Digital Maturity Model

What is a digital maturity model?

A digital maturity model is key to establishing the standard of your business’ digital presence and customer experience. Sitecore’s digital maturity model is broken into three stages.

Marketers can use the model to determine what their level of digital maturity is and how far they have to go. So, is your business stuck in its infancy or are you striding towards adulthood?

Childhood stage – attracting customers:

• Initiate – having a ‘brochure site’ with the capability for email campaigns and web analytics
• Radiate – distributing content across the most commonly used channels and networks
• Align – digital focus begins to shift towards reaching strategic goals

Teenage stage –increasing conversion:

• Optimise – grab every opportunity for optimisation and improvement, such as testing and personalisation
• Nurture – a focus on automation builds strong customer relationships with relevant conversations in the customer’s preferred channels

Adulthood stage – encouraging brand advocacy:

• Engage – connect online and offline customer data into a central hub for real time use across channels
• Lifetime customers – customer experience is optimised across every channel by anticipating the customer’s needs based on customer data and experience

Why does it matter to marketers?

Having a ruler to measure their business’ growth against lets marketers stay goal oriented. For marketers, goals align business objectives with marketing strategies to keep your campaigns focused. Use the digital maturity model to guide your growth as a business.

Simply put, the digital maturity model revolves around customer experience. It outlines the baby steps that take a business from stagnant webpages to customer-centric digital activities. In case you’ve been living under a rock, it’s all about customer experience in the digital marketing world these days.

Companies focused on customer experience see higher engagement, improved conversion and better brand perception (according to Ensighten).

How Sitecore can give you a digital maturity boost

Sitecore features are customer experience focused to the core. Every aspect of the platform is designed to improve your digital maturity level. And with the recent release of Sitecore 8.1, these features have had a further boost.

Sitecore will kick you out of the childhood phase with:

• Easy system integration for email marketing. Sitecore’s Email Experience Manager easily integrates with your site and customer data.
• Create great content, quickly and easily. Create content and media that’s engaging and highly sharable. Manage all of your assets from a single library.
• Start goal tracking with Sitecore Analytics. Real time analytics built in.

Features that get rid of that teen angst:

• Easy SEO capabilities to optimise your content for search engine results, making sure customers get what they ask for.  Use analytics to track your optimisation and keep improving.
• Cross channel automation in Sitecore lets you deliver personalised content on any channel, for a customer experience users can count on.

And finally, pushes you into adulthood with:

• Sitecore Experience Platform combines powerful web content management with marketer-friendly tools. The Experience Platform links channels, eCommerce and engagement automation and analytics. It personalises your site based on customer data and previous interactions. Key to exceptional customer experience.
• Easily Integrate the Sitecore Experience Platform with a CRM (like the Sitecore Customer Experience Database). Manage every bit of customer data for automation and personalisation.

We’ll give you a hand up the ladder

Be brutally honest when assessing your business’ digital maturity level. Otherwise your progress could miss a fundamental step. Don’t rush through your digital adolescence and end up underdeveloped.

Our relationship with Sitecore means that our clients get the best from the platform. We’ve worked with companies like Saint Gobain, Welsh Water and Fairtrade to improve their digital maturity level using Sitecore’s digital maturity model.

If you’re already on Sitecore and you think your implementation is hurting your digital maturity, talk to us about an audit. If you want to know more about Sitecore’s digital maturity model and how it can help your business grow, get in touch.