Digital marketing maturity benchmarks 2021

Benchmark your digital maturity against the latest research on digital marketing maturity from BrightTALK and Smart Insights

How will this guide help me and my business?

It's likely that you have an idea of where you'd like your organization's digital marketing efforts to be. You might feel you have strong abilities in one discipline, say content marketing, but you know you could improve your email marketing efforts.

How you rank yourself within each channel or discipline is what we would call Digital Marketing Maturity. In essence, you're ranking how mature or advanced your organization is when it comes to digital marketing activities.

The aim of this research is to help you benchmark your digital marketing maturity against other organizations and then identify areas of improvement with our guidance.

It features the results of a survey of marketing managers from across the globe and in varying industries, as well as a break down of what these results mean for marketing maturity on the whole, and what it can mean for you, depending on how you rate your maturity.

We focus on benchmarking omnichannel marketing as a modern marketing technique that can be used across different industry sectors beyond retail, where the term originated. Not familiar with the omnichannel marketing approach? No problem, this resource will help you get up to speed and direct you to further reading.

How is the guide structured?

This guide begins by discussing how prevalent a digital marketing strategy is amongst our respondents and discusses the associated benefits and negatives of either having or not having one.

We then reveal and break down the results of how our respondents rated their digital marketing maturity, highlighting areas of further reading and tips for improvement.

Then there follows a discussion of these findings in light of the Coronavirus pandemic currently gripping much of the world right now.

Finally, our findings are broken down further by industry. This allows us to draw some conclusions about the most and least advanced industries in terms of marketing maturity.

The digital marketing maturity section of this resource is structured using the Smart Insights RACE Framework. The framework’s elements of Plan, Reach, Action, Convert, and Engage show the typical activities related to digital marketing as well as the various components that comprise low to advanced maturity within each stage.

Who is this guide for?

This guide is aimed at helping managers in different roles responsible for shaping the future of their digital marketing output to increase digital channel performance. Typical roles include: