Perspective

Assess your organization’s maturity level with the Digital Marketing Maturity Model (DM3)

Ramakrishna Naidu Kapa,

Senior Director - Technology, Global Capabilities and Technology Solutions

Published: April 28, 2022

Many organizations want to know where they stand in terms of digital maturity compared to their competitors. Benchmarking a brand’s digital performance over time and comparing them with industry best-in-class brands creates a 360-degree view of the organization’s digital health. This helps leaders prioritize digital investments according to their digital marketing opportunities.

It is necessary to evaluate the current strengths and weaknesses of your organization’s digital marketing processes. Virtusa’s Digital Marketing Maturity Model (DM3) helps organizations assess their current maturity level in the digital ecosystem. You can use DM3 to generate an assessment report with details including digital health, tools utilization, and improvement areas. The report will help you determine the best ways to utilize your current digital investments to achieve better ROI.

The five enablers of digital marketing maturity

Our assessment measures an organization’s maturity level against critical enablers for digital marketing platforms. Five key enablers: customer experience, technology, processes, data, and strategy and vision, are considered in the evaluation.  

Five enablers of digital marketing maturity 

Five enablers of digital marketing maturity
Five enablers of digital marketing maturity
  1. Customer experience: Customer experience is vital to positively impact an organization’s growth. The voice of the customer (VOC) tells you how customers feel about your brand. The feedback helps improve the customer experience.
  2. Technology: In the digital era, organizations need to invest in appropriate technology tools to address complex problems in an automated fashion.
  3. Processes: Process maturity is critical for an organization’s digital acceleration. Digital acceleration will happen with intelligent automated processes like DevOps, operations, or any process that drives vital digital marketing activities.
  4. Data: An organization’s strength lies in its data. A robust data foundation with the proper data governance will help create the right customer experience strategy. The correct data will also help to drive the comprehensive data-driven marketing use cases.
  5. Strategy and vision: C-level executives will need to drive organizations with the right strategy and vision. They will help organizations invest in people, processes, and technologies to achieve the desired goal. 

The DM3 assessment and framework

The Digital Marketing Maturity Model assessment has pre-defined parameters to measure an organization's current digital maturity level. The data gathered during the assessment is then used against the framework to create a roadmap to reach the desired maturity level for the organization.

DM3 assessment

Using the DM3 assessment, you can map your current maturity level based on the five critical enablers described above. By determining which category you belong to Novice, Incidental, Expanded, Disciplines, or Integrated, you can then determine your organization’s next steps to become more mature. 

Digital marketing maturity model (DM3

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  • Novice: Organizations in this category have a reactive approach and do not anticipate change, making change challenging. They use one channel (web) to reach customers and have disparate tools and technologies across business units. Their processes are manual, and there is no single source of truth for customer data. They are at risk of losing customers to their competitors.
  • Incidental: An organization with this maturity level has a strategy for its individual business units, but not at the enterprise level. They have a technology stack to address customer experience use cases. Their customer experience uses multiple channels, but is the experience is not seamless. Customer relationship management (CRM)  software is used as the single source of truth and DevOps is enabled at this maturity level, but not fully automated.
  • Expanded: These organizations have a clear strategy at the enterprise level, which is implemented, measured, and optimized. They have a well-defined roadmap for digital marketing. Customer data is brought in a single system like a data lake and implemented closed-loop marketing with a fully automated. But innovation might be missing in the overall ecosystem.
  • Disciplined: These organizations have innovation in their culture and a well-defined strategy, vision, and future roadmap. They follow the best technology and process adoptions like composable architecture, headless approach, and have DevSecOps enabled. They have reached maturity in their operating model with Agile delivery. They are good at delivering data-driven experiences and 1:1 personalization use cases. They have an integrated technology operating model.
  • Integrated: These organizations also have innovation in their culture and a well-defined strategy, vision, and multi-year roadmap. They constantly evaluate new channels based on the current trends and changing customer experience demands. They invest in new technologies like Customer Data Platforms (CDP) immersive experiences like AR/VR, and leverage AI/ML for predictive models to provide superior customer experiences. They follow AI operations for automating IT operation processes and measure experience level agreements (XLAs).

Performing a SWOT analysis during the assessment helps evaluate the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of business, project, or transformation efforts. It also helps identify the organization’s digital capabilities while analyzing internal factors and identifying internal capabilities.

DM3 framework

Once the assessment is complete, you will know your organization's current maturity level. The next step is creating a roadmap to reach your desired maturity goal. Following the OGSM (objective, goals, strategies, and measures) model, a goal-setting and action-plan framework used in strategic planning, you can define and track measurable goals and actions to achieve an objective.

Benchmarking digital maturity for the future

Benchmarking your organization's current digital maturity against competitors helps ensure your competitive advantage. Once you’ve defined your current state and desired future state, you will shape successful transformation initiatives.

If you need help with your digital marketing maturity assessment, Virtusa can offer the guidance you need for scalable success. 

Virtusa delivers superior experiences through digital transformation. We believe in innovation through experimentation and will enable you to reach your goals in some of today’s most complex and fast-moving use cases developing new solutions or scaling existing solutions and processes.

An organization’s most essential elements are people, processes, and technology. All three are critical for an organization to balance strategic planning and execution. Our transformation initiatives address all three: people, process, and technology. 

 

Ramakrishna Naidu Kapa

Ramakrishna Naidu Kapa

Head - Customer Experience Transformation

Ramakrishna brings over 19+ years of rich experience in the IT industry spanning content management, digital marketing, business development, competency development, and consulting experience.

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