Insights
How mature are your organization's digital marketing efforts? Whether you’re a young organization or an established one, there are always opportunities to continue to advance your digital maturity using an integrated digital marketing strategy. By focusing on the activities that will add the most value, your organization can maximize the return on investment (ROI) of your digital marketing activities.
Digital Marketing Maturity as a Measure of Effectiveness Online
Digital marketing maturity is a measure of the sophistication and effectiveness of the digital marketing tactics and strategies an organization uses. When measuring your organization’s digital marketing activities using Br8kthru’s Digital Marketing Maturity Model, you can gain a better understanding of where your organization currently is in terms of maturity, and what you can do to get where you’d like to be. We break down digital marketing maturity into three phases, or stages: Foundation, Acceleration, and Expansion. These simplified stages help you better understand your marketing maturity for future work efforts.
By understanding your marketing maturity, your organization is more equipped to make intentional decisions to align your activities with your business needs. That way, your strategy can best reflect your goals. Among other benefits, a more mature strategy is better equipped to guide users through the marketing funnel, converting them from passive consumers to active and loyal Clients.
Moving from Foundation to Acceleration
After you’ve covered the fundamentals of digital marketing, you can move on to more advanced tactics. At Br8kthru, we call this phase Acceleration, because your efforts will pick up pace and achieve more results over time. This phase incorporates activities like search engine optimization (SEO), content marketing, email marketing, and social media marketing.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO allows your organization to become more visible in search engine results pages (SERPs). By developing SEO skills and following best practices throughout your integrated digital marketing strategy, your organization will be better positioned to succeed on and off the SERPs.
To accelerate your efforts, utilize SEO to guide your website and content. If your organization is new to SEO, optimize your content for keywords with attainable search volume, keyword difficulty, and competition. Incorporate them throughout your content, both on individual web pages and in blogs or articles. If your organization has been working in SEO for a while, consider a pillar + cluster strategy to amplify your efforts.
Additional SEO activities you may want to consider — if you don’t already do them — include:
- Optimize metadata, such as descriptions and titles, for better search authority;
- Create and execute a backlink strategy to get more traffic to your site;
- Internally link your pages, so search engines and visitors can navigate your site; and
- Optimize for Core Web Vitals to improve your website’s overall user experience.
Content Marketing
Content marketing provides you with an opportunity to connect more deeply with your audiences and nurture them as leads. Content can be part of an integrated digital marketing strategy to answer questions, share information, and increase conversions, especially when it targets a variety of stages in the user journey. By developing a content strategy, creating content, and following content marketing tips, your business can begin to increase conversions over time.
One of the key content marketing tips in the Acceleration phase is to create content for both people and search engines. While it can be tempting to create content for just one or the other, successful content at this stage keeps both in mind, so the content can solve user problems while also helping your business rank more highly in SERPs.
As you begin to develop a content strategy, consider the following to ensure your strategy aligns with business goals:
- Who is your target audience?
- What are their primary pain points?
- How can your services, solutions, or products solve those pain points?
- How can you leverage your SEO strategy to bolster content efforts?
Email Marketing
Email marketing is a strong way to stay front-of-mind for your audiences. It can also help you share relevant information with them, like company updates to purchasing opportunities. There are also many types of email marketing, making it a flexible tactic to achieve numerous goals.
Email marketing can be used in various ways. Your organization can send consistent emails with updates and repurposed content, like a monthly or quarterly newsletter. This is an opportunity to stay in touch with audiences while continuing to answer questions and share your unique value with them.
For a slightly more advanced approach, you can set up specific, personalized email workflows with unique messages tailored to your audiences. These types of email marketing workflows can function in many ways, such as addressing precise pain points or warming a cold lead. By personalizing the message, you are more likely to have success with an email campaign.
As you assess your email marketing activities, consider the following metrics:
- Opens
- This is the number of times your email was opened, even if the same person opened it multiple times. On average, 21.3% of the people who are sent your email will open it. Higher-than-usual opens may mean a specific subject line, preview line, or topic is more popular among your subscribers.
- Unique Opens
- This is the number of unique people who opened your email. This metric removes duplicates for a clearer picture of engagement on your email.
- Clicks
- This is the number of times the links in your email were clicked, even if the same person clicked a link multiple times. An average of 2.6% of people will click through the emails you send. Looking at successful links or buttons will give you a sense of what your audience wants to see more of.
- Unique Clicks
- This is the number of unique clicks in your email. Like with unique opens, this removes duplicates for a better sense of engagement on your email.
- Unsubscribes
- While we hope the unsubscribe will be low, the industry average is 0.3% of recipients will unsubscribe. Keeping an eye on higher — or lower — numbers will allow you to tweak emails as needed.
Social Media Marketing
In an increasingly digital landscape, the social media marketing world can be used as another avenue for reaching prospects and Clients alike. When used effectively, social media marketing can build brand awareness, drive traffic to your website, and support other digital marketing activities, like content marketing. In the Acceleration phase, we use primarily organic social media to reach audiences; while advertising and paid social media are options, they are more advanced tactics.
When embarking on a social media marketing journey, it’s important to have social media activities integrated into digital marketing activities as a whole. Aligning your platforms and messaging with larger organizational goals will be key to success on social media.
Whether you’re new to the social media marketing world or looking to level up, the platforms you choose to invest in impact your outcomes. Depending on your goals, you may want to consider one or multiple of the following platforms:
Accelerate Your Efforts with Br8kthru
At the Acceleration phase of digital marketing maturity; an organization has the foundation necessary to succeed. It intentionally adds to it with additional tactics, thus accelerating the outcomes of the work. By leveraging the tactics discussed above, organizations of all sizes and maturities can create integrated digital marketing strategies that begin to bring users along from awareness to consideration in the marketing funnel, bringing you closer to a conversion.
At Br8kthru, we specialize in complex customer journeys. We’ve developed our Foundation, Acceleration, Expansion framework for digital marketing maturity based on what we’ve found to be successful for our Clients and their sales cycles. When you collaborate with Br8kthru, you access not only our framework, but also the experience and expertise of all our subject matter experts (SMEs).
Interested in expanding your digital marketing maturity? Request a Digital Marketing Gap Audit today to see where your maturity is currently and learn how we can support you on your journey to Expansion.