What the heck is digital marketing maturity?

What the heck is digital marketing maturity?_5ee33cb8b493b.jpeg

As it stands, only around 2% of businesses are operating at the highest phase of best-in-class digital marketing, known as ‘multi-moment’.

When operating at the highest level of digital marketing maturity, brands will be making use of multiple channels and automation, working in tandem, to drive more personalised experiences for their customers. Utilising dynamic and cost-effective approaches, they will be demonstrating their brand value at all touch points and seamlessly guiding customers through the buyer funnel.

The 2% of companies who do this are not necessarily huge, powerful brands but more so those who understand how to create integrated campaigns which effectively utilise data and create something powerful.

What are the four phases of digital marketing maturity?

Nascent

Your business uses external data to create marketing material. Campaigns are simplistic and have limited alignment with converting to a sale. Siloed data means that your business has no edge over the competition.

Emerging

The culmination of own data and external data, however, not enough of the internal data to make the outcome as unique and profitable as some of the competition. Optimization and testing are carried out across one channel at a time rather than looking at a multichannel experience.

Connected

Marketing efforts rely on integrated data and cross-channel activities. Impact on ROI and sales proxies is more demonstrable making the activities more valuable.

Multi-moment

An organisation in this phase is optimising and executing a dynamic marketing strategy, across multiple channels, with a range of business outcomes and a variety of ways to target each customer segment, across various touchpoints.

Technical enablers

Research collected by the Boston Consulting Group revealed the technical enablers which were present in businesses displaying the highest levels of digital marketing maturity.

Combined data, collected from a variety of sources, was being utilised for a range of marketing and creative activities. They had build succinct audience profiles based on the breadth of the behavioural insights, which then lead them to determine and implement multiple touchpoints, on and offline, which were all intrinsically linked for a holistic experience.

One of the smartest uses of time by advanced-level digital maturity marketers is through ensuring that tasks, within the likes of their CRM and analytics, are automated. This can free up valuable time to spend on tasks which demand emotional intellect. It also allows for messaging to be tailored to fit the specific audience through the use of machine learning.

Finally, to be on top with the best marketers, your objectives should be linked across all of the channels utilised, forming unified and overarching brand goals. You should also be able to validate each action through attribution, with tangible and valuable outcomes such as reducing cost per lead or increasing volume of leads.

Organisational enablers

Your organisational operations have repercussions on the workforce performance, which means those companies seeing the most success are implementing important systems at an organisational level to support the technical elements.

Regular performance reviews of the overall marketing objectives are carried out in order to regulate budgets, maintain quality and ensure deadlines are hit. This also includes standardising how each of the teams collaborates with one another, whether this is internally or with external agencies. This allows campaign development to happen more seamlessly.

The importance of hiring people to focus solely on one area is common knowledge, and even companies operating at Nascent level will employ people with specialist skills. However, the difference lies in the best-in-class marketing teams ensuring that across all disciplines, their staff have advanced analytical and data science knowledge which bolsters their existing abilities and supports in a better understanding of purpose and outcome.

Organisations must ensure a balance is struck between relying on technology and the human input needed to make the experience meaningful and valuable to customers. Only leaning on either one of these two attributes will often impact the overall success of the outcome.

Lastly, one of the key success attributes is to create a culture of sharing, learning and testing. This should extend from the top senior levels, through sponsorship of the teams they managed. This can be through a series of knowledge sharing and building of best practices through ongoing feedback and testing.

For more information on optimising your marketing and organisational practises, get in touch with us today.



Also published on Medium.

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