiliates, Affiliate
1 might be credited with 30% of the sales value and Affiliate 2 with 70% for example.
Keeping customers

This approach is useful since it indicates the value of display advertising – a common
phenomenon is the halo effect where display ads indirectly influence sales by creating
loyal

7
awareness and stimulating sale at a later point in time.

Attribution and the path to purchase

If you’re investing a lot, it’s essential to put time into the tricky discussion15 of which channel

15  To read more about crediting your channels, read our guide to media attribution

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 gets the credit – last or first referring, or is it weighted? Keep it simple initially and pick
one. Even if you’re not investing so much, you can use free tools like Google Analytics
Multichannel analysis explained in our media attribution guide to understand your customer
journeys.

Strategy Recommendation 35  Analyse your customer “path to purchase” to credit chan-

Managing digital
nels and keywords correctly

strategy
Use attribution modeling to adjust your investment in the media mix.

More on this in the section on selecting the right mix, but we wanted to flag it up here, since
it’s so important.

Review your
marketplace
Define allowable cost per acquisition
rr Q. Realistic minimum cost per acquisition defined?
Digital media are often costly because of the targeting they offer. So it’s essential to set a
realistic maximum cost of using different digital media channels to attract visitors and convert
them. This is the cost-per-acquisition (CPA) (sometimes cost-per-action or sale).

Define your
future
Strategy Recommendation 36  Define allowable cost per acquisition
An allowable cost per acquisition will help you control your costs and CPA enables you to
compare media.

To control costs, it is important for managers to define a target allowable cost-per-acquisition

Targeting
such as £30 for generating a business lead or £50 for achieving sign-up to a credit card. If
you run a transactional business, then it’s fairly obvious to set a CPA based on your average
order value and a conversion model. But this is less obvious if you’re not selling online. You
can still try to apply the principle though - work out the value of a lead or email signup.

What is it?  Cost per acquisition (CPA)

Proposition
The cost of acquiring a new customer or achieving a sale. Typically limited to the
communications cost and refers to cost per sale for new customers. May also refer to
other outcomes such as cost per quote or lead.

Using a CPA-led approach is sound, but it does have the disadvantage that it will favour Getting new
direct response media such as search and affiliate marketing and may not give sufficient
customers

credit to media that work best at generating awareness and for demand generation. This is
particularly true if you’re just assessing media using the last-click model to assess media
effectiveness. We’ll explain more in the section on media attribution.

Best Practice Tip 21  Balance your mix to include sufficient awareness-building
Keeping customers

approaches
Display advertising and PR activities can work as part of your mix to drive awareness, so
loyal

7
it’s important to invest sufficient in these.

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 Increase channel efficiency for digital media channels
rr Q. Success factors for main media channels reviewed and prioritised?
We introduced the six main digital media channels at the start of the guide:

Managing digital
strategy
Review your
marketplace
Define your
future
Targeting
Which of these channels is most important to a company will vary dramatically, but within
each there are some common success factors that will affect your returns from each channel.
We will highlight these here and then you can drill-down to read more about them in the
individual 7 Steps Guides or discuss them with your agency or team members responsible

Proposition
for them.

Recommended resource?  Search and social media marketing guides

We believe that search and social media marketing are the most important channels for
growing your audience cost-effectively. See our detailed 7 Step Guides to these channels
for a DIY approach to improving their effectiveness or reviewing with your agency/clients: Getting new
customers

þþ Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) 7 Steps Guide

þþ Google Adwords Paid Search 7 Steps Guide
þþ Social media marketing 7 Steps Guide
Keeping customers

For each of these you should review your current capabilities and then tackle the success
factors that you feel are the biggest levers that are going to get you results.
loyal

Strategy Recommendation 37  Identify the main success or efficiency factors for each
channel to make them more effective and then work with specialists to improve efficiency.

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 Effectiveness describes how successful each media is in meeting your overall business
goals of delivering the right message and outcome. Efficiency is the quality of execution in
delivering cost efficiencies and response.

Managing digital
1. Making search more efficient

strategy
r Q. Search marketing acquisition strategy reviewed?
The search marketing strategy is in two main parts - to gain visibility in the paid and natural
results and so encourage brand awareness and click through.
r Q. SEO acquisition strategy reviewed?

Review your
marketplace
You will see from the 7 Steps Guide to SEO that the main success factors are:

rr Keyphrase research and targeting

rr On-page optimisation (match of content and document markup to keyphrases searched)

rr Universal or blended search (images, videos, maps, product content)

Define your
rr Off-page optimisation (link-building), particularly through attracting links through content

future
rr Internal linking and site structure

rr Social media optimisation (integration with SEO and online PR)

Social media signals are increasingly important to SEO, so it’s important to integrate with
E-PR activities.

Targeting
r Q. Adwords acquisition strategy reviewed?

rr Keyphrase targeting - gap analysis with Google Analytics

rr Quality score review

rr Campaign structure

Proposition
rr Match type review including balance between broad and negatives

rr Excluding or harnessing the Google Display Network (GDN)

2. Making social media more efficient

Getting new
r Q. Social media acquisition strategy reviewed?
customers

rr Quality of messaging and offer to sign-up on social channels

rr Review of e-communications strategy (effectiveness of value of content shared and

engagement messages and frequency)
Keeping customers

rr Quality of interactions and sharing on social channel

loyal

rr Integration of social channels with business goals 7

rr Social media optimisation including integration of social media content and sharing into a
site

3. Making online PR more efficient

r Q. Online PR acquisition strategy reviewed?

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 rr Use of influencer networks and outreach

rr Reputation management and social listening

rr Integration of PR with SEO and social media activities

Managing digital
4. Making partner marketing more efficient

strategy
r Q. Partner marketing acquisition strategy reviewed?
For affiliate marketing this includes:

rr Share of key super-affiliates and segmentation of other affiliate types

Review your
marketplace
rr Affiliate partner communications and management

rr Use of appropriate commission levels

5. Making display advertising more efficient

r Q. Display advertising acquisition strategy reviewed?

Define your
future
rr Balance of direct site advertising and ad networks

rr Quality of engagement devices

rr Creative quality

rr Direct response efficiency and branding effectiveness (awareness generation)

Targeting
6. Making acquisition email marketing more effective
r Q. Email marketing acquisition strategy reviewed?

rr Identification of suitable list partners

Proposition
rr Quality of engagement devices

rr Engagement and response follow-up

Working more with partners Getting new

customers

rr Q. Value and efficiency of offer to encourage acquisition of new leads defined?

