You’ve done your Digital Maturity Assessment - so now what?

As the marketing landscape continues to evolve at a rapid pace, it can be challenging for CMOs and Marketing Heads to keep up. This is seen for example by the number of providers and solutions today, which have grown from ±150 in 2011 to now more than a whopping ±10,000! (ChiefMarTech & MartechMap) *

In order to stay ahead of the competition and make informed decisions about your company’s future competitiveness, it’s important to assess your organization’s digital maturity.

That’s where the Digital Maturity Assessment (DMA) by BCG and Google plays an important role.

What exactly is the DMA?

The Digital Maturity Assessment is a comprehensive tool that evaluates an organization’s digital maturity across several dimensions, including strategy, organization, capabilities, technology, and media sophistication. By assessing your organization’s digital maturity, you can identify gaps, areas for improvement, and opportunities to enhance your digital marketing strategy and get ahead of competitors.

One of the key benefits of the Digital Maturity Assessment is that it provides a holistic view of your organization’s digital maturity, rather than focusing on specific technologies or platforms. This means that the assessment can help you identify broader trends and areas for improvement, instead of just pointing out specific weaknesses or ending in deep technical rabbit holes of debates with multiple vendors.

The maturity assessment is free and open to anyone to complete it on their own. It highlights general areas for improvement, which can already be super helpful.

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Consider working with partners

On the other hand, working with partners, such as Advertising + Marketing Technologies and Media Modernization experts, can be crucial to the success of the Digital Maturity Assessment. Skilled partners can provide valuable facilitation, insights, and expertise that can help you accurately complete and interpret the results of the assessment.

Therefore, the main difference between a DIY approach versus working with a partner is much like giving a football game score to a new coach (Let’s say a draw of 1:1) and then asking the team’s new coach to suggest a strategy to win the next game. Pretty hard ask if you are one of the players on the field or the new coach that did not even see the game, doesn’t know the team at all, and only has the score in hand.

But all Ted Lasso jokes aside, Tech & Data partners bring a wealth of technical expertise, industry experience, and objectivity to the process. Even the captain of a football team (CMO / Heads of Digital) should know they need a coach to succeed. Most importantly, partners should help you to develop an actionable, prioritized, and practical roadmap to advance your digital maturity.

How to make the outcomes of the assessment a success

Here are three tangible steps that Brands, CMOs, and Marketing Leads can take to make the outcomes of the assessment a success:

1. Develop a clear roadmap: Once you’ve completed the Digital Maturity Assessment, it’s important to develop a roadmap for digital transformation that addresses the gaps and areas for improvement identified in the assessment. This roadmap should be based on a thorough analysis of your organization’s strengths and weaknesses and should be developed with input from partners and multiple internal stakeholders.

Some examples of what such a roadmap could contain (not exhaustive) are shown below:

• Technology: Review, Audit & Architecture of all Ad+MarTech solutions for optimal utilization. Why: Gartner finds marketers Utilize Just 42% of Their Martech Stacks
• Privacy & 1st Party Data: Link your consent management, 1st party data collection, and marketing activation to best reach your ideal customers in a (3rd party) cookie-less world.
• Creative & Digital Assets: Maximise the relevance of your creative, messaging, and digital destinations (Web & App) for different user types.
• Media Budget: Extend your reach and optimize the performance of your budgets.

2. Implement a data-driven approach: As part of your digital transformation, it’s important to implement a data-driven approach that enables you to measure and optimize your digital strategy. This means investing in the right technologies and tools to capture and analyze data and developing a culture of data-driven decision-making.

3. Foster a culture of innovation: Digital transformation is not a one-time event, but rather an ongoing process of innovation and improvement. To be successful, you need to foster a culture of innovation within your organization, where experimentation and risk-taking are encouraged. This means providing employees with the training, resources, and support they need to test and implement new ideas, and celebrating successes along the way.

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But let’s get practical. To give an example of how the Digital Maturity Assessment could work, let’s consider a fictional e-commerce retailer called ACME WIDGETS. ACME takes the assessment and scores low in the dimension of Analytics & Measurement, indicating that they have a limited ability to collect, analyze, and act on customer data.

As a result of this low score, ACME could embark on several practical projects or work streams to improve their data and analytics capabilities. For example, they could invest in a customer data platform (CDP) to centralize customer data from various sources, such as their websites, apps, social media, and email campaigns.

As an alternative to buying yet another piece of technology, ACME could do a review of their current Ad+MarTech in their marketing ecosystem, review suitability, adoption, and interconnectivity against their marketing goals and then design and build a fit-for-purpose tech stack. The solution could be as simple as a good, solid Web Analytics setup with integrated audience sharing to the buying platforms.

Either way, this would allow them to create a single customer view and gain deeper insights into customer behavior, driving media performance for their most relevant customers.

Another practical project could be to develop a data-driven personalization strategy. By leveraging the customer data collected through either the CDP or Analytics, ACME could create personalized product recommendations, targeted email campaigns, and customized website experiences.

This would help to improve customer engagement and loyalty, ultimately driving revenue growth.

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The 6 dimensions explained

In terms of the six dimensions that maturity is measured across, they are as follows:

• Organization: measures the degree to which an organization has executive sponsorship, clear digital goals, a digital-first culture, and a cross-functional team structure to support digital initiatives.
• Access: measures the organization’s ability to access and effectively use digital tools and platforms, such as paid media channels, social media platforms, and email marketing or other owned channels.
• Audience: measures the extent to which the organization understands and engages with its target audience through digital channels and how these audience(s) are collected, analyzed, and activated.
• Automation: measures the extent to which the organization uses automation and technology to streamline processes and improve efficiencies, such as marketing automation tools, platform APIs, or advanced bidding techniques.
• Analytics and Measurement: measures the organization’s ability to collect, analyze, and act on data to drive business outcomes, including media investment, website traffic, conversion rates, and customer engagement.
• Assets & Ads: measures the organization’s digital asset management capabilities, including the ability to create and manage digital assets such as ads, videos, social media content, and on-site or in-app customer experiences.

By measuring their digital maturity across all these dimensions, organizations can identify areas for improvement and develop a roadmap for action that aligns with their business objectives and marketing targets.

For example, if an organization scores low in the Access dimension, they may need to invest in training programs or consult a media agency to help improve their ability to leverage digital channels effectively. Similarly, if an organization scores low in the Automation dimension, they may need to explore opportunities to automate processes to reduce costs and improve efficiency within their technology ecosystem.

Ultimately, by leveraging the insights provided by the Digital Maturity Assessment along with collaboration with their media, technology, and platform partners, organizations can develop a comprehensive roadmap that drives growth, success, and revenue.

To wrap up

The Digital Maturity Assessment by BCG and Google can provide CMOs and Marketing Leads with valuable insights into their organization’s state of digital maturity, as well as a roadmap forward. By working with partners and taking steps to implement the outcomes of the assessment, organizations can stay ahead of the competition and succeed in an increasingly digital world.

If you are interested to learn more about how we work as DMA partners, do not hesitate to reach out to Mauritz Gilfillan, Partner Manager at Acceleration (mauritz.gilfillan@acceleration.biz)