Of the 200 brands included in our survey, about 90% were split almost equally between the emerging and connected categories. (See Exhibit 1.) Clearly, marketers are trying to climb the digital curve, but the curve gets steeper as it rises, increasing the difficulty of moving to the next level. And multiple barriers hinder companies’ efforts to achieve multimoment maturity. 

The companies in our study wrestled with both technical and organizational issues:

• 83% could not make connections across consumer touch points.
• 68% lacked automation, relying instead on manual processes.
• 78% could not attribute value to touch points along the customer journey.
• 80% suffered from inadequate cross-functional coordination.

In studying digital success factors, we identified six that enable a company to navigate the maturity curve, measure customer journeys, engage customers through multiple channels at opportune times, and develop personalized relationships and interactions. (See Exhibit 2.) The first three enablers are technical: connected data, automation and integrated tech, and actionable measurement. The other three are organizational: strategic partnerships, specialist skills, and agile teaming with a fail-fast culture. All are essential if a company is to reach multimoment maturity.

But the results also showed wide variation. (See Exhibit 3.) For example, advanced audience targeting resulted in a drop in CPAs ranging from a median of 8% (not bad) to 27% (a pretty big deal). Similarly, automated bidding with artificial intelligence reduced CPAs by a median of 9% (okay) to 44% (really good) depending on the company and test. The difference lies in human intervention.

The Human Boost

Marketers typically improve their digital campaign performance over time by learning best practices and optimizing settings. Our research showed that, because advanced technologies are quicker than people to identify and correct the reasons for underperformance, these technologies provide an average performance boost of 20%. But it takes humans and a test-and-learn approach to apply strategic considerations and adjust for compatibility factors that algorithms have difficulty seeing. On average, human adjustments can add another 15%, on top of the 20% technology-driven improvement, to campaign performance. (See Exhibit 4.)

Human input can help improve campaign performance in three areas. First, by aligning campaign objectives and technology settings (such as bidding strategy and definition and measurement of the consumer action desired), marketers can increase their reach and reduce CPAs. Second, adjusting the mix of channels or devices for category compatibility (to account for product seasonality or how a particular touch point fits into the purchase cycle) increases conversions and accelerates ML. Third, aligning the selection of audiences and messages with customer journey stages improves both effectiveness and efficiency.

In our tests, the combination of advanced technologies and human adjustments reduced CPAs by twice as much as the control group by optimizing spending on the higher-performing in-market audiences. Revising the channel mix produced an even result between the test and control groups. But by adjusting the bidding strategy to prioritize efficiencies, brands achieved an improvement of 50%.

Consider three examples from our study. One large retailer and its online agency conducted geographic tests across the UK to measure the online and offline sales impact of advanced audience targeting according to user interest in a category. The tests demonstrated that use of the advanced technology produced an immediate material improvement in search campaign metrics across user engagement, online transactions, and CPAs. They also showed a correlation between online and offline performance, with an uplift of about 1% in offline sales value. When marketers intervened and adjusted the campaign strategy, they more closely aligned category dynamics and customer journeys, focused on the highest-performing customer groups, and reallocated budgets to the mobile devices with the highest revenue results. These moves, combined with the boost driven by technology, realized a 30% to 50% overall improvement in conversion rates, up to a 30% improvement in CPA, and a doubling of ROAS.

In another test, an automotive brand aimed to increase engagement across its display campaigns in order to generate more high-quality visits to its website. The company defined custom audiences to identify customers with purchasing signals that indicated interest in buying a new car (people searching for new cars, visiting dealership websites, or researching related brands, for example); it compared those audiences with purely sociodemographic audiences (which were based on customer-provided age and income information). Tests showed immediate improvement over the control group. After about ten days, conversion rates doubled and CPAs were down about 25%.

Human input further improved campaign performance by adjusting both the target custom-audience signals and bid thresholds and the strategy. This drove an additional 20% improvement in conversion rates and a 5% to 10% improvement in CPAs. Overall, tests showed material improvement in both effectiveness (42% more conversions, 10% more high-quality website visits) and efficiency (27% lower CPAs). The automaker plans to further test these advanced custom audiences on other campaigns and brands in an effort to identify best practices that can be scaled.

