Introducing The RACE Growth System and RACE Planning Framework: practical tools to improve your digital marketing
How to streamline your planning and measurement of integrated digital marketing using RACE
Smart Insights created RACE as a practical tool to help marketers and business owners plan, manage and optimize their digital marketing using a more strategic, structured, and data-driven approach.
Our RACE Growth System for improving marketing effectiveness has two parts which we will introduce in this article through two different visuals:
1. The RACE Planning Framework: defines the essential activities and measures businesses need to master to survive and thrive in today’s marketing world.
2. The RACE OSA improvement process: defines the three steps needed to build and implement your growth plan – either for your overall marketing plan or for an individual channel, such as organic search, social media or email marketing.
Why use RACE?
- 1. RACE is practical and action-oriented: It focuses on tactics you can implement in your digital marketing communications channels and on your website.
- 2. RACE is customer-centred: It follows the established customer lifecycle of relationship 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.
- 3. RACE integrates all modern marketing activities: RACE covers all the many paid, owned and earned inbound marketing activities available from digital marketing. It covers always-on digital marketing activities across the customer lifecycle which are sometimes neglected in favor of the still-important campaign-based activities for launching new products and promotions. Plus, it also integrates traditional offline marketing activities.
- 4. RACE is multi-channel: Many businesses still rely on offline touchpoints to acquire and retain customers, you will see these are built into RACE, particularly as part of the ‘Convert’ stage where offline interaction is often needed to make a sale.
- 5. RACE is commercial, based on a data-driven performance improvement process: It encourages a data-driven marketing approach that defines KPIs that digital marketers should include at each stage for setting targets, reviewing results using analytics and summary dashboards and continuous optimization. For Business Members, we offer an interactive monthly reporting dashboard based on the RACE Framework using the Google Analytics API to rapidly create monthly reports using Google Data Studio.