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Smart Insights Is An Educational Platform For Marketers With Members In Over 100 Countries

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Below is our recent interview with Dave Chaffey, Co-founder and Content Director at Smart Insights:

Dave Chaffey

Q: Could you provide our readers with a brief introduction to Smart Insights?

A: Smart Insights is an educational platform for marketers with members in over 100 countries who learn best practices for digital marketing using our comprehensive library offering best practices templates, guides, market insights and elearning.

We help our members improve their personal digital marketing skills and businesses improve their return on digital marketing by explaining the latest techniques, best practices and how to create digital marketing strategies. To take an example, see our most popular resource which is this. This explains how to create a digital marketing plan structured around our RACE planning framework.

Q: What makes your approach different?

A: I originally set up Smart Insights because I found when consulting and training that there were some common challenges businesses experienced when seeking to increase the returns from their digital channels. These include lack of an integrated strategy, difficulty in knowing what to measure and report on and which best practices to follow since there is so much conflicting, or out-of-date advice.

Our focus is helping our members plan, manage and optimize their marketing. A lot of what is written about digital marketing online focuses on the tactics like search marketing, social media, email marketing and conversion optimization. We cover best practices for these, but our most popular toolkits explain how to structure marketing plans and strategies which isn’t discussed so oftent online.

We’re also big believers in data-driven marketing which harnesses the power of digital marketing to report on activities and then to optimize performance. We provide example calculators and dashboards which businesses can amend to create their own plans.

We have defined 25 key marketing activities within our RACE planning framework so companies can do a ‘gap analysis’ of the techniques thy ARE using against those they SHOULD be doing in future.

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Q: Why is it important to have an integrated digital marketing strategy?

A: Many medium and larger businesses have found it difficult to cope with the pace of change needed by the advances in digital technologies and platforms like Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Amazon and Apple. Often, they are using digital marketing within their campaigns, but they don’t have a structured plan, so digital marketing has grown organically and it is poorly integrated.

A planned approach to integrate digital and traditional marketing activities is needed. The options for integration are shown in this visual which shows the many options for structuring always-on communications activities around the customers’ path-to-purchase.

Some businesses still plan their marketing activity around campaigns, without sufficiently using inbound marketing to tap into the continuous demand for their products and services shown people searching for information on products and suppliers in Google or Social networks.

Q: What is the best way to create a winning Social Media Marketing strategy?

A: Success in social media marketing is dependent on engaging your audiences to share your content or offers. So for me, content strategy is at the heart of social media strategy. You need to design content which engages your audiences on different social networks, but also supports your commercial goals. It’s important to get the ‘sell-inform-entertain’ balance right. Many companies don’t quite get this right so may be too ‘salesy’ while others fail to feature their products and promotions enough.

To create a strategy, I recommend you start with this type of approach to [content mapping], by reviewing which content will emotionally engage your audiences while considering how it supports purchase.

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Q: What are your plans for the future?

A: When we launched our subscription service over five years ago, like many startup companies, we were bootstrapping and I authored many of our guides and templates based on my experience as a consultant. Today, we have 20 toolkits covering different tactics and we increasingly use external subject matter experts to give specialist advice on the latest techniques. We’re using more video-based content such as our quick wins format and e-learning. We started by providing general advice on digital strategy and planning, but in future will add to our advice specific to sectors like retail, financial services, travel, business-to-business and healthcare.

We’re also moving to more interactive formats where are members can assess their digital marketing capabilities and skills and get recommendations.

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