In a third test, a UK do-it-yourself chain saw a 9% improvement in CPAs with human input reallocating budget and automating creative optimization in ways that focused spending on the better-performing messages for each audience. The technology also helped the advertiser identify that project-based messages were more effective than product-focused creative content with the target audience.

Organizational Enablers

A big part of the human boost to campaign performance lies in the organization’s ability to support and enhance the performance of technology consistently across brands and campaigns. Among the 200 brands that we observed, we found that the more the marketing organization can apply organizational best practices, the more it can add significant scale to the impact of advanced technology on campaigns. In fact, companies with high organizational maturity reported 1.4 times the impact on costs and 2.5 times the impact on revenue compared with low-maturity marketing organizations. We identified three key organizational enablers for digital marketers.

Strategic Partnerships. Technology is about ecosystems. Few companies, even digital natives, go it alone. The key for marketers is to collaborate effectively with agencies and marketing tech providers while maintaining direct control over technology and first-party data. One automaker established a marketing hothouse where about 150 people, including staff from four agency partners, work in the same building alongside members of the OEM’s marketing and media teams. This approach puts all the expert disciplines (creative, content, operational, social media, and others) in a single place. The company has standardized ways for its agencies and marketing team to collaborate on campaign development, including performance reviews against predefined shared marketing objectives as well as budget, quality, and timeliness criteria. Among the benefits: increased agility with improved capacity planning and speed to output.

Specialist Skills. The best performers identified, hired, and trained technical talent, such as in-house data scientists and measurement experts, and also integrated these people with other members of the marketing staff to produce effective cross-functional teams. The lack of organizational connection between branding and online-marketing staffs led one online retailer to establish multidisciplinary marketing teams in which experts could work together closely to create one experience for customers. Each team includes specialists in brand marketing communications, customer insights, shop management, programmatic advertising, shop marketing, and marketing intelligence (data scientists) who advise the rest of the team on data and performance.

Agile Teaming with a Fail-Fast Culture. The most mature marketers in the study embraced a fail-fast, test-and-learn approach in which they identify failures early, learn the appropriate lessons, and move on. Done right, an agile transformation affects everything from internal processes to how employees spend their day to how people in the organization interact. Because most established organizations favor the status quo and fear change, it is not unusual for them to try to kill the transformation before it can gain traction. To prevent this from happening, C-suite sponsorship is essential, as is the active cooperation—and often the physical presence—of corporate functions such as HR, legal, and finance. For most companies, making the agile transformation is the most difficult step to take, but it’s also the one that brings all the others together.

A Roadmap to Maturity

Technology can give a quick boost to results, but long-term improvement requires more far-reaching organizational change. (See Exhibit 5.) Marketing organizations that want to make the shift will need determination and persistence, but as the best-in-class marketers have shown, the payoff is worth it.

Having a roadmap helps. On the basis of our research, we have identified the pathway and attributes that brands typically acquire to move forward on the maturity curve. The roadmap has three stages, and—as with the enabling factors—there are both technical and organizational milestones to achieve at each stage.

From Nascent to Emerging: Set the Foundation. Best-in-class marketers have overcome the challenges of changing how their people work. Such a transition typically requires an active and visible C-suite sponsor. It also demands the involvement and cooperation of internal and external partners. HR must help design new career paths and incentive schemes, for example. Legal must agree to new ways of reviewing and approving campaigns and data collection. The company will probably have to bring external agencies and their expertise onboard to fill gaps in internal capability (although, ironically, this is often easier than securing cooperation in-house). 

On the technical side, responsible data analysis is the foundation of digital engagement, but many marketing organizations lack regular access to sources of trusted and transparent data about customer behavior on their sites (such as clicks on websites, page views, and conversions). Furthermore, they lack the robust analytical capabilities that can turn data into plans, programs, and initiatives. Without such data-related capabilities, they have little hope of reaching the next stage: becoming connected.