Across the six channels, putting enough time into working with partners to keep things
integrated is important. We suggest you identify potential influencer and partner sites and
then select them carefully to ensure that you get the three-for-one benefit of referral traffic,
social sharing and inbound link equity.
Keeping customers

Strategy Recommendation 38  Put sufficient resource into influencer marketing

loyal

7
Review your influencers and put in place a method to communicate with them to
encourage sharing and collaboration.

Influencers and other forms of partners are key in modern marketing, as Jay Baer comments: 

“With a disproportionate ability to spread information and add credibility, influencers are

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 human TV stations and magazines.”
It can help to think about influencers with a hub and spoke model in mind, your site being
the hub, with influencers on different spokes. Our social radar diagram (above) helps you
think that through and prioritise different outposts, some of which will be more powerful
influencers. Once identified, true influencers and partner sites need to be treated with the

Managing digital
respect they deserve, your business is effectively in a relationship, and like any relationship

strategy
it develops over time and is based on respect, trust and a lot of giving. You wouldn’t expect a
relationship to develop any other way.

ACT: Improving customer journeys, interactions and leads

Review your
marketplace
Define your
future
After successfully reaching potential customers to attract them to your website or social
media, the next challenge is to encourage them to interact with you. We have a separate
‘interact’ stage within RACE before ‘Convert’ since most prospects will not convert
immediately, they will want to learn about you and your products and services through more
site visits.
What is it? ACT

Targeting
The Act part of RACE focuses on persuading site visitors or prospects to take the next
step, the next Action on their journey when they initially reach your site or social network
presence. The main aim is to generate leads or at least encourage visitors deeper into your
site to learn more about you.

Proposition
As a business, you will want to nurture visitors to explain more about your offerings and
persuade them to convert using retargeting via email and advertising. This will work best if
you can generate a lead or email contact you can follow-up upon.

Recommended resource?  Act: RACE Planning Elearning

In the Act lessons in the RACE Elearning module (sign-in required) members can learn
Getting new
customers

detailed actionable recommendations on these techniques to improve website customer

journeys, content marketing aimed at improving lead generation.
þþ 3.1 Improve customer journeys
þþ 3.2 Lead capture and audience profiling
Keeping customers

þþ 3.3 Optimize content marketing

þþ 3.4 Optimize Landing Pages
loyal

7
þþ 3.5 Campaign and Content Planning

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 Defining the required interactions - micro-conversion

The way to persuade your site or social page visitors action is to use interactive tools to com-
municate with your audience. Common interactions on a website, social media or in a mobile
app for prospects are:

Managing digital
þþ 1. Clicking through to the next page through a call-to-action (CTA) or ‘Scent trail’, either in

strategy
the navigation or ‘in-line’ within the page.
þþ 2. Registering with a site via a form - this is a contact or ‘lead’ added to the database.
þþ 3. Adding user-generated content (such as a comment or a review)
þþ 4. Liking or sharing content
þþ 5. Liking or following a business

Review your
marketplace
þþ 6. Completing a deeper interaction such as completing a quiz, game or calculator.
þþ 7. Sharing content or following a brand on social networks
These interactions are sometimes known as micro-conversion steps, so from a strategy
point-of-view, the takeaway is to measure and continuously improve conversion for these
micro-steps and the quality of the experience.

Define your
future
What is it?  Micro-conversion
An intermediate step on the path to purchase, a term used by Avinash Kaushik, Digital
Marketing evangelist at Google. Through improving micro-conversion rates we increase
overall conversion rates. Here is an example of micro-conversions for a transactional site.

Targeting
Proposition
Getting new
customers

Strategy Recommendation 22 Set up micro and macro-conversion goals for the full funnel
It should be possible to view micro-conversions at the top of the funnel, i.e. what proportion
of visitors view and interact with category, product and search pages as well as the more
Keeping customers

obvious bottom of the funnel macro-conversions, i.e. add to basket/cart and checkout.
loyal

Encouraging customer interactions

As the good content starts bringing customers to your site, you then need to consider how
to encourage them on their journey, whether they’re seeking information, entertainment,
purchase or they’re just not sure.

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 As we work with clients on consultancy projects to help them get more leads from their site,
there are these stages we work through:
þþ Step 1. Define site micro and macro conversion goals and setup analytics tracking – this
is defining the Opportunity
þþ Step 2. Define audience types and customer data profiling requirements

Managing digital
þþ Step 3. Define content marketing strategy including lead generation offers and maping of

strategy
content to different audiences through the journey
þþ Step 4. Define device support - desktop, tablet and smartphone
þþ Step 5. Define Customer journeys and Conversion Paths – this is defining the Opportunity
þþ Step 6. Create a landing page plan – also defining the Strategy for customer journeys

Review your
marketplace
þþ Step 7. Optimise site page templates and journeys

Define lead acquisition offers and engagement devices

rr Q. Value and efficiency of offer to encourage acquisition of new leads defined?
So far, we have looked at how we can use media to drive visitors to a site, but as you’ll know

Define your
you can lead a horse to water, but you may need to encourage it to drink! This is where

future
thinking about the strength of content and lead generation offers will help. Remember that
in Step 4 we talked about using personas as a way of understanding customer needs and in
step 5, offering relevant types of value.
Of course you need to establish these before you plan your campaigns since these devices
will feature in your ads and communications.

Targeting
This is particularly important for non-transactional sites which is often the case in business-
to-business service sites and high-value, high-consideration consumer sites, like Laser eye
treatment. We’ll take a look at some examples in a moment. The need is also the case with
transactional sites where you can encourage the first purchase through a loyalty bonus or
“hero products”.

Proposition
But, going back to non-transactional sites, here you need to go back to basic permission
marketing principles for success.

Permission marketing
Permission marketing is an established approach that still gives a practical foundation for
CRM and online customer engagement. ‘Permission marketing’ is a term coined by Seth Getting new
customers

Godin way back in 1999, but it’s still valid and we think that many still don’t work hard enough
to get permission. These days it’s more commonly known as Inbound marketing.

