Connected experience: Pioneering digital-first integrated growth within your business

Why digital maturity matters

Focusing only on your competitors to benchmark your organisation’s success will no longer be enough to satisfy your stakeholders or retain your customers.

There is no more powerful source of feedback than when one can hold a mirror up to oneself. That’s why we’ve created the Digital Maturity Evaluation to enable collaboration, long-term thinking and avoid siloed decision making.

With your consumers seeking an enhanced digital experience, using a digital maturity framework to evaluate yourself, team and organisation is an effective tool to support strategy implementation and ensure a clear focus on the customer.

Improving your digital maturity

Here we explore how brands can propel their digital maturity from ‘Emerging’ to ‘Connected’, but if you’re at an earlier stage in your digital maturity journey you might find this more useful:

• ‘Siloed’ to ‘Emerging’: How to pioneer integrated digital growth within your business

Or if you’re one step ahead:

• ‘Connected’ to ‘Advanced’: How to create the ultimate customer experience by pioneering omnichannel growth

Evolving from ‘Emerging’ to ‘Connected’

If you have identified your organisation as sitting in the ‘Emerging’ stage, we anticipate that ROI will be your top KPI, but you’ll also likely be tracking revenue, leads and share of voice. We’d expect data to be fuelling your marketing delivery and elements of experimentation to be supported by your business.

Based on our experience, we have identified ten areas of focus (and investment) to help you advance to the next level to achieve truly digital-first integrated growth:

1. Prioritise understanding and segmenting your customers. You should invest in customer journey mapping and CX. Walk in your customers’ shoes!
2. Broaden your marketing mix. Bring in elements of Mixed Media Modelling (MMM) to help prioritise spend and forecast with greater accuracy.
3. Embrace digital-first top funnel channel activity driven by first-party data (like brand-safe CTV) and audience enrichment to harness personalisation and targeting. At the bottom of the funnel, implement advanced CRO and UX practices.
4. Create a robust measurement framework and a first-party data strategy beyond delivery. This will be key to achieving competitive advantage!
5. Create opportunities for creative and personalisation to work together to heighten the customer experience. 
6. Invest in content creation at scale to help you achieve your business goals.
7. Ensure collaboration across teams and departments is part of the culture to refine your marketing vision and ensure it aligns with the wider business vision. Adoption is the key metric.
8. Review and align your marketing tech stack. 
9. Migrate multiple disciplines (such as affiliates, influencers and social shopping) into Partnership Marketing.
10.  Bring your agency partners together. The sum will be greater than the parts. 

Looking for support?

We understand that each business is different and has its own unique set of challenges. If you’re looking for personalised advice on how to level up your digital maturity, get in touch with our team. 

Our consultants can help you explore:

• How you can leverage 26’s ‘Outcomes Generator’ for Mixed Media Modelling, 
• Examples of customer journey mapping and its impact on the brands we’ve worked with.
• How to create use cases for first-party data beyond delivery with the support of our data collaboration partner, InfoSum.
• How we launched a marketing academy for Mitchells & Butlers to engage wider stakeholders and enhance marketing maturity.