The path to digital maturity: how to hit your milestones

Once you have reached your first milestone by bringing social media management in-house, the common assumption is that the client is able to manage everything related to digital themselves. This isn’t the case.

Once your client understands the nature of social, and how that impacts their greater digital strategy, they are at the point where they can start turning to you, the digital strategist, for more tactical ideas, as opposed to basic management and implementation.

It’s at this point where you have set up a solid foundation and are able to start looking at strategic moves to help progress your client to the next milestone. Your client is also likely to have an internal social media manager, or digital marketing manager, which makes the facilitation of progressing their already successful strategy smoother.

Hitting your second milestone
It’s often at this point that you begin to see the exploration of new digital channels and platforms. Some of things that I have seen with my team is that at this point a lot of clients start realising the importance of mobile. This is just one of the natural progressions but there are a number of other directions the journey could take.

Once you start implementing tactical digital solutions you have reached milestone number two!

The next steps
Now that your client has grasped the digital world, how it works and more importantly, how it works for their business, your role as a strategist becomes more interesting. You’re now in a position to start look ahead — at trends, technology, industry changes etc, and understanding how this will implement your client and where this could take them on their digital journey.

Transform your client’s business strategy
It’s at this point that you could start exploring new innovations, playing around with ideas previous classified as sci-fi and getting your client to think beyond their comfort zone.

What’s really exciting about hitting the third milestone is that moving into a really mature digital space can have the opportunity to transform your client’s business, not just their marketing strategy.

The key thing that I tell my clients is that it’s not about becoming digital, it’s about succeeding in a digital world. A subtle difference, but a big one.