Our digital marketing maturity models can be used to identify new opportunities for digital upskilling or digital transformation.
Since I started working with businesses to improve digital marketing, I have seen vast differences in their digital capabilities. Smart Insights has always advocated using digital marketing maturity models to evaluate your digital marketing effectiveness. Competent Insights members have access to various digital marketing auditing resources and training solutions for digital upskilling.
You might wonder why reviewing and assessing digital marketing maturity is essential if you are new to it. Studying digital maturity can provide a quick benchmark to help you improve your digital marketing efforts. Comparing your digital maturity with similar competitors is crucial to understanding the customer’s experience of your brand in today’s digital world.
How can digital marketing maturity be improved?
To review and improve maturity, the following steps are:
- Use the proper scope to define digital maturity in various categories.
- To prioritize improvements and identify opportunities and weaknesses in digital capabilities.
- Demonstrate your business case and prioritize improvements to colleagues (or clients if you are an agency or consultant).
- To improve marketing maturity, set objectives to be reviewed against.
Depending on the context, the right level of maturity for a business will vary.
It is essential to improve digital marketing maturity to compete in specific industry sectors where digital channels are a primary channel for the market. Digital maturity/capability may be lower in other industries, such as Pharma and business-to-business. Traditional channels are still important communication channels.
Larger businesses may have more resources to support digital transformation than smaller businesses. However, smaller and medium-sized businesses often respond more quickly to market forces than larger companies.
Based on my experiences working with many businesses, from the largest to the smallest, and in many different industries, digital marketing maturity assessments benefit all types of companies. In this briefing, I will recommend a digital maturity model that can be applied to any business situation. This topic has also inspired me to showcase new models of marketing maturity.
Your digital marketing maturity and personal growth
Before I discuss digital marketing maturity assessments for businesses, I would also like to add that it is valuable for individuals working in marketing and industry to evaluate their digital maturity. This refers to your experience and skills in helping your company improve its digital capabilities.
It doesn’t matter if you are a manager looking to improve digital marketing or a specialist marketer who wants to build your digital skills.
This interactive tool is free and can be used to evaluate your digital marketing skills. The assessment is based on our RACE Growth System. It has been designed to be simple and efficient. It should take you less than 5-10 minutes to complete, and you’ll receive a score of 100.
What is digital maturity?
This is an excellent question, as the scope of digital maturity assessment can vary depending on where it is conducted. It may be broader than a digital maturity assessment for larger projects. However, the focus will likely be on digital technology and data. Digital business can include using digital communications to support interactions between various partners, from suppliers to channel partners to customers.
Digital transformation is often more narrowly defined, which allows brands to create customer value propositions and business/revenue models that can be transformed. This is a valuable focus because it examines business opportunities to compete better by changing the competition base through new market offerings.
The final category of digital maturity is the more narrow one. Here, the focus is on digital auditing and improving marketing communication strategy and implementation through better-integrated marketing campaigns and continuous digital marketing. Brilliant Insights’ primary focus is on this.
Smart Insights’ digital marketing maturity model
In the early 2000s, I created frameworks to evaluate digital maturity as part of my consulting and training services to assist businesses in improving their digital marketing. Since I began my career, pre-web, this was an apparent evolution. I had previously managed teams of software developers that created what we now call marketing tech or Martech.
These tools were created to encourage change in 2010. We made them available to the public around 2010, and although we made some changes to incorporate new technologies such as AI and machine learning, they are still relevant and sound. This campaign-related example is part of our digital marketing maturity model. It’s one of many similar ‘one pager’ maturity assessments, including digital maturity overall and for specific digital marketing channels and strategies.
In this article about benchmarking in digital marketing, I explain that it was common to examine the maturity of processes for developing complex software to ensure it is fit for purpose and minimize errors. These concerns also apply to digital communications, often based on martech.
I used the Carnegie Mellon Capability Maturity Model for software to help me create the Smart Insights digital market maturity model. Although the details of each assessment were different, I found it appealing because it had 5 stages that correspond to increasing maturity. These are the steps I used to build our digital marketing capabilities frameworks, such as this one.
Assessment of digital marketing maturity using tools
- Digital marketing strategy assessment/healthcheck Smart Insights members can assess their company’s digital marketing maturity and score their capabilities. They can also prioritize changes in strategy, planning and training.
- Downloadable visual frameworks – Free Members can download up to 12 digital marketing benchmarking templates. These templates are great for analyzing current performance in workshops.
- Interactive digital capabilities grader tool Our grader is quick and can be completed in less than 5 minutes. All Free Members can get a score that is relevant to their business needs once.
- Personalized learning plan This tool allows Free Members to create an action plan that will help them improve their digital marketing skills using free and paid resources.
We’ll see that marketing maturity models are often created by large consultancies to large multinational brands. However, I wanted to make sure that my offering was relevant to small and medium-sized companies. It would cover both communication strategies and communications.
These tools do the trick, but we created this framework to simplify what a digital strategy should address. It is also available as a template in our digital marketing plan template .
The pillars represent a group of different types and types of initiatives. They can be prioritized to increase maturity. These six pillars are the foundation of our 25 key RACE digital strategies, which are covered in our digital marketing audit template.
Maybe you need to improve measurement and reporting, or maybe a content marketing strategy or marketing automation is required to support conversational messages. The left-hand side is where management and governance are required to implement a planned, strategic approach that is based on data-driven marketing selection and reporting on relevant KPIs. This crucial aspect, “Strategy and Governance”, is not included in the Google framework but is in the Gartner framework.
International brands are larger and more mature than local ones. Teams that work across multiple products and countries. A Digital Marketing Centre of Excellence is available to help. The Best Practices Guide for Creating a Digital Marketing CoE shows how to evaluate which digital marketing activities should go under review centrally and which should be done locally.
Let’s take a look at the two most recent digital maturity frameworks.
The Google-BCG Digital Maturity Model
Google, in collaboration with Boston Consulting Group, released the appealingly named, but possibly misleading Fast Track to Digital Marketing report in August 2021.
These five aspects of maturity are covered in this framework. These are, as one would expect from Google’s commercial interests, a strong focus of customer acquisition via media using a data-driven approach.