What is it?  Permission marketing

Customers agree (opt in) to be involved in an organization’s marketing activities by email,
social networks or traditional channels in return for the value offered.
Keeping customers
loyal

The classic exchange is based on information or entertainment – a B2B site can offer a free 7
report in exchange for a customer sharing their e-mail address and details, while a B2C site
can offer a newsletter or company Facebook page with valuable content and offers. This is
stage 2 in this process:

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 Managing digital
strategy
Review your
marketplace
It’s worthwhile optimising this process to ensure you’re using the best engagement devices,

Define your
messaging and placement to maximise lead generation.

future
What is it?  Engagement devices
A call-to-action that encourages visitors to the site to interact. If these also enable capture
of leads, these are lead-generation devices.

To improve the effectiveness of your permission marketing, ask these questions:

Targeting
E-permission marketing checklist - how effective are our engagement devices?
rr Appeal and range of devices? How effective compared to competitors?

rr Balance of lead-generation and non-lead generation devices

Proposition
rr Placement - engagement devices have to be located within the right type of content, for
example, product pages or brand pages.

rr Call-to-action? Lead generation offers need to have clear benefits stated

rr Ability to track (see the section on event tracking in our Google Analytics guide) Getting new
customers

rr Type of engagement device

rr Videos

rr Content download

rr Poll, survey or interactive quiz

Keeping customers

rr Social recommendation (share through social networks or email)

loyal

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 Strategy Recommendation 39  Review engagement and lead-generation devices
Check that you have the best methods of generating leads within your budget. Review
the range of engagement devices you have against competitors. Use testing to review
the messaging and placement of offers to maximise conversion. It’s best to use a mix
of engagement devices that include both those that include lead generation and do not

Managing digital
require registration to maximise reach.

strategy
CONVERT” Increasing conversion rates online and offline
rr Q. Conversion effectiveness reviewed and optimisation progress in place?

Review your
marketplace
Define your
future
Recommended resource?  Customer conversion RACE Planning Elearning
In the Convert lesson in the e-learning module (sign-in required) members can learn our
recommendations on these techniques to improve conversion of leads:

Targeting
þþ 4.1 Lead nurturing and Remarketing
þþ 4.2 Web Personalization
þþ 4.3 Improve mobile experience
þþ 4.4 Multichannel selling
þþ 4.5 Creating a CRO programme

Proposition
Create a conversion model to help define realistic goals
rr Q. Conversion model used to calculate realistic targets for goal volume?

Strategy Recommendation 40  Develop conversion models to set realistic

Getting new
customers

online channel goals and returns for media investment

Conversion models can help you set realistic goals from online marketing. Once
your goals are defined you can review your progress towards them and make the
improvements necessary to succeed.
Keeping customers

A conversion model budget is essential if you’re serious about getting return on investment
loyal

since it helps set quantitative targets to hit. Use this spreadsheet16 we have developed to 7
help set the right goals for creating an annual or campaign-based investment in digital media:
See the ‘Read me’ on the spreadsheet for further explanation - there are separate tabs for
media shown as column and row-based.

16  Smart Insights: Digital Marketing Media Planning budget

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 Managing digital
strategy
Review your
marketplace
To implement a ‘real-world’ version of this for larger organisations where targets can be set

Define your
future
and reviewed on a monthly basis, see our Acquisition-budget spreadsheet which is available
for Business-level Expert members17.

Understand your conversion drivers (and barriers)

rr Q. Loyalty drivers understood?

Targeting
Success factor mapping is a useful approach to improve any aspect of your digital marketing,
but it’s particularly important to apply when trying to improve conversion and loyalty.

Strategy Recommendation 41  Understand conversion drivers for purchase and interaction
Analyse, through web analytics and customer research, which factors are most important
in facilitating or blocking the path to purchase and other forms of engagement on the site.

Proposition
Here’s an example of how Dell apply this approach to their retail site. It highlights the main
levers that need to be pulled to improve results.

Getting new
customers
Keeping customers
loyal

17  Smart Insights: Online Customer Acquistion Spreadsheet

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 Using structured experiments to improve performance
rr Q. We have evaluated the relevance of AB and multivariate testing?
Once you have identified the levers which affect conversion on your site that will give you the
biggest potential improvements, we recommend you invest in a structured improvement or
CRO programme if your site is big enough to warrant it.

Managing digital
strategy
Developing a conversion rate optimisation strategy is far from one-dimensional, it means
bringing a lot of disciplines to the table, including understanding traffic sources, visitor
psychology, and the company’s position in the marketplace, including its core strengths and
weaknesses. On top of that there’s usability testing, copywriting, and web design factors
to look at. All of these elements go into creating a hypotheses for testing, and then getting
maniacal about testing. The aim is not to throw a series of “best practices” against the wall to

Review your
marketplace
see if anything sticks. Best practices should not be the answer to optimizing a website, they
are the starting point for formulating a test strategy.
Consider reviewing different visitor segments18, though a head-line conversion may look
strong, maybe a bounce rate <25%, you want to go beyond the over-arching conversion
rates to find problems and opportunities at the deeper level.

Define your
Best Practice Tip 23  Check you’re using segments to analyse behaviour

future
Use a structured approach to segment visitors with different needs and characteristics
and then apply these segments to Google Analytics – e.g. from search, affiliates, first time
customers.

Think about where people are being routed through your site, much like an air traffic

Targeting
controller landing your planes on the right runway according to their origin and then routing
them to the right terminal gate as efficiently as possible by using the best signposts and
scent trails. Google makes this relatively straight forward, though of course you can layer this
on top of those visitor segments if it made sense to dig deeper.
Since some of the tools are free, the main cost is learning about the tools and running the
tests, so it could even be worthwhile for smaller sites.

Proposition
Strategy Recommendation 42  Invest time in “conversion rate optimisation” (CRO) experi-
ments to improve pages and journeys
AB and multivariate testing enables you to test improvements to site layout, messaging and
offers in a structured way rather than based on gut feel and ad-hoc testing. Getting new
customers

What is it?  AB testing

AB testing refers to testing two (or more) different versions of a page which contain
different page elements such as a heading, images or button against a control which is the
original page.
Keeping customers

Best Practice Tip 24  Use the right tools for managing page optimisation experiments
loyal

Tools like Google Content Experiments enable you to modify existing pages through 7
Javascript while others such as ion Interactive and Unbounce manage the creation of
landing pages also. www.whichmvt.com provides a great summary.

