Where are you now? Where do you want to be?

This article, written by Neil Mason, was originally published on Clickz.com and is republished here with permission.

Maturity models seem to be all the rage these days. These models help organisations to identify where they are on the roadmap of whatever discipline or capability the model is about and where they need to be. They help to describe the journey to world-class status or best practice. I have been using a simple “maturity model“ for a few years to help organisations identify where they are in terms of their development of their digital marketing optimisation capabilities. I’ve found it a useful device to help people understand the journey they are on and a sense of the ultimate destination.

At Emetrics in San Jose WebTrends launched their own maturity model called the Digital Marketing Maturity Model. Having taken a look at it, I think it’s a useful contribution to the debate. They are clearly hoping that it will be adopted as an industry standard and that, over time, organisations will be able to benchmark themselves against others. There’s a survey you can take based on the model that will help to build industry norms.

The model seeks to help organisations assess the development of their digital marketing measurement capability on six main dimensions:

• Measurement strategy
• Analytics resources and domain expertise
• Data integration and visualisation
• Data analysis and insight
• Adoption and governance
• Ongoing optimisation

These dimensions cover the bases and reflect the fact that an organisation’s maturity is not just based on what technologies they have invested in but also the infrastructure they have in place to support and the way that they are using them. The model recognises that one of the key criteria is that an organisation needs to have a coherent measurement strategy. Too often, still, we see organisations investing in measurement technologies without a clear idea of which problems they are trying to solve or with little recognition as to where the technology fits into an overall plan.

The other useful aspect of DM3 is the recognition that “adoption and governance” is also an important component. This section is essentially about business processes around the measurement technologies. Do organisations have procedures around some of the key processes such as campaign tracking, content tagging or user support. If they have those procedures, are they actually being followed? Again, too often, analytics and measurement technologies are implemented without the necessary rigour of the business processes around them leading to disappointment and poor quality data.

WebTrends stress that DM3 is a piece of work in progress and are looking for feedback. My own feedback is in some of the detail of the construct of the model in the different dimensions. For example, one of the components within the Data Analysis and Insight dimension is called “Social Media and Competitive Analysis”. For me these two things are completely different. You can have good benchmarking capabilities and spend a lot of time monitoring your competitors and at the same time do doing absolutely nothing about monitoring or measuring social media activity. These two elements need to be separated out.

One of the notable exclusion in DM3 is anything about mobile measurement. Given all the attention that mobile is getting at the moment and the challenges in getting decent mobile metrics, I think that it would be important to have it in the model somewhere or other. It probably highlights one of the challenges that the DM3 might face and that’s keeping current and up to date with emerging digital marketing channels such as mobile.

I also feel that the model is too orientated towards site centric measurement systems. Any digital measurement strategy needs to incorporate Voice of the Customer type programmes to a greater or lesser extent. Whilst it is implicit in some of the dimensions around Data Integration and Data Analysis, it needs perhaps to be a more explicit competency which an organisation needs to display.

It’s early days for the model and I’m sure it will evolve but I think that DM3 is a useful tool by which organisations can take a look at themselves and make an assessment about where they are on the learning curve. The model also gives some guidance about what needs to be done next to move to the next level. On the basis of this type of formalised process and scoring, organisations can be better informed about how and where they need to invest their efforts next.