it’s valuable for people working in marketing and business to review their personal digital maturity. This relates to reviewing their experience and skills for helping their business increase their digital capabilities.

Whether you are a manager directing improvements in digital marketing or a specialist marketer looking to develop your digital skills it’s useful to understand what your gaps are and what the priorities are to develop your skills.

In larger digital transformation projects, it may have a broad scope covering digital business and with a focus on digital technology and digital data. Digital business includes using digital communications to support interactions with a range of partners from suppliers to channel partners and customers.

Often the scope of digital transformation will be narrower, offering the opportunity for a brand to transform customer value propositions, business/revenue models and communications. This focus is valuable since it reviews opportunities for businesses to compete more effectively.

To help create the digital marketing maturity frameworks I adapted the Carnegie Mellon Capability Maturity Model (CMM) for software. While detailed assessments differed, it appealed since it has 5 clearly defined stages that correspond to improving maturity.

Maturity frameworks are often developed by large consultancies for large international brands, but I was keen that our offering would also be relevant for small and medium-sized businesses and cover both strategy and practical communications techniques.

This framework covers these 5 aspects of maturity. As would be expected from Google’s commercial interests these have a strong focus on customer acquisition via media using a data-driven approach.

Unlike the framework above there is less focus further down the funnel considering digital customer experiences and brand-customer engagement.