From Emerging to Connected: Build Connections. The second stage of the journey to digital maturity involves building the cross-functional connections that make digital organizations work. Companies can demonstrate progress by starting to coordinate multiple channels, drive incremental revenue, and achieve efficiencies through better media execution. Most successful companies establish cross-functional teams (which they will need anyway when they move to the next maturity stage) that combine the relevant expert disciplines—creative, content, operational, and social media, for example—and bring together offline channels and online marketing to work more closely together. Some put their teams in the same location, as the automaker did in establishing its cross-functional hothouse. These teams work toward common KPIs and are often supported by dedicated measurement experts.

Crucial at this stage are the technical abilities to combine internal and external sources of online data in order to provide insights about audiences and to inform creative work, and then to automate messages for fast campaign development, testing, and adjustment. For example, companies link most or all of their online data, engage audiences on the basis of insights about their behavior, automate message tailoring, and link KPIs to business outcomes. Applying ML-based technologies helps automate deployment and realize efficiencies in execution.

From Connected to Multimoment: Make Every Moment Count. The final stage of marketing maturity is the most difficult. Acting on relevant customer touch points in a coordinated and sequenced way involves integrating key proprietary capabilities, such as an advanced analytics team, into the organization and also embedding agile teaming—without that, it’s virtually impossible to move at digital speeds. This is where many companies stumble, leaving them with an organization that is agile in name only or that has adopted half measures. They may be successful at cross-functional reorganization, for example, but fall short in following through with redesigned career paths and incentive programs based on shared objectives. They may have a bank of data scientists and measurement experts but fail to use data-driven decision making. Companies that get agile right start to market across channels and deliver better, more personalized customer experiences that drive sales. At the same time, their use of more advanced tech and automation lowers costs.

It’s essential at this stage to link technology objectives to business outcome KPIs and to use sophisticated attribution, among other measurement techniques, to optimize value. A global restaurant franchise company links offline sales to online marketing through a combination of third-party customer footfall data as a proxy for sales and store location data. A UK retailer has developed a strategic measurement plan to understand behavior and identify opportunities as a basis for deriving fast, accurate insights that can inform real-time decisions.

Getting Started

Smart companies find quick moves that they can make at each stage, often using existing data capabilities and technology, to show early progress. They build momentum, forcing practicality and helping fund the journey to the next stage. The best way to begin is by adopting a test-and-learn methodology that demonstrates the value that data-driven marketing can bring and that can accelerate achieving scale. It’s important to prioritize tests that can reveal the value of more-advanced techniques and technologies in digital marketing. Early results show progress and start to generate support.

One way to demonstrate an early win is to focus on mastering a single channel and improving execution. The company can allow the money saved from driving out costs to drop to the bottom line, or it can reinvest the money to build new capabilities and fund additional effective campaigns. Visible results help. To show the value of digital marketing, one retailer went so far as to cease its online-marketing activity in an entire region of the country and track the drop-off in sales.

Marketers should think through how they communicate results. Building a business case around bounce rates doesn’t work in lots of traditional companies. To secure investment, show results that are meaningful to a CFO, such as the impact on sales or costs. Provide trend data that demonstrates value relative to past performance. Relate results to the success criteria used by business units and brands. Calculate the full-scale potential of the test results to show the business case for scaling up. Once you have good results in hand, don’t be shy about taking them to the C-suite. Investment in new technologies and the organizational change necessary to make the technologies work typically require senior-management support. During the later maturity stages, the investments in expertise and enablers will pay off with the ability to mount personalized campaigns at scale and build customer relationships that deliver increased loyalty and revenue.

They say that growing up is never easy—and when it comes to digital marketing, they are right. But our tests showed that making headway in a few weeks is possible with the right conditions. Advanced technology can drive rapid business performance and improved marketing maturity. But it takes human supervision to achieve maximum impact. Most marketers still need the technical and organizational enablers in place to achieve multimoment marketing maturity. Individually, each of the enablers provides a powerful increase in capability. The combination of all of them defines full maturity and makes marketing organizations capable of engaging customers at every stage of the purchase journey—and of building lifetime customer relationships.

Maturity has its advantages. The sooner marketers start (or accelerate) their journey to digital maturity, the sooner they will see the benefits to their business begin to accrue.

Appendix