18  Read this post on Advanced Segment options in Google Analytics to see how you can
understand different customer groups better.

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 Here is an example of the benefits of this form of testing where landing page conversion
rates have been improved by 86 percent and acquisition costs were almost halved. In this
case it was found that the addition of additional bullet points on the right of the screen
increased conversion.

Managing digital
strategy
Review your
marketplace
Source: PRWD

Survey visitors about their visit intent and satisfaction with their experience

Define your
future
rr Q.Visitor intent-satisfaction surveys completed?
A visitor intent survey involves asking the user why they visited the site through an exit
survey. We think they’re essential since your web analytics will only tell you so much – what
visitors DO, not what they FEEL. See this post for the full range of tools available19

Strategy Recommendation 43  Ensure you use qualitative tools to get feedback

Targeting
from site visitors
Use visitor intent surveys and site feedback tools to understand journeys and satisfaction
with the content you offer.

4Q Survey is a free exit survey tool we recommend for rating intent (reason to visit site) and

Proposition
satisfaction – so you can see which journeys are most common and which are most broken.
The free-form text comments will give you qualitative info on which factors are causing
problems as will other tools like Kampyle.

Getting new
customers
Keeping customers
loyal

19  Smart Insights: Website feedback tools review

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 Perhaps more importantly, you can use the website as a platform to get feedback on your
whole proposition. For example Uservoice enables a customer panel to suggest and rate
ideas for new products.

Best Practice Tip 25  Use feedback tools to get customer panel feedback

Managing digital
Using services such as Uservoice and Ideascale you can gain ideas and ratings on new
product and service ideas.

strategy
A couple of higher-end enterprise services less suited to the small business that can be used
for this purpose are Confirmit and Forseeresults.

Review your
marketplace
Use your analytics system to identify broken customer journeys
rr Q. Do we have optimisation processes for reviewing and improving performance?
Many sites have Google Analytics or other systems installed, but it’s not so often used
for in-depth analysis. There are many reasons why this could be, but it’s most likely
that management doesn’t provide the resources to make this happen, so staff work on
operational issues like content and campaigns rather than optimisation.

Define your
future
Strategy Recommendation 44  Provide sufficient resource for site optimisation
To compete and grow resource and process has to be found for optimisation to happen
continuously. This sets apart the most capable digital marketing companies from the also
rans.

Targeting
Think of your capabilities. How do you rate compared to these four stages. Is optimisation
happening continuously, occasionally or not all?

AIMING FOR DIGITAL Take your digital marketing to the next level with our
capability assessment. Use our visual checklist to audit
how well your business or clients are using analytics to

ANALYTICS EXCELLENCE

Proposition
review and improve results from digital marketing.

#ActionableAnalytics 4. Quantified
5. Optimised

3. Defined
2. Managed
Cross-business
1. Initial Dedicated experience
integration and
Wider use in business and media optimisation
collaboration
HiPPO engaged Dedicated analysts resources to implement
A. Management No engagement Simple reporting (larger businesses)
and Resourcing No dedicated resource Getting new
customers

Satisfaction scoring
B. Metrics Marketing outcomes Customer Lifetime value
None selected Financial value or proxy KPI dependencies
Selection Last click Media attribution models
Simple media attribution

Basic web analytics + Customer-feedback + Voice of customer +Real-time social media + Predictive analytics
C. Tools
Basic Social media + Basic social analytics + Personalisation + Offline report + Econometric models
(Typical types)
Basic Email reporting + Benchmarking tools + BI visualisation + CRM/Individual tracking (large businesses)

Goals Segmentation
D. Analytics ‘Out-of-box’ Automated real-time
Custom reports Events Fulll dashboards
Customisation standard reports alerts
Mailed reports Simple threshhold alerts
Keeping customers

Personalisation system 360 degree

E. Integration None Email integration Social media integration
Marketing Automation customer view
loyal

None /
Persona consideration
AB Tests
7
F. Optimisation Simple in-page and visitor Multivariate Testing Optimisation of
HiPPO-led Media testing
path analysis Personalisation

Increase in number of
G. Review No structured reviews and Regular 90-day planning defining
Continuous programme tests
Process WILFING (weekly, monthly) programme of testing
of new techniques

“Directionless” “Reporting” “Structured testing” “Customer-centric“ “Optimising”

Visit our hub page www.smartinsights.com/ Join our Expert members to learn how to achieve more
Check our blog for lots of examples of how to
actionableanalytics for our free blog articles, fast actionable analytics by improving KPIs, people, process and
Plan, Manage and Optimize your digital marketing
start checklist. tools using our templates and guided learning

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 CRO is relatively easy to tackle if you’re a retailer since at the business level, you’re going to
look at conversion rate to sale, sales units and basket value. This is great of course but also
look at the whole funnel – not just the checkout, but the top of the funnel too. Review how
many are engaging with different types of products, responding to offers and even getting
beyond the home page?

Managing digital
If you’re not a retailer, then you have to identify other ways to demonstrate value to the

strategy
business from CRO. This is serious stuff since web investment and marketing activity need
to align from the perspective of sales managers or managing directors. It’s easier to do that
you might think, as marketing managers working within the TUI Travel Group at www.i-to-i.
com we needed to be able to define the value of leads based on average order value and
conversion rate to sale. Knowing a brochure enquirer is worth, say £1 changes everyone’s
perspective, knowing that people who completed 3 lead types are worth £50 changes

Review your
marketplace
perspective at the business level again (those sample values are made up of course!).
Management is immediately empowered to enter in to healthy and relevant discussion
surrounding website conversion and all that encompasses. All the best for convincing your
colleagues of the need for CRO. For recommendations on setting up a CRO programme, see
our CRO briefing for business-level Expert members.

Define your
future
Targeting
Proposition
Getting new
customers
Keeping customers
loyal

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 SEVEN
Strategy: Keeping customers engaged and loyal
Much of what is written about online marketing looks at using tactics like Adwords, SEO,

Managing digital
Social media and landing pages to increase acquisition of new customers. But savvy

strategy
business people know that it’s a massive mistake to neglect communications and service for
existing customers.

