My simple maturity model
This article, written by Neil Mason, was originally published on Clickz.com and is republished here with permission.
Jim Sterne, the author and Chairman of Emetrics, was in London last week and I had the opportunity to catch up with him at our offices. During our conversation we talked about the way that the market is developing and what the differences were (if any) between what is happening in the digital marketing optimisation space on my side of the Atlantic compared to his. As we were talking I kept thinking back to a simple model that I developed a number of years ago to describe where organisations are in the development of their digital marketing measurement and optimisation capabilities. These days it would be fashionable to call it a “maturity model”.
My simple maturity model has three main stages:
- Performance tracking
- Process optimisation
- Customer centricity
Performance tracking
In the first stage of their development organisations are focussed on performance tracking. The challenge here is to “get the right numbers right”. This is laying the foundations for further capabilities to be developed and the main activities revolve around deifying the needs of the business, setting success criteria such as Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) and getting the right measurement technologies in place and getting them working properly. This will involve a lot of effort with specification and configuration issues.
At this stage in the model, organisations might be wondering whether it’s all worth it. The “effort to insight” ratio is high. The amount of value being gained from the data may seem to be low compared to the amount of heavy lifting required to get it. However, it’s vitally important that this bit is got right otherwise it’s hard to move from this stage of the maturity model to the next.
Process optimisation
Once the right numbers are right, organisations can start to use the data to make better decisions. The application of insight into the business creates an opportunity to optimise processes and to begin to create some return on investment in the putting the measurement capabilities in place. So the focus shifts from tracking to optimisation of the core digital marking processes such as acquisition and conversion.
The process of optimisation is driven by the “test, learn and adjust” approach and requires more than just good data and some smart technology. It also needs the right organisational culture backed up by sounds business processes. These processes needed to be embedded into the organisation during the Performance Tracking phase and they guarantee data integrity. Nobody likes making decisions on dodgy data and you can’t optimise marketing processes without making decisions about what’s working and what’s not.
Customer centricity
During the Process Optimisation stage, organisations still tend to be quite “site centric”. They are focussed on how to optimise a series of processes, tweaking conversion rates, improving satisfaction scores and so on. The next stage in the model is moving from being “site centric” to being “customer centric”.
The main difference I think is the difference between asking what the conversion ratio was last week and asking how many new customers there were last week and what’s their expected value in the future. Customer centricity is about looking at the digital channel in the context of an organisation’s overall relationship with the customer rather than the other way around.
The main challenge here is to be able to get a multi-channel perspective on the customer. To do that you need multi-channel data, bringing together where possible data from offline systems and online systems.
The conclusion I came to from my conversation with Jim was that the difference between what is happening over here and what is happening in the US is essentially down to the distribution of where organisations are in the maturity model. There are some companies in the UK and the rest of Europe doing some really interesting stuff, it’s just that there are more of them in the US. But that’s OK, sometimes it’s best to go second, you can learn quicker that way!