As one of the industries on the front line of digital change, marketers know that they need to develop their digital capabilities in line with rapid changes in technology and consumer behaviour. But knowing that you need to keep pace with digital transformation and actually doing it can be two very different things.
The following article is the first in a four-part content series produced in collaboration with Squared Online. Click here for our collaborative content guidelines.
How successfully are marketing organisations addressing the digital skills challenge?
As one of the industries on the front line of digital change, marketers know that they need to develop their digital capabilities in line with rapid changes in technology and consumer behaviour. But as we all know too well, knowing that you need to keep pace with digital transformation and actually doing it can be two very different things.
How well are marketers really keeping up with digital change and best practice? To find out, Google’s Digital Academy and the Boston Consulting Group joined up with six other organisations, including the Marketing Academy and The Knowledge Engineers, to conduct the Talent Revolution Survey.
The first of its kind, the survey looked at nine key areas across digital, giving each company the opportunity to benchmark its digital know-how against best practice and see how it measured up to the industry at large.
1188 marketers in 65 companies across the UK and Germany, including brands like Unilever, Vodafone and Procter & Gamble, took part in the pilot survey. So what did the report discover, and how can marketers act on the information it revealed?
The survey looked at nine key areas of marketing in a digital world | Image: Squared Online
The survey’s key findings demonstrated a clear lag in digital development across the marketing industry. Despite years of discussion around all things digital, even the largest and most well-resourced organisations were found to lack essential digital skills and best practices.
Companies are still grappling with mobile and multi-screening: just 19% of marketers believe that their mobile strategy is based on a ‘clear understanding of mobile’s role within the customer journey’, while only 11% agreed that they are able to effectively attribute the value of mobile using data.
Just under a third of marketers (28%) think that their organisation embraces a ‘test and learn’ approach by recognising lessons from failed tests as learning opportunities. And senior leaders are contributing to the delay in acquiring digital skills: under half of respondents (44%) said leadership empower them to take risks and challenge established business practices.
The new, fragmented customer journey is still tripping up marketers: 82% do not believe that their customer journey map captures all online and offline touchpoints to paint a full picture which allows marketers to attribute value and allocate spend accordingly. And 80% of marketers don’t believe their company invests enough in marketing capabilities to embrace changes in the digital space.
But the outlook isn’t all doom and gloom. Squared Online, the digital marketing leadership course developed with Google, runs a webinar series which encourages businesses to build the skills, capabilities and mindset to achieve great things in digital. When they asked participants about the state of digital transformation in their company, 50% of them were found to taking steps to actively address the digital skills challenge.
However, it’s clear that marketers are up against plenty of obstacles when it comes to closing the digital development gap. How can businesses who want to do this go about making up the ground?
Image: Squared Online
Squared Online has produced a whitepaper in conjunction with its webinar series which aims to answer this very question.
‘Digital transformation: How to create a culture of digital learning, development and innovation in your organisation’ contains contributions from key figures at Google, Google Digital Academy and iProspect on how you can identify the gaps in know-how in your organisation, create a programme to address them, and foster a culture that keeps transformation going.
Find out how Google is tackling the digital skills challenge, how iProspect is engaging digital natives within its organisation, and how Google Digital Academy is nurturing a culture that rewards innovation.
The whitepaper provides in-depth case studies of digital transformation along with practical, actionable insights that you can apply to your business to get ahead in the world of digital innovation.
Click here to download your free copy of the Digital Transformation whitepaper.
