Jascha Kaykas-Wolff Vice President of Marketing Jascha Kaykas-Wolff oversees all Webtrends marketing efforts, including overall strategy, branding, demand generation, advertising, public relations and web site operations. Read the full biography here.

Just How Mature Are You?
Measuring Your Digital Marketing Campaign

Jascha Kaykas-Wolff - 16 November, 2009

We might look back on 2009 as the year digital overtook offline media as the driving force behind corporate marketing programs. Given the extraordinary growth rate that social networks and online communities are experiencing, it would not be surprising if the amount of budget allotted for online advertising increases as we head into 2010.

Organizations need a standardized approach to measuring the effectiveness of their digital marketing campaigns.

As online marketing continues to grow and mature, organizations need a structured approach to building and maintaining successful programs across all types of digital marketing activities. This need fuelled our Digital Marketing Optimization team to develop the Digital Marketing Maturity Model (DM3), which aims to give organizations a standardized approach to gauging their capabilities to execute and measure the effectiveness of their digital marketing campaigns.

The benefits of DM3 are threefold. Firstly, it measures the maturity of an organization’s ability to execute and measure digital marketing programs across six core areas, known as ‘Six Pillars of Digital Measurement’:

Secondly, it gains organizational consensus and support for measurement practices. And finally, it pinpoints the skills, staffing and other investments needed to advance within the model's four maturity levels.

Ultimately, even with the most sophisticated tools, effective digital marketing measurement is not a plug-and-play task.

These levels, which help define a company’s digital marketing maturity on a ranking of 1- to 4, contain their own levels of engagement and provide a detailed benchmark that organizations must meet to reach a higher level of maturity. When approaching the model, organizations need to determine the level that is appropriate for them based on their business goals and the likely return if they make the investments necessary to step up to a higher level.

Ultimately, even with the most sophisticated tools, effective digital marketing measurement is not a plug-and-play task. It requires significant planning and organizational coordination. Additionally, different types of vertical industries use digital marketing in a variety of ways to achieve different business goals. Having said this, it’s important to keep in mind that digital marketing maturity looks different for different types of organizations and is rarely achieved overnight.

Webtrends recently released the results of 160 companies that have taken the DM3, the first assessment survey from the DM3 since it was released last June, and the detailed results of the DM3 survey are available here:
www.webtrends.com/Products/Services/Digital-Marketing-Maturity-Model .

The more knowledge and understanding of your goals, and the journey you are about to embark on with your digital marketing campaign, the better prepared and more prosperous you will be when venturing in to that new frontier.

Jascha Kaykas-Wolff

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