Do you know what the digital maturity of companies is? If yes, can you indicate whether your company is digitally mature? The answer to this question involves the analysis of several factors, ranging from using digital tools to fostering an organizational culture focused on innovation.
The lack of digital maturity means that these companies do not collect all the information necessary to improve decision-making and, consequently, lose competitive advantages.
But, after all, what is the digital maturity of companies? Understand this concept better below and identify what stage your organization is at.
What Is Digital Maturity?
Digital maturity is a classification that shows the stage that the knowledge and implementation of digital technologies have reached within a company.
When a business starts the digital transformation, it integrates technological tools in favor of its strategies to achieve management goals.
As technologies consolidate, companies can automate functions to optimize time and start working with data intelligence. This information is a basis for general business planning and guiding digital marketing and sales actions.
For the digital maturity of companies to become a reality, it is necessary to consider:
- the company’s market strategy;
- the ability to analyze data and use it in actions;
- the internal organization to have trained team members who disseminate knowledge;
- digital culture as a source of business innovation.
The path to digital maturity is long; therefore, managers need to outline a consistent plan so that technology is used in a way that aligns with the company’s goals.
Four Stages Of Digital Maturity For Companies
To better understand where your company fits in the digital maturity index, a suitable parameter is to know how this analysis is done. In the study A Journey Towards Digital Maturity, the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) indicated four stages:
- Nascent: companies that use third-party data to guide marketing actions and direct purchase of media with little connection to sales results;
- Emergent: campaigns are carried out based on own data and programmatic media purchase with optimization and testing independently by media channel;
- Connected: the data is integrated across multiple media channels with the measurement of the investment impact of each of the actions on the financial return achieved;
Multi Memento: companies that apply the omnichannel consumer concept and can execute actions in a dynamic, optimized way and carry out activities aimed at the individual result of each customer in the different media channels.
According to the researchers, advancing between stages of digital maturity can represent a 20% increase in revenues and a reduction of up to 30% in costs.
Given the four stages defined by the Boston Consulting Group, it is clear that companies that seek to become more digitally mature must be data-driven; that is, they must pay special attention to data collection and analysis to create personalized campaigns for their clients.
This mission becomes closer to being accomplished when companies work with tools that integrate all the contact information with their customers in the different service channels.
How To Measure A Company’s Digital Maturity?
With a data-driven strategy, companies can measure their digital maturity, as they can compare the results to verify their evolution in this process.
To create the staged ranking described above, the Boston Consulting Group team evaluated business responses to the following Data-driven Marketing (DDM) questions:
- What is the value generated when companies improve their DDM capabilities?
- What are the best practices in DDM?
- What are the gaps and opportunities to reach the next level of digital maturity?
- What is the best path of evolution? What areas and activities should be prioritized?
This short roadmap of questions can assess the investments and whether the objectives are being achieved. With the business world advancing increasingly in digitization and the integration of technologies into everyday work, the sooner companies start investing in their digital maturity, the better.
It is essential to highlight that each business has a particular development when measuring digital maturity initiatives.