ENGAGE: Improving customer retention using digital marketing

Review your
marketplace
Define your
future
Engaging with existing customers is also one of the biggest challenges in online marketing.
Sure, you may able to get someone to visit or buy from your site once. But getting them to do
the same again is just as challenging. Even more challenging if you don’t get their experience
right the first time.

Targeting
Recommended resource?  Customer retention guides
In larger businesses, customer retention and growth is usually managed as a separate
activity with its own team for which a separate customer retention team and budget will
be required. If this is relevant for you and if you have Business-level Expert membership
we recommend downloading our Customer retention guide by customer loyalty specialist

Proposition
Andrew Campbell.
Smaller businesses can consult the Engage section in the E-learning module (sign-in
required) which covers these essential retention activities:
þþ 1. Customer on-boarding and growth
þþ 2. Improving digital experience for customers Getting new
customers

þþ 3. Customer service and success

þþ 4. Email marketing
þþ 5. Social media marketing

To get this part of your online marketing right you need a strong brand. At this level,
Keeping customers

competing effectively is simply down to the strength of one brand against another. So you
loyal

have to work out which aspects of your brand encourage loyalty and advocacy from your 7
audience. A brand that is strong online will offer:
þþ Great experience. Ease of use and enjoyable interactions combined with quality service.
þþ Great communications. Compelling, relevant communications which engage and will be
shared.
þþ Great community. Gives customers a reason to belong - to be part of a tribe or

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 community
þþ Great connections. Links to complimentary partners or to the offline experience of the
brand.
þþ Great value. Value through great deals, great product and great content.

Managing digital
Putting this together we need to open and maintain conversation, ask questions, listen, build

strategy
better products and market in a more relevant way; to add value to the relationship with the
consumer. There are no quick tips we can give here, but we can offer this structure which will
step you through the decisions you need to make to work towards long-term relationships.
We start Step 7 by looking at how to encourage online brand engagement since
understanding the reasons for the current level of online engagement is key to boosting

Review your
marketplace
future online interactions. What we need to understand are the loyalty drivers and barriers.
What will encourage and discourage customers from making future purchases and
interacting with our brand online?

Understand current levels of online brand engagement

Define your
rr Q. Approaches to encourage brand engagement reviewed?

future
In 2007, Forrester heralded customer engagement as “Marketing’s New Key Metric” due to
the rapidly increasing online media fragmentation and increasing importance of social media
marketing. We agree about the importance of understanding and improving engagement
- that’s why we made it the ‘E’ in our RACE framework! For customer engagement in an
online context, it’s a mistake to restrict understanding of engagement to engagement on a
single occasion, like a visitor dwelling on a site for a significant time or converting to sale.

Targeting
Instead engagement really refers to the long-term ability of a brand to gain a customers
attention on an ongoing basis whether the engagement could occur on site, in third-party
social networks or in email or traditional direct communications.

Strategy Recommendation 45  Review engagement and use it to drive retention

Proposition
Find out how engaging your brand is now for different segments and what it’s most
important to do to enhance engagement.

Forrester analyst Brian Haven says:

“Using engagement, you get a more holistic appreciation of your customers’ actions, Getting new
customers

recognizing that value comes not just from transactions but also from actions people take
to influence others. Once engagement takes hold of marketing, marketing messages will
become conversations, and dollars will shift from media buying to customer understanding.”
Richard Sedley of Seren (www.seren.com) has developed this definition of engagement
which works well.
Keeping customers

What is it?  Customer engagement

loyal

Repeated interactions that strengthen the emotional, psychological or physical investment 7

a customer has in a brand.

Richard explains this in our interview with him20:

20  Smart Insights: Richard Sedley on Customer Engagement

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!
 “The two key words here are ‘repeated’ and ‘investment’. A simple focus on maximising
conversions can, in some circumstances, decrease the likelihood of repeat conversions.
Think of that pushy door-to-door salesman.
You might buy something from him but what is the likelihood that you will repeat that
purchase, or recommend his services to a friend?

Managing digital
Customer engagement places the strategic emphasis on the creation of valuable

strategy
relationships and encourages both parties to see mutual advantage in that relationship.
Frequently this will mean that your tactics require a multi-channel approach incorporating
the best of digital and traditional media. I see the ability to effective blend media in its type,
quantity and timing (known as Right-touching) as one of the key challenges in the coming
years.

Review your
marketplace
Forrester developed this framework you can apply to measure engagement through the
customer lifecycle and also away from a brands own site, such as on publisher sites or social
networks.
1. Involvement. Forrester says that online, this includes web site visits, time spent, pages
viewed.
2. Interaction. This is contributed comments to blogs, quantity/frequency of written reviews,

Define your
and online comments as well as comments expressed in customer service. [We could add

future
the recency, frequency and category of product purchases and also ongoing engagement in
email marketing programmes as discussed later in this chapter are important here]
3. Intimacy. This is sentiment tracking on third-party sites including blogs and reviews, as
well as opinions expressed in customer service calls
4. Influence. This is advocacy indicated by measures such as like likelihood to recommend,

Targeting
brand affinity, content forwarded to friends, etc. It should be measured by data collected both
online and offline.
Since customer experience is so important to loyalty we have developed this capability
review to help members think about how they manage customer experience.

Proposition
ONLINE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE Improve your online customer experience by using
our visual checklist to review your capabilities for

EXCELLENCE REVIEW
management, evaluation and personalisation.

5. Optimised
4. Quantified
3. Defined
2. Managed
1. Initial Dedicated team
Clear responsibilities in
each area of business
Getting new
Defined individual
customers
(larger organisation)
Ad hoc - cross-functional responsible
A. Responsibility No defined responsibility responsibility

Value of interactions Long-term value Detailed understanding of

B. Evaluation and Volume of Quality of interactions and
Simple satisfaction Long-term engagement Loyalty and satisfaction
KPIs interactions short-term engagement
assessment (Hurdle rates) drivers

C. Journey
Limited understanding Path analysis in analytics Cross-channel analysis
Analysis Visitor intent surveys Usability studies
of journeys Simple funnels e.g. panels
Techniques
Keeping customers

Ad hoc tests
Ad hoc changes Continuous structured
D. CRO Process No optimisation Simple AB test Multivariate testing
“Suck-it-and-see” testing programme
on key pages
loyal

E. Personalisation
Techniques
None
Specific content
for Personas
Limited dynamic
personalisation
Cross-journey
personalisation
Optimising
personalisation
7
Website not integrated Simple cross-channel Mobile support Full range of cross- Optimised multichannel
F. Integration
with other channels signposts and offers Remarketing (paid media) channel services integration

Web Analytics Simple analytics

G. Tools Personalisation Advanced Personalisation Real-time feedback tools
(not customised) customisation. Surveys.

“Hope for the best” “Taking control” “Pulling all main levers” “Long-term perspective“ “State-of-the-art”

Improve your ROI from Online marketing with Check out our hub page http://bit.ly/smartexperience Join our Expert members to download best practice advice
Smart Insights member resources. for our free blog articles and Ecommerce “Bible”. and templates on improving Ecommerce Marketing.

