Marketing leaders today are tasked with delivering far more than brand awareness and lead generation. They now embody a leadership role that can also include sales, tech, and customer experience responsibilities, and are also on the hook for business growth. That includes being responsible for evaluating, implementing, and managing marketing technologies and processes to support growth goals. The steady stream of disparate data from these platforms is constantly being accumulated. It is a lot of data—data that is often not leveraged to its full potential.
Getting the most out of this wealth of data is a matter of marketing maturity. Accurately assessing your company’s digital maturity level can help you up level and unlock new ways to optimize the overall effectiveness of your digital marketing strategies and track and get the best return on your investments.
Digital Marketing Maturity Defined
In our previous blog, Why Modern Marketers Face Increased Pressures to Perform, we reviewed why it’s smart to first assess your digital marketing blind spots. With this knowledge in hand, you can then determine where you are in your digital transformation journey by locating your current maturity level from the Maturity Guide. An honest assessment of where you are right now will help you get more out of current digital marketing spend. It will also help put you on a path to mature your marketing organization, moving it towards taking full advantage of AI and ML. Industry research shows that half of marketing data scientists spend their time in preparing the data and the other half on visualizing the data. Think of this transformation journey as a way to take you from Hindsight to Insight to Foresight.
Hindsight—The ability to see your historical campaign performance. The past provides great context and background to show you where you’ve come from. Research shows that over 60% of marketers are right here; looking in the rear-view mirror somewhere between level 1-2 on the maturity curve. More than 80% of marketers desire to be at a more advanced level 4 or 5, and gaining not only real-time insights but foresight.
Insight—Provides a clearer picture of your current situation. This is a valuable way to identify marketing efforts that could be working for or against you right now.
Foresight—Looking ahead at what may happen in the near future is a positive exercise for marketers. Exploring the possibilities can give you the power to reset goals, pivot, and see where you need to make changes to increase campaign conversions.
Download our Maturity Guide: Improve the Return on your Digital Marketing Spend to understand where you are in your digital transformation journey, learn strategies to help you mature your marketing organization, and how to take full advantage of AI and ML through conDati’s data science as a service platform solutions.
Locate Your Digital Maturity Level
The 5-level maturity guide summary below gives you a quick and easy way to understand your situation, desired business outcomes, questions you should be able to answer, and the underlying technology capability you need to help you achieve each level.
You can also identify where you are in this maturity continuum through the questions you’ve asked of yourself and your team, and likely what senior management has asked of you. Know that you are not alone. Every skilled and seasoned marketer is likely at some maturity crossroad, wishing they were further ahead. That said, your goal in this competitive landscape is to leapfrog ahead by not only assessing where you are right now but taking action toward where you want to be.
In the fast-paced marketing world it is tempting to move forward quickly with the implementation of new campaign strategies. Sometimes it is unavoidable. The most successful marketers are those that make data-driven decisions and are confidently making spend decisions using reporting they trust.
Watch for the next blog in this series, titled, Can Marketing Data Be Trusted to Help Meet Business Goals?
About conDati: At conDati we apply AI and Machine Learning algorithms to build analytic solutions that transform massive volumes of customer, event, and transaction data into accessible dashboards, alerts, and automatic reports. We provide marketing executives and hands-on marketers with the comprehensive and real-time visibility, predictive models, and science-based recommendations needed to maximize marketing’s contribution to business success. Learn more at conDati.com.
