Go Beyond Digital Transformation to Digital Maturity

To understand how digitally mature your company or brand is, you have to be honest. How embedded, and effective are your digital processes? Digital is one of those words that now means something and nothing. Getting to each business's slightly nuanced view of their digital activity is critical to producing a deeper understanding of the challenges and opportunities ahead.

This process is usually defined as "digital transformation". I'm not a big fan of this phrase for two reasons. The first is that "digital transformation", like "digital", is a phrase so overused and abused that it has lost its meaning. It can now mean anything.

Secondly, we find that any significant "transformations" tend not to stick within a business. When a fantastic new online ordering tool is introduced into a business, it usually has to compete with a legacy system that may be inefficient but is widely understood. Any new solution needs to be presented to both internal and external stakeholders deliberately and thoughtfully. Otherwise, that paper and pen system of old will trump a million-dollar investment every time.

We have to start with understanding the digital maturity of an organisation. Digital maturity as a phrase accurately reflects the journey that a business is about to embark on. Maturity suggests changes over time as opposed to a transformation.  In our experience, helping modernise brands to communicate with digital-first customers takes time, it's a journey rather than a transformative destination.

So, how do you start to understand your digital maturity? Here are some top-line questions you can ask yourself.

• When you run digital campaigns, is it because you feel you have to or do they actually deliver meaningful business growth?
• Do you understand the broader customer journey across all channels, not just digital? Do you know what their challenges and their internal customer challenges are? Are your teams such as product, marketing, sales and service in agreement on this?
• What's the strategic advantage that your digital activity provides you over your competitors?
• When you add new technologies to your marketing stack, are they being added with a clear purpose and thoughtfully integrated into your teams? Do they achieve tangible business results?
• Does the collection of various data points result in providing actionable insights that deliver more business value?
• Is the entire business aware of the results of your digital activity?

If your answers to any of the above questions are unclear, you probably need to look at how to improve the way you approach digital to increase maturity. Our process talks to various teams across the business, reviewing digital activity and understanding the tools that are used in marketing functions. We then come up with a roadmap over a specific period to help improve the digital maturity of the business.

Over the past ten years, we've helped clients understand where they are and how to get to where they need to be. This has led to making fundamental, lasting changes that deliver on the aspirations of your business. Want to take the first step? Let's have a chat about your particular situation and see how we can help.