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 Set goals to improve engagement

Using hurdle rates to assess and set goals

rr Q. Hurdle rates used to assess and set goals for customer engagement?
Although the idea of hurdle rates seems to be quite widely used within finance and

Managing digital
investment circles, we rarely hear it discussed with digital marketing. But they’re one of the

strategy
most important types of measures for improving online retention marketing since they enable
enable you to set actionable goals.

What is it?  Hurdle rate

The hurdle rate for engagement is simply the percentage of customers who perform an

Review your
marketplace
activity, they have jumped over the hurdle target you set.

A hurdle rate is the proportion of customers that fall within a particular level of activity or
engagement with a brand typically within a time period. This is usually expressed as a target
percentage and the number who have achieved it.
For example, the percentage of members of an email list that click on the email within a 90

Define your
day period, or the percentage of customers that have made a second purchase within 90

future
days, or the percentage of your audience that has logged into your network within 90 days.
So, hurdle rates enable you to assess how many of your audience are engaged with your
marketing activities. You can then set targets to use communications to encourage more
customers to “jump the hurdle” or engage with you.

Targeting
Hurdle rate examples
Here are some examples we’ve used in different areas of digital marketing:
þþ Email marketing – the level of emotionally unsubscribed – the % who never open or never
click in a 6 month period .
þþ Email marketing - the level of active subscribers – the reverse – the % of visitors that
have clicked within a 6 month period.

Proposition
þþ Social media and community – likewise – the % of active followers – if you have a
Facebook page, Facebook will tell you the proportion of monthly active users. Similarly
you could calculate average clickthrough rates across a month in Twitter to see how
many of your audience responded. I’m not sure of a simple way to do this. Any ideas?
þþ Banking – The % of active online account holders – 90 day active is a standard we Getting new
customers

believe – the % of online customers who log in at least once in that period. You can also
set goals for different activities like checking a balance, using online payment services,
etc.
þþ Intranet or communities – the same principle can be applied to how many log-in to a
subscription site and the activities they perform. How many bloggers leave comments for
example.
Keeping customers

þþ Retail – how hurdle rates can be used for Recency, Frequency and Monetary value. We
loyal

picked up this concept from Jim Novo a while back - this is original post which is still 7
worth a read, particularly if you work in retail21.

21  http://www.jimnovo.com/RetailCustomerRetention.htm

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 Understand your loyalty drivers (and barriers)
rr Q. Loyalty drivers understood?
Success factor mapping is a useful approach to improve any aspects of your digital
marketing, but it’s particularly important to think of with improving loyalty. A general analysis
of loyalty drivers for a retail site is shown on the loyalty map below.

Managing digital
strategy
Strategy Recommendation 46  Understand loyalty drivers for purchase and interaction
Analyse through customer research which factors are most responsible for continued
purchase. It’s also useful to understand what influences continued social following and
interaction. Once you understand the loyalty drivers you can work to knock down the
barriers that may prevent these.

Review your
marketplace
You may know this technique as ‘cause and effect analysis’, Ishikawa or ‘fishboning’. With
this approach, the ultimate objective is placed at the right of the diagram and the success
factors or performance drivers that will help achieve this outcome are placed on the left of the
diagram (a more typical format for this diagram is shown later). 

Define your
future
Targeting
Proposition
Getting new
customers
Keeping customers

Note: Touch strategy includes social network interactions.

loyal

For online retention marketing, our ultimate goal on the right of the diagram is customer 7
loyalty. The factors on the left help to deliver two main drivers of loyalty.
First,we’re looking for emotional loyalty where loyalty to a brand is demonstrated by
favourable perceptions, opinions and recommendations including social sharing. The
success factors at the top of the diagram which are all related to the customer experience
of your online services. These tend to influence emotional loyalty the most and these are

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 important in determining customer satisfaction. Of course, a favourable customer experience
is, very important to achieving repeat purchases – how many online sites have you continued
to use after a poor level of service was delivered?
The second type of loyalty is behavioural loyalty where loyalty relates to repeat sales,
repeated site visits, social interactions and response to marketing campaigns. To achieve

Managing digital
these repeat sales, companies work hard to deliver relevant marketing communications

strategy
either through e-mail or web-based personalisation or through direct mail.

Examples of satisfaction gap analysis

Let’s now look at a couple of computer-related examples of this gap analysis.
First, a computer manufacturer looked at the buying experience across the customer

Review your
marketplace
lifecycle:

Define your
future
Targeting
Proposition
Getting new
customers

You can see there is a big gap in service here. For each of the factors you can think through
how the web channel can help, although here the offline channel needs fixing!
Here’s an example of how Dell tackle this. Dell treat loyalty seriously; over 10 years ago they
created a customer experience council that researched key loyalty drivers across different
Keeping customers

channels, identified measures to track these and put in place an action plan to improve
loyalty. Examples of their loyalty drivers and KPIs they used to review performance are:
loyal

7
1. Order fulfilment. Ship to target. % that ship on time exactly as the customer specified.
2. Product performance. Initial field incident rate – the frequency of problems experienced by
customers.
3. Post sale service and support. On-time, first-time fix – the percentage of problems fixed on
the first visit by a service rep who arrives at the time promised.

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 You can see that similar loyalty drivers can be identified for an e-retailer, i.e. Deliver on
target, time to resolve different queries and returns.
Once the problems have been identified you will have to look at the reasons inside the
company for the inefficiency. This is an example of a “fish-tail” analysis from Dell. It’s an
approach we recommend to help nail problems and opportunities.

