Increase Your Marketing Success with Digital Marketing Maturity

In 2011, the MartechMap included about 150 tools, technologies and softwares for marketers to use in their daily work; in 2023, there are already more than 11,000. Platforms and programs no longer serve a single purpose but cover a variety of needs. The premise: faster, bigger, wider. To ensure that marketers can still see the forest for the trees, Gartner recommends they select “the trends that align best to their organizational needs, develop short- and long-term roadmaps […] and allow their organizations to evolve gradually.”

But even those who are selective still face increasing complexity. For example, the role of CMOs has changed massively in recent years. Whereas the job profile used to include only marketing, nowadays the package also includes areas such as growth, customer experience, and branding. Symptomatic of this development is a shorter tenure of CMOs: it is lower than at any time in the last ten years.

Other job profiles are also affected: In 2010, Google Ads managers were still busy finding suitable keywords and placing ads at a good price. Today, this is done by automated tools such as Performance Max, Smart Display Campaigns, or Discovery Ads. Campaign managers now deal with far more complex, strategic work.

Companies need to adapt to these changes if they want to continue to exist and operate effective and efficient marketing. While the path of increasing specialization is often chosen (“best-of-breed agency approach”), that may come at the expense of losing sight of the big picture.

Companies can adjust in these ways:

• Keep pace with increasing speed.
• Maintain an overview in a fragmented marketing landscape.
• Identify opportunities and capitalize on them.
• Do it all better than the competition.

A central aspect of surviving in today’s marketing world is a company’s digital maturity. This approach provides orientation for decision-makers and helps them answer the following questions:

• Where do I set my priorities?
• How can I make my marketing organization more efficient and effective?
• What processes can I use to react more quickly to changes?

We have combined the concept of digital maturity with our many years of experience as a digital marketing agency and translated it into a framework.

The framework uses a flexible modular structure to map the comprehensive marketing setup of a company. Companies are confronted with a wide variety of questions, and the framework is a helpful tool for answering them:

• What is the fundamental maturity of my marketing?
• What is needed for the success of this project?
• How do I achieve this goal with my current marketing setup?

Using the use case of a website relaunch, we illustrate how we approach customer projects in practice.

1. Location determination

• Which topics are directly or indirectly affected by the website relaunch?
• Which departments and decision-makers need to be involved?

2. Analysis and evaluation

• What is the state of digital maturity (qualitative and quantitative criteria)?
• Are all relevant topics considered in the planning of the relaunch?
• How is the performance evaluated in terms of benchmarks/best practices?
• Are the responsibilities and spheres of influence distributed correctly?

3. Concrete recommendations for action

• Which measures can be used to specifically improve the maturity?
• What should be prioritized?
• What needs to be considered during implementation and enablement?

While reality is always somewhat more complex than any model, the Digital Marketing Maturity Framework is a highly adaptable tool that helps companies thrive in a constantly changing environment.