20201019 ML Brief
Unboxing our new toolkits
We’ve structured our 140 resources into 15 interactive toolkits to help Basic and Expert members discover the exact tools you need
As Smart Insights has grown and we’ve developed more and more resources, the range and quality of the resources has increased so that we now cover the full customer lifecycle of marketing activities across our RACE Planning framework. However, as we have developed our library of advice we have suffered a challenge that all libraries, online and offline face – it becomes more difficult to find the most relevant guide. That changes today as we launch a new members area in response to feedback from our customer research that we completed in the autumn.
To help with the findability of our resources and to add extra guidance on developing digital strategies, we’ve developed a series of interactive toolkits which group our resources around the key areas of digital marketing, or present packages of resources designed specifically for certain industries.
Access our interactive toolkits
Our new toolkits break down our resources into the key areas of digital marketing, and each comes with a capability review for assessing your progress and an e-learning module for boosting your knowledge.
Access the Toolkit
You have to be signed in to the site to access the toolkits. Both Basic and Expert members can see them all, but Basic members won’t be able to access all the resources which Expert membership unlocks – however, they will be able to browse the introductory lesson of each Elearning course and complete a capability assessment to help identify those key digital marketing techniques to work on, and those Quick Wins. We also have a set of enterprise marketing toolkits aimed at larger, international businesses, and these are only available to business-level Expert members.
Why toolkits?
Back in the autumn of last year we asked our members how we could improve the way Smart Insights worked, and invited them to let us know what they liked and didn’t like.
We found that our members found the resources incredibly useful and were almost universally impressed with the range and depth of content, but finding the most relevant content was a challenge. The existing grouping of content for some activities like Digital Strategy, Content Marketing or B2B marketing was also popular. In addition, some also said they liked the depth of best practices, in our in-depth guides, and also wanted summaries of key issues and quick-wins.
Since then, for the last four months or so, the team, has busied ourselves dividing up our resources into what we hope will be handy toolkits, and creating capability assessments for each to let you benchmark where you are at and see how to develop. E-learning programs for each should help to deliver some ‘quick-wins’ for those who don’t have the time for reading our e-books
We hope you find the toolkits welcome, and we’re happy to hear any feedback you have that could help us improve how they work – please use the Hotjar feedback on each page – Bottom right or contact us.
What you get from the new toolkits
1. Booster toolkits
Our 8 booster toolkits package together a specific group of guides and resources designed to help you plan, manage and optimise your efforts in the given area of digital marketing they relate to.
2. Digital marketing technique-specific capability benchmark assessments
Each toolkit has its own capability assessment which you can take to benchmark your current position and get handy recommendations on how you can improve. You can also use these to check your progress as your abilities become more advanced through putting our resources into practice. If you are not familiar with how our capability assessments work, watch this 30-second clip to see the capability review for the content marketing toolkit.
3. Toolkit-specific e-learning
Each toolkit not only groups a series of relevant resources to help you massively improve your abilities in that area, but also has a specific e-learning module to help you get to grips with the topic and introduce you to the more advanced areas. The e-learning module also tracks your progress giving you a handy summary of how far through you are any given topic. 
4. Industry sector toolkits
We’ve also developed a set of four industry-specific toolkits designed to showcase our content that has been written with a certain industry in mind. We have a lot of resources designed specifically for those working in certain areas, such as for agencies or charities, as it is important to tailor tactics and advice to the particular needs of those industries.
How to use our toolkits
Accessing the toolkits is as simple as going to Members Home on the blue nav bar when you are logged in. We strongly recommend you start by looking at the digital marketing strategy and planning toolkit at the top, and if you haven’t already, review your current planning ability by taking our capability assessment, which is structured across the five areas of the RACE framework. 
After that, we hope it’s reasonably intuitive – it simply a case of clicking on the relevant toolkit to focus on whichever toolkits you think will best help you fulfil your business objectives. You can get stuck straight into to reading the guides and applying the best practice advice, but we do recommend you take the capability reviews first to see where you are currently at and how you can improve. This also helps you track your progress see how you’ve improved.
Thanks for listening – and for giving us the feedback to make these changes – do let us know how you find them.
From our sponsors: Unboxing our new toolkits