Managing digital
strategy
Review your
marketplace
Define your
future
Targeting
Once you’re able to understand and leverage consumer motivation, need, intent and/or
purchase history then there’s the potential to re-market and so re-engage with someone
much more easily, since you can really speak to them. How this is done is dependent on
what kind of organisation you are in terms of budgets and resources available.

Recommended resource?  Ecommerce Success Mapping

Proposition
Our Ecommerce Success Mapping template can be used as a management tool to help
you review and work on improving the key factors that drive online sales.

Asking customers what they think Getting new

customers

rr Q. Customer feedback obtained regularly?

So, how can you get this data? We will talk about quite a few different feedback tools here22.
Here are some ideas:
rr On site survey tools. Get data from those masses who do nothing on your site, tools like
4Q and Kampyle are great since they’re low commitment, fast and anonymous. It’s impor-
Keeping customers

tant to learn what people are interested in and why people are losing interest and leaving.
loyal

rr Email surveys. Good if you lack a steady stream of data and prefer to ad-hoc, mass ques- 7
tioning of your database, annually for example. It’s the most common form of insights
gathering though often done last minute when things feel broken. Better is designing
insight capture into the marketing and sales process in a robust way, for example using

22  Smart Insights: customer feedback tools review

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 email sequences since it brings the consumer to the marketing table. Of course you can
target particular groups of customers with email, so they’re powerful in this sense.
rr Ask during key processes. Avoid asking everything at once! Build relevant data capture
at key buyer stages so that you learn more about your consumer as they near purchase,
and beyond. This can be as simple questions built into existing enquiry, purchase and

Managing digital
post purchase forms using tools like Qualaroo that are specifically designed for this. Think

strategy
also about using tools such as Get Satisfaction for feedback too since it offers you pro-
gression into a feedback community and crowd-sourcing. You can also use the “Watch
don’t ask” approach of using analytics to see what customers click on or don’t click on.

Encouraging online brand engagement

Review your
marketplace
rr Q. Approaches to encourage brand engagement reviewed?
Valuable content is at the heart of online brand engagement. On-topic content enables you to
demonstrate a continued relevance to consumers who are buying certain types of products
from you, or at least they’re giving you indicators as to what is motivating and helping solve
problems in their world. A great example of this are the enewsletters from Lakeland23.
Blogs are a way to centralise this, to form the content hub, then repurposing your content

Define your
future
into Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ represent additional ways to reach (with
permission) and so re-connect. Layer on segmented email communications to such solid
social media programme and you’re pioneering brand communications! Being useful adds
an incomparable value to a consumer relationship post purchase as well as keep you front of
mind.
This approach has obvious potential for re-promotion of your products in the right way, and

Targeting
at the right time, adding value and re-engaging re-affirms relevance and earns you that
right. It’s right-side up marketing in that sense since it has an inbound effect over interruptive
outbound promotions that feel random to the recipient.
You may say it’s simplistic, but we think it’s worthwhile brainstorming all the ways to
encourage repeat visits to an online presence like a website or social site. Here’s our
braindump from the simple question: “What will encourage site visitors and customers to visit

Proposition
our website or social network community again in future?”
We’ve tried to keep it general, so it applies to different types of business. Techniques tend to
work both for websites and your Facebook presence. Here are some ideas. What would you
add?
Getting new
customers

Value
This is more important than the push comms, ask how your site can add real value to help
people’s day-to-day life and business. This based on the need for a content strategy.
Keeping customers
loyal

23  Lakeland Enewsletter example entertains, educates and sells through investment in
quality content

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!
 rr Regular features. It’s publishing 101, readers return to what they like. So find your most
popular content and offers and encourage visitors to return to it.

rr Exclusive deals. Likewise it’s merchandising 101, make your audience on a channel
make feel special through special online-only or channel-only loyalty rewarding deals and
keep them regular.

Managing digital
rr Different content offers and formats. Different strokes for different folks. What’s

strategy
popular will vary, so don’t make your content and formats too narrow. In the content
marketing guide we talk about the sell-inform-entertain balance; you need a bit of each
with the balancing varying depending on your audience.

rr Community. People like to hang-out, share ideas, so make sure you emphasise the
watercooler conversations offer, not just the content and deals you offer.

Review your
marketplace
Push communications
Next, think how you can best communicate these engagement offers. Let’s start with the
most obvious techniques:

rr Email marketing : Enewsletters and campaign offers still work if the relevance is right!

Define your
future
rr Social channels: Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+

rr Display advertising: Remarketing is good at reminding previous site visitors to go

through to the site

rr Traditional communications: If you’re using direct mail as part of your marketing mix,
then offer reminders of the value available online

Targeting
Encouraging customer advocacy
rr Q. Approaches to encourage advocacy reviewed?
As you develop your retention communications think how you can encourage and reward
loyalty and sharing.

Proposition
E-CRM and data profiling approach reviewed?
rr Q. E-CRM and data profiling approach reviewed?
We can refine Seth Godin’s permission marketing ideas, which have been described in the Getting new
previous steps, to make them more practical to apply to retention marketing.
customers

Permission marketing E-permission marketing

Opt-in Selective opt-in

Opt-out Selective opt-out
Keeping customers

Initial profiling Communications preferences

loyal

Continued profiling Sense 7

Targeted communications & Respond

These are some of the key features of E-CRM implementation we suggest you work through
for your organisation.

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 rr 1. ‘Offer selective opt-in to communications’. Offer choice in communications
preferences to the customer to ensure more relevant communications. Some customers
may not want a weekly e-newsletter, rather they may only want to hear about new
product releases. Remember opt-in and providing opt-out is a legal requirement in most
countries.

Managing digital
Four key opt-in options, selected by tick-box are:

strategy
rr Content – News, products, offers, events

rr Frequency – weekly, monthly, quarterly, or alerts

rr Channel – Email, direct mail, phone or SMS

rr Format – Text vs HTML vs Mobile and now a choice of mobile as Amazon have in

Review your
marketplace
their preference centre

Define your
future
Targeting
Proposition
This is an example of a preference centre or customer profile. Although many mega-brands
use these, they are now within the reach of smaller companies through low-cost E-CRM
tools, IF they have a strategy that acknowledges their importance.

