Digital Marketing Strategy: An Integrated Approach to Online Marketing 1st Edition

This was a gift to a relative involved in digital marketing. The feedback has been very good.

The book is a very useful If the content contains a complete and easy to understand.

Total Integration Components for Digital Marketer

Is this a textbook or a route map to establishing or streamlining your digital marketing strategy? The positioning is unclear, yet it provides in any case a great host of information about digital marketing subjects that can be used by the practitioner or student as a base for their own needs.The author has consolidated a lot of relevant, practical information together in this book, acting as a bit of a ready-reference source instead of a more outwardly looking inspirational guide to doing digital marketing. This is not a criticism per se, but a reflection of how the book appears and feels. Certainly it is doing a good job and has the potential to be a closely consulted companion for many readers.It seems that the objective is not to be a “one size fits all” book, so by providing a host of strategies, theory, practical case studies and guidance the author aims to be a central resource and the reader has to pick the tools that may be best suited to their requirements and then implement them at will. This makes sense in many ways. This book can also be a more unique, personal book to each reader, since they get different benefits from their book along the way.In any case, this can be a certain “no brainer” purchase; it is competitively priced and has a lot of relevant, up-to-date information that acts as a great springboard to additional knowledge for the reader. It is more than just digital marketing too, so if you’ve forgotten some of your marketing and business theory you can brush up on this at the same time without being embarrassed!Leave some space on your bookshelf for this book!

I think what got me hooked on this book was Simon Kingsnorth highly intelligent decision not to agonise about a definition of “strategy”*. Instead, in the Introduction, he poses the questions “Can you sum up in one sentence what will be trying to achieve over the coming years? If not, then you don’t have a strategy.” We can all relate to that and it puts us in an action-oriented, slightly alarmed frame of mind, making us perfectly poised to read on and find out how to get ourselves sorted out.There are lots of books about digital strategy (a quick peek at Amazon listed 4,482 books!) so any author needs a good reason for adding to that. Simon Kingsnorth has come at this from a very contemporary, very practical angle. It’s definitely worth reading on. This is a good book for experienced digital marketers who want to see how everything fits together or for those who want to feel more confident in creating plans and strategies and selling them in to their clients or colleagues.Here’s a few points that really hit home with me:• His main thrust is that digital is not so different. Just as marketing needs to be totally aligned to business goals, so does digital. He makes a good case for that. Blending that idea into a book that looks at specific channels too is a neat trick. There’s just enough detail on, for instance, search marketing or display advertising to inform but not enough to distract the reader.• He sets out in parallel two approaches for planning, one for vision-based planning (all about long term goals) and the other for real-time planning (focusing on what needs to be done short term). This presentation shows the similarity, reinforces the importance of both and gently makes it clear that now is always the time to create a plan or strategy, there are no justifications for delay.• Towards the middle of the book he addresses some of the current themes of digital marketing: User Experience, CRM and Retention, Personalisation and Customer Service. These chapters explain briefly what these tools are and bring them together with the art of strategy development. By setting the importance of tactics such as SEO and social media alongside a strategic approach these chapters root strategy firmly in the practical rather than the cerebral.• The section on User Experience is particularly helpful. As he points out User Experience (UX) is a relatively new discipline and its proponents have come from psychology, creative and development backgrounds. Each brings something of value to the discipline but the variety of approaches can bring some conflict and confusion too. He shows the value each adds.The range of topics covered in this reasonably short (320pp) book is broad and well-selected. As well as the sections mentioned above he covers SEO, paid search, display and social media plus a chapter on Content Strategy. The Analytics and Reporting chapter is very thorough and there’s a particularly good explanation of attribution.To keep digital marketing and marketing aligned, he has a chapter early on in the book showing how some key marketing models work when applied to digital scenarios. This is very well done and helps to enforce the point he makes about digital being part of marketing, marketing needing to align with business goals.The best strategy in the world is no use to you if you can’t get buy-in from colleagues, management or investors. Simon Kingsnorth approaches this problem in two ways. Near the beginning of the book he has a chapter on Barriers and Considerations, looking at how to anticipate and overcome problems and objections. He returns to this in the final chapter, Presenting your Strategy, where he provides a useful framework for formulating a presentation (the 6Ss) and again looks at how to identify and avoid potential pitfalls.This is a great book for marketers but I think this focus on selling in a strategy also makes it very useful for entrepreneurs or those in smaller organisations.It is very simple, maybe a touch simplistic in places. Like a lot of business books now it uses a formula for structuring chapters, lots of pull outs and bullet points summaries. Nothing wrong with these (indeed it helps the busy reader) but it can make it seem over-simplified at times. I also found the sections on the history of digital marketing and some of the individual topics a bit pointless. It’s not that I knew all the information in there, clearly Simon is very knowledgeable, I just didn’t feel it helped me write a better strategy.

This book was recommended reading for the Digital Marketing module of the CIM Level 4 Certificate in Professional Marketing. No book on the subject can ever be truly up to date as digital marketing is constantly changing and evolving. This book is however a really good read and covers all aspects of digital marketing strategy and more importantly how it should be integrated.

A very helpful introduction to this important business skill. After being asked by a client to produce a digital marketing strategy for them, I looked at all the books available and selected this one. It has taught me many new ideas and concepts and gave me confidence that I was taking the right steps.

Helped with CIM assignment

excellent