No one sets out to build a business organization without the inherent need to see it flourish and grow. Businesses may start small, but fundamental in any company is the objective to expand increasingly as the firm thrives. Sustainability and expansion are always part of the roadmap towards success.
Today, digital marketing plays a massive role in pushing growth in any corporation. In line with this, the Boston Consulting Group and Google developed the Digital Maturity Framework (DMM) that we know today. It is meant to bring structure to digital marketing capabilities. Multinational corporations worldwide have adopted this model for their advertising efforts, and others are following suit.
The DMM emphasizes marketing and involves other company divisions such as security, development, creative, and IT. The goal is to build a team together and make sure that business goals are accomplished. This way, different parts of the organization carry the burden of bringing forward company objectives and hitting targets as a unified front.
As DMM grounds the organization and propels its journey forward, it also makes it easy for everyone to understand the story behind its projects and which direction it is headed. With this framework, a map is developed, which is available to everybody to see how a singular effort contributes to the organization’s output as a whole. There are parameters set to monitor if every step is geared towards success or failure.
You will realize all the challenges that come with this collaborative effort and know just how valuable a resource DMM is in this aspect.
The DMM – Digital Maturity Model
What is it all about?
As mentioned earlier, the Digital Maturity Model (DMM) places the organization on a digital maturity scale through rigorous evaluation to help generate a model to follow and reach company goals moving forward.
How does it add value?
Studies have shown that emphasizing the digital maturity aspect significantly improves how marketing campaigns will impact company objectives. Data gathered supports the view that there is greater effectiveness and efficiency when organizations focus on digital maturity. The premise of the model is such that as you progress in the alignment of goals with DMM, your company becomes increasingly effective and efficient at all levels.
If you make a graphical representation of both effectivity and efficiency and plot both variables on the x and y-axis, the resulting visual will show a steadily rising line. At the same time, the company evolves as a digitally mature unit. After an initial assessment, you can see where your business lies on the graph and map out the subsequent stages. It will provide a broad view of your organization while also tracking every granular step it takes towards the intended outcome.
Every firm is unique and may likely excel in some areas while needing work in several others. Before you get ahead of yourself and delve into these areas for improvement, you must sit down and consider your particular business needs, the goals and objectives in place, the direction from your stakeholders, and all the options you have in your hands.
Only when you have established your business footing will you make decisions that will provide value to your organization and work out a DMM roadmap.
What is it used for?
If aligning your company goals to the DMM is a feat in itself, why should you go through all the trouble?
Benchmarking
When monitoring your company’s performance, there has to be a standard by which you can measure everything against – the benchmark. The DMM provides such via a scoring system that will give you a view of how your marketing efforts contribute to your drive towards digital maturity. This step is essential, especially in SEO, since you cannot see the direct relationship between the activity and the results.
Direction
The framework will also direct both the near-term and the long-term objectives of your digital marketing campaigns. The ultimate goal is to move you up the curve as you make progress after progress in your digital maturity lifeline.
Savings
Recent data have proven that advertising efforts can reach up to a maximum of 20% revenue increase and 30% savings on expenses as businesses reach the highest level in the DMM. If you impute these figures onto your financials, it becomes quite clear how substantial the impact of using the framework is to your company’s financial goals.
The Digital Maturity Model – Four Stages
The joint effort of Google and the Boston Consulting Group produced a model with four stages: The Nascent, Emerging, Connected, and the Multi-Moment.
Nascent
The initial stage will cover the most fundamental aspects of digital marketing. There will be minimal use of data, basic targeting, no utilization of automation as of yet, and all optimization efforts will be done manually. Moreover, the collection of data will play no considerable role, but data silos may be present. Teams may exist but will have little collaboration, and the quality of data will be relatively low.
It’s crucial in this stage to accomplish an executive buy-in to make sure that there is approval and processes will push through without a hilt. The existing marketing structure may be working effectively for the organization. Still, it’s essential to realize that it may need an overhaul to achieve better business results.
Emerging
As you move on to the emerging stage, more and more automation is employed as data collection becomes extensive, and its use in reaching decisions for the company broadens. There will be fundamental segmentations and other processes to test out results and ensure improvement in all aspects.
The “test and learn” principle drives this stage as your business lexicons and KPIs are made to align amongst business units, and various organizational methods and procedures are documented. In this particular phase, the emphasis shifts to a technological focus as teams across the organization realize how vital it is to share data amongst countries that speak different languages.
The KPIs, lexicons, and documentation begin to play critical roles at this stage to scale the processes and bring everybody on board.
Connected
As your business grows in its digital maturity, it will usher in the connected phase where data will be obtained from both first and third-party sources. Data segmentation will involve various criteria. At this stage, you will be utilizing all formats and channels for your advertising. Your advanced attribution model will come in and the automated processes.
Emphasis will be given on platform integration to achieve activation across multiple data, both offline and online. This strategy will accomplish stronger cooperation between different functioning teams in the organization. Technology will be given even greater concentration than the previous stage, and cloud solutions may be started or are on the horizon.
Multi-Moment
The final stage will showcase fully programmatic management of your digital media. You will have metrics for your offline and online data, strategies that consider your target audience, and messaging, which is customized for your employ. The ultimate objective is to fully understand your clients and their lifetime value (LTV).
In the Multi-moment phase, all touchpoints matter as each involves the delivery of tailored experiences to the customers in all advertising platforms. There exist personalized attribution models. It makes sure that every marketing effort does not go to waste, and cloud hugely helps bring all of these to the clients at unheard-of speeds.
Data regarding clients provide a holistic perspective, and all information may be accessed by all teams as may be necessary for a concerted marketing effort. This way, all channels are optimized to ensure that all content delivered to specific target markets is individualized, and even tiny details such as email campaigns generate revenues for the company.
In this end stage, most businesses will be using machine learning to their advantage to spur their digital marketing operations to the next level.
Despite the significant benefits that companies will gain from this last stage of the DMM, studies show that only 2% of most advertisers may be classified as being in their Multi-Moment phase. More than 90% will be in their Emerging and Connected levels. So, let the description of this stage be a goal that companies must set for themselves and not a source of discouragement as most are still striving to reach it.
Final Words
Ultimately, the Digital Maturity Model (DMM) helps put in place a system by which businesses may be grounded on where they are and the direction in which they should go in terms of their digital marketing programs.
The framework tells you where you are in the four stages and what you can do at every level to strive to move up in your digital maturity journey, as highly influenced by your specific business needs and motivation.
The model has been proven to be useful in generating a roadmap that may be tested for results evident in your company’s financials. Moreover, management and stakeholders alike can quickly approve of such an integrated plan that brings measurable outcomes and collaboration across multiple teams in the organization.
Wondering where you stand? Take the free quiz built by Google here: https://digitalmaturitybenchmark.withgoogle.com/en/advertisers/
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