Best Practice Tip 26  Create a customer communications preferences centre Getting new
customers

A preference centre enables customers to adjust the frequency and type of

communications so increasing the likelihood of engagement.

rr 2. Create a ‘common customer profile’. Following on from the idea of a preferences

centre. A structured approach to customer data capture is needed otherwise key data is
Keeping customers

needed for delivering targeted e-mails will be missed. You don’t want to ask for lots of
loyal

details straightaway, so a preference centre enables you to gradually add data. 7

rr 3. ‘Don’t make opt-out too easy’ (selective opt-out). A bit radical, but my view is that
we often make it too easy to unsubscribe. Yes, providing a straightforward opt-out is part
of permission marketing and in many countries, a legal requirement. Although offering
some form of opt-out is now a legal requirement in many countries due to privacy laws,
a single click to unsubscribe is arguably making it too easy. Instead, wise e-permission

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 marketers use the concept of ‘My Profile’. Instead of unsubscribe, they offer a link to
a web form to update a profile, which includes the option to unsubscribe to some or
potentially all communications. Amazon’s communications preferences page is a good
example of this approach. Remember though that offering opt-out that works is a legal
requirement. Many opt-out processes still don’t work so instead subscribers may report
as spam which can hit your overall deliverability. Still, we still think there’s some merit in

Managing digital
what we said way back: The use of ‘My Profile’ can be tied to the principle of ‘selective

strategy
opt-in’ – you could call it selective opt-out. Put the ‘My profile’ option in the e-mail prompt
the user to keep their contact details up-to-date. Take care though since opt-out is a legal
requirement, many opt-out processes still don’t work so instead subscribers may report
as spam which can hit your overall deliverability.

rr 4. ‘Watch don’t ask’ – use ‘Sense and Respond’. The need to ask interruptive

Review your
marketplace
questions to better profile customers can be reduced through the use of monitoring of
clicks to better understand customer needs and to trigger follow-up communications or
‘Sense and Respond’. Some examples of personalisation through this technique include:
Monitoring click-through to different types of content or offer. The interests of individual
list members can be assessed through monitoring what they click through to. Lastminute.
com reputedly tailor their newsletters to many different template types according to

Define your
content clickthrough. For example, if you click through to theatres or city-breaks, then you

future
will receive more of this type of content in future.
þþ Monitoring the engagement of individual customers with e-mail communications. This
is achieved by monitoring trends of opening and click-through by individual customer.
These metrics indicate the level of interest of individual customers and we can monitor
how these vary through time and use follow-up communications. For example, perhaps
a buying signal is suggested by a customer who has not previously responded to e-mails

Targeting
who starts clicking through to the web site more frequently. This could be followed up by a
tailored e-mail communication or a phone call.
þþ Follow-up of response to a specific e-mail. If a B2B vendor offers information about a
new product launch which encourages click through to a landing page then they have two
main choices of follow-up. First, the form could contain a question asking about the future

Proposition
buying intentions or whether contact from a sales rep is required. Alternatively, if there
is a capability to monitor an individual who has clicked through to a page, then it may be
best to use this to prompt a call from an account manager or sales person. The second
approach may result in more sales, but of course there is a danger that the customer may
react negatively to monitoring or ‘stalking’ of this type and it is arguably not permission
marketing. Getting new
customers

Refine Ecommunications strategy

rr Q. Communications strategy in place to deliver quality content and dialogue?
You will have some form of Ecommunications strategy in place if you’re using enewsletters
and social media marketing, but you need to make it sing. Will look at how in this final section
Keeping customers

Strategy Recommendation 47  Update your ecommunications strategy to manage

loyal

7
sustained content sharing and dialogue
To maintain a strong voice online requires commitment to continuous distribution of
content. But there is also a need to encourage conversation and dialogue to maintain
interest and sharing.

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 Create a content hub
rr Q. Content hub created?
Your Ecommunications strategy should be centred on a central location for content, a
“content hub”. What do we mean by a hub? Essentially it’s a place around which you can
grow a network of interested individuals, a place where interaction or engagement with your

Managing digital
content and your brand can take place. This interaction will happen because of the quality of

strategy
your content marketing.

What is it?  Content marketing hub

Ideally this is a central branded location where your audience can access your content
marketing and interact with it. It should integrate with your other content.

Review your
marketplace
Think of the hub as the home for your content, a place for feedback and dialogue and the
connector to a number of out-posts where your brand is present (Facebook, Slideshare etc)
and being shared and discussed. You can increasingly use a social network like Facebook
as the place to build your hub, but Facebook is not an asset you can truly own in terms of
features and functions so that is risky (you never know!). Facebook also remains external

Define your
to your main brand presence, so we’d suggest that a hub is the bridge between the your

future
commercial or main website, and external out-posts like Facebook.
At a physical level of a site the content hub can be:
þþ A blog – effectively the home page
þþ A customer magazine

Targeting
þþ Your online news section
þþ A resource centre
Does the label matter? Yes it will vary by audience, so often in B2B, “Blog” or “News” is the
best approach whereas consumers may not be so familiar with blog, so a magazine may be
the best label. Here’s a good example from www.asdamagazine.com which originally used
the Wordpress blog platform, but is positioned as a magazine:

Proposition
Getting new
customers
Keeping customers
loyal

Strategy Recommendation 48  Create a central branded hub

A hub gives you a focus for your audience to find and share your content and to
participate.

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!
 So what should go into an Ecommunications strategy? Well we cover all of these in detail in
our content marketing 7 Steps guide24.

Ensure you have

Managing digital
rr 1. Guidelines for regular content update frequency

strategy
rr 2. Guidelines for content types and formats

rr 3. Create core content marketing resources

rr 4. Review options for creating and sourcing content

rr 5. Content atomization, repurposing and syndication

Review your
marketplace
rr 6. Create and update your editorial calendar

rr 7. Communicate your content marketing proposition

Review social media engagement strategy

Define your
rr Q. Social media engagement strategy reviewed

future
The ecommunications strategy is closely-related to the content and social media marketing
strategy. Read our detailed guide on social media marketing.

Your next steps?

We hope you have found this guide useful? All the best for developing and refining your

Targeting
plans. Any questions or comments, do contact us or ask any questions in the Smart Insights
Answers forum. Thanks.
Dave Chaffey. Smart Insights.

Proposition
Getting new
customers
Keeping customers
loyal

24  Smart Insights: Content marketing strategy guide

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!