We created the RACE Framework to help digital marketers plan and manage their digital marketing strategy in a more structured way since we found that many don’t have a well-formed digital marketing strategy.
To explain and fully define ‘What Is Digital Marketing?’ we created this popular infographic structured around the RACE Framework of plan, reach, act, convert and engage. It shows the key measures to set targets for and evaluate at each stage of the funnel.
The RACE mnemonic summarizes the key online and multichannel marketing activities that need to be managed as part of digital marketing. RACE covers the full customer lifecycle or marketing funnel from:
(Plan) > Reach > Act > Convert > Engage
There is an initial phase of PLAN, which involves creating the overall digital strategy with the help of 360 degree digital marketing solutions in India, objective setting and plan, so sometimes members call it PRACE, but we prefer RACE Planning for simplicity.
We have defined four steps of engagement across the customer lifecycle, since in online marketing there is a major challenge in gaining interaction, participation with prospects and creating those all-important Leads after the initial customer touchpoint.
These interactions, covered in the Act step can take place over several channels and touchpoints such as web, mobile, social media and email contacts, so these leads need separate management from final conversion to online or offline sale through techniques like retargeting and assisted selling.
The RACE Framework consists of these four steps or online marketing activities designed to help brands engage their customers throughout the customer lifecycle.
Looking to grow your business? Review your company’s marketing strategy opportunities and barriers across each stage of the RACE Framework to inform a data-driven approach.
Get full access to our library of RACE Framework tools and templates when you join Smart Insights as a Business Member. Find out how the RACE Framework can transform your marketing activities, so you can reach and acquire more high-value customers.
We created the RACE Framework planning system to help give a simple framework to help small and large businesses alike take the best advantage of the opportunities available from digital marketing.
In our research, we have found that, shockingly, many businesses don’t have a digital marketing strategy. When creating a digital marketing strategy, knowing how to structure it and where to start is sometimes the biggest challenge!
There are so many tools and tactics available that it’s difficult to know where to start. We hope the RACE Framework gives a structure to help you review and prioritize when there are so many options, but some options work better than others.
RACE is a practical framework to help manage and improve results from your digital marketing. It covers always-on digital marketing activities across the customer lifecycle which are sometimes neglected in favour of campaign-based activities for launching new products and promotions.
Investing time and budget in planning always-on activities is vital for many businesses to connect with customers who are researching new products by searching or asking via social media.
Ultimately, it’s about using best practice analytics 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 improve ROI.
We believe that data-driven marketing is the best approach to growing business through digital marketing. Priorities and improvements should be based on a sound evaluation and optimization process using digital analytics showing which marketing activities are effective and which aren’t. This diagram shows relevant key performance indicators (KPIs) that should be used at each stage.
Here’s an example of our recommended measures in a simpler summary of RACE KPIs which could form a dashboard – the best dashboards show not only volume and how they change through time, but also the quality of visits and the value generated.
Many of these measures can be pulled directly from Google Analytics although you will need to customize for example to record goal value or revenue per visit. For some other measures such as social mentions, you need to pull in from other tools.
For Premium 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 Docs Sheets.
The dashboard makes it easy to compare digital marketing performance through time with a focus on the key digital marketing measures across the customer lifecycle or marketing funnel defined across the RACE Framework.
For example, you can compare year-on-year or compared to the previous reporting period both overall and for each of the digital marketing channels such as organic, paid search, email and social media marketing.
All of our guidance on Smart Insights from our Learning Paths to detailed guides and templates are structured according to RACE. This is a summary of some of the main activities which our guides, templates and free blog guidance cover.
Google Analytics has over 60 reports displaying many more metrics and that’s before you start segmenting your audience… Other web analytics tools have more… This makes it difficult to know what to report; you have to identify your “critical few” Key Performance Indicators which you report on regularly to review performance and identify problems.
Digital marketing today is not just about your website, and in fact it never has been, partnering with other sites or co-marketing and influencer marketing have always potentially been important.
But today, the popularity of participation in social media with web users means that how to reach, interact, convert and maintain ongoing engagement of customers through social networks is vital to the success of a brand.
At each step in RACE you need to think how social media can help achieve your goals and how you can measure the effectiveness of social media.
Digital channels always work best when they’re integrated with other channels, so remember that where appropriate, digital channels should be combined with the traditional offline media and channels.
The most important aspects of integration are first using traditional media to raise awareness of the value of the online presences and drive visitors to the website(s) at the Reach and Engage stages.
Second, at the Convert and Engage steps stage customers may prefer to interact with customer representatives as part of the buying or customer service process.
Our dedicated Learning Path guides your through a step-by-step process to implement RACE in your digital marketing strategy and start achieving your goals today!
You can find more details about applying RACE for digital marketing planning in our FREE RACE digital marketing planning template download.
I also like to credit the REAN (Reach > Engage > Activate > Nurture) framework for web analysts which influenced my thinking back in 2010. It was originally developed by Xavier Blanc and popularised by Steve Jackson in his book Cult of Analytics of which I’m a big fan.
We devised RACE since we wanted to develop our own approach for improving digital marketing and we feel Step 2 is more about initial interactions with a brand and in step 4, customer engagement is a longer-term process.
Through 15 years of advising marketers through my books and training I’ve found that, after time has passed, all that often remains from the course as a takeaway is a framework on which to hang future actions. C’est la vie! But busy people seem to like frameworks and mnemonics to structure their actions. To help digital marketers structure their thoughts, over the years I’ve created or been involved with these frameworks too – I hope you find they’re useful – that’s what we aim for – to make marketing life simpler and more profitable.
And finally, it’s why we’re called SMART Insights – we believe the best marketers compete and win by a data-driven or insight-driven approach to marketing
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