What is R.A.C.E?

Grant Leboff: So Dave, one of the things you do to sort of make planning and strategy work is you have an acronym which you use called RACE. Would you just describe that for us a bit?

Dave Chaffey: Yeah for sure. What we found with planning is people often don’t know where to start and what’s involved. We thought if we simplified it to give a structure or framework that would be helpful. RACE stands for Reach, Act, Convert and Engage and it’s a classic marketing funnel but applied to digital marketing.

Reach is how do you get visibility and awareness through search engines, social media, partner sites. The Conversion stage is divided into two, so Act is about getting an initial interaction or lead on the website or social medial because you typically won’t convert people straight away so it’s about using content marketing to get those leads and putting the right customer journeys on the website to connect the person with the right content or product or offer. Conversion, that can happen in the offline or the online world and that’s, again, about sign posting and showing the value that you can offer. Your value proposition, your online value proposition to get that sale and to differentiate from your competitors which is still probably the biggest challenge in marketing. Finally, Engage is about customer communications and encouraging customers to buy again, keeping them engaged through social media on the website and through email marketing as well. That still works really well for customer communications.

Grant Leboff: One of the things that people have to think about online and offline, but we’re talking about the online arena, is the idea of the customer journey. How do they find you? Where do they come in? How easy is it to plot the customer journey against that framework? Does it make any easy mechanism for people to understand the different stages?

Dave Chaffey: Yeah, that’s right. What we’ve tried to do is to put measures in place for each stage so you can see the overall customer journey and so you have KPIs for each so you can see you’re converting as many people as possible. A technique I’d recommend there, actually, is customer journey mapping because you were saying everyone lives in both the real and the online world, the virtual and the offline world if you prefer. So we need to think through time how people are switching between different channels, online and off, and how the communications can support each other. That’s the key technique to do that for different personas, different audiences.

Grant Leboff: How easy is it? I think a lot of people struggle with being able to follow the customer journey when it is so complicated and can be a mix of online and offline. How easy is it to integrate the two, in your opinion, and get a sense of where the customer is and how they’re interacting with your business?

Dave Chaffey: It is really difficult, no doubt about that. I think with the online journey it’s, perhaps, easier than people might thing because with the way the cookies are used, Google Analytics has got this technique called Multi Channel Funnels which allows us to see if there’s a sequence of media leading up to a sale. Someone might arrive by a search, then through social media, then they might do another search. You can track the influence. That’s attribution, as you know, that’s that technique. Where it gets more difficult is that you’ve got different digital devices. I might be searching on my tablet, then my desktop, then my smartphone but Google’s put in place tools to manage that. There’s cross-device conversions which will help people with that.

Now with the offline media, that gets more difficult still but you have to put in place research programs which is more traditional qualitative research to see the influence of channels. One example, a pub chain here in the UK, was they had specific coupons that they were able to see in the offline world being redeemed through social media and through the website. They were able to track back, match back and see how that campaign worked.

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