Marketing Maturity Model for New Media

An enormous wave of diversity has hit the shores of digital marketers. With the fast and furious adoption of Facebook, Twitter and smartphones, consumer demand for social and mobile channels has hit marketing like a tsunami, catching many brands unprepared to manage expectations in this new digital landscape.

According to a Forrester’s Study digital interactions have moved from being primarily site-centric just a few years ago to being splintered across multiple channels and devices. The study yielded three key findings:


1. The Splinternet (term coined by Forrester) disrupts the marketing landscape, but adapting to a multiple channel environment is critical.
2.   Marketing strategies need a reboot to meet expectations of sophisticated consumers.
3. Multi-channel success requires understanding of unified customer behavior across all channels.

Entering a marketing channel without plan of measuring the ROI or ROETI (Return of Employee Time Invested) will be an unwise decision. Since last five years companies are experimenting with spend in Digital Marketing channels like Social Media, SEM and Mobile Marketing. In absence of well defined deliverables, they have always been hesitant in committing significant marketing dollars on this channel.  As for my understanding marketing needs a threshold budget to start showing significant effect. If you have an outsourced vendor for your organization you certainly need to know the maturity model for the different channels.

Advertisers can measure the success of their marketing effort using following three step CWR process:

Crawl: This is an operational reporting stage, where brands measure what matters to a company's key performance indicators, such as adoption of apps or acquisition of fans.

Walk: Testing and targeting allows brands to apply insights from measurement to build engagement and improve the customer experience.

Run: Nurturing users with targeted marketing results in conversions and revenue, providing brands with a true picture of marketing effectiveness.      

 Figure 1: Social Media Marketing Maturity Model

With rise of usage of smartphones, user has started consuming a lot of data on go. Companies have started investing in their mobile presence and started opting for responsive layout for their web presence. Setting up a plan for measurement before launching an app or a mobile ad campaign is key to a successful endeavor.

  

Figure 3:Mobile Marketing Maturity Model