How To Benchmark Your Web Strategy

Dave Chaffey has put together an excellent tool to help you benchmark & improve your web marketing capabilities.

The excel tool is based on the Capability Maturity Model, which will be familiar to you if you’re a software engineers or business analyst. (keep reading - I promise it’s far more interesting than I’ve made it sound so far…).

CMM is a tool used to plot how close your organisation is to proven ‘best practice’ in its business processes. It’s the kind of thing that a consultant would charge you an arm and both legs to run through and you’d STILL think you got value for money. So picking Dave’s tool up for free is a big bonus.

The Digital Strategy tool focuses entirely on Digital Marketing &, in theory, tells you whether you have poor/average/good digital processes & where you can improve.

How Does it Work?

The excel tool asks you a series of questions about your current capabilities. These are posed as statements, against each you rate your current capability on a scale from 0 to 5:

• We manage online reputation in communities and social networks proactively
• We are effective in natural search and online public relations
• We have flexibility & budget to trial new digital marketing approaches
• We can track multichannel interactions and the value they generate effectively

Once you’ve answered the questions Following that, the tool spits out a ‘radar graph’ comparing your current capability (the pink shape in the image below) against the ideal (the blue edges):

What’s the point in all this?

Essentially it’s a framework tool. It says “This is where you’re at today” & “This is the perfect state you should head towards”. We do that every day with money, clickthroughs and visitors (”how much revenue did the website make today?”) but there are fewer tools available for showing us where we’re at in terms of processes.

The key benefit of a regular web analytics tool is it tells you “this is where you’re at today in terms of visitors and revenue”. The key benefit of the benchmark tool is it says “this is where you’re at today in terms of business processes”. From there you can say “this is what we need to do to improve…”.