Are You Helping Your Clients Reach Digital Marketing Maturity?

Think with Google is a new YouTube series that seeks to educate and inspire the next generation of marketers, advertisers, and creatives with tutorials from experts in privacy, digital transformation, and AI to name a few.

In related news, the 2021 Forrester Digital Marketing Maturity survey, conducted on behalf of Google, found that nearly three-quarters of survey participants said the role of marketing gained importance in the past year, and 1 in 4 said their companies increased digital spend by at least 10%. But, just 48% of B2C marketers and 35% of B2B marketers said they have a comprehensive cross-channel view of customer activity.

When researchers examined the five key phases of a marketing campaign — planning, creation, execution, optimization, and measurement — they found numerous opportunities for improvement.

Only 32% of marketers — and 29% of business-to-business (B2B) marketers — said the process of planning campaigns went very well. Just over half were sure they had selected the right business goal for a given marketing project, and only 42% were confident that they identified the right target audience. Companies can augment their performance in each phase, but planning stood out as the biggest barrier to success.

Part of the problem: There are way too many cooks in the kitchen these days. On average, 18 decision-makers now have input into digital-marketing investments, the survey found, and they often disagree about strategy. My question is how many of the 18 decision-makers know the difference between strategy and tactics?

Do Your Campaigns Measure Up?

To compete today, advertisers want to “create a competitive advantage by prioritizing digital marketing maturity,” suggests Lucie Volmer, director of performance solutions at Google. “By defining clear business objectives, empowering cross-functional work, fostering a test and learn mentality, and investing in ML and AI, marketers create lasting value for the business and shareholders.”

To better express this lasting value, marketers need numbers and measurement continues to be a problem area for marketers today. In this new video, Think with Google suggests investments in first-party data, the use of cross-platform analytics tools, an emphasis on privacy and transparency, conversion modeling, and a cloud-based solution that predicts customer behavior.

I do believe advertisers have been predicting customer behavior from the beginning of time, but clearly, we now have machines and the brainiacs who program them to help validate or negate our hunches rapidly, saving everyone time and money, and helping create efficient communications systems where brands more easily connect with interested shoppers.