In recent years several models have been developed to measure the maturity of marketing within an organization.

But the dimension with growth potential remains underexposed or blurry. There is also a lack of focus and measurability. So I went on a quest to create a new model.

Axis

The horizontal axis indicates the maturity. The maturity is divided into five stages: Ad-Hoc, Repeatable, Defined, Managed, and Optimizing. The vertical axis represents the (financial) value for the business.

Growth

The growth lies in the combination of the two axis. The growth curve can be recognized as a s-curve from the ‘old’ marketing literature.  In the beginning growth is slow and the effort is high.  After this, everything has accelerated (little effort, lots of impact).  In the end it is becoming increasingly difficult to achieve additional value.

Circles of Focus Areas

The circles in the model are the focus areas of the model (these could possibly be extended). The size of the ‘filled’ circles stand for the internal focus / attention that the company has on the focus areas. The size of the ’empty’ circles stand for the attention / focus for the next period in the growth plan in order to mature. The five focus areas are: Communication, Channels, Sales, Customer Insight and Marketing Intelligence.

Company Profile

The gray area between all areas is the “position” that the company holds. The model can be used as a quick scan or for more organizations to be compared.

Other

The growth curves are always focus towards the growth curve (s-curve). This balances business value, effort and focus in  a reasonable way. All values are obtained by a questionnaire (answers in scores).

Maturity   Ad Hoc Marketing is carried out in a chaotic manner. This often means that there’s no marketing department. Often agencies are used for incidental work. Marketing is more luck than skill.   Repeatable Processes are repeatable. There are often a few people involved with marketing and some methods are archived. One can reasonably make decisions for future action, based on past results.   Defined Marketing processes are well established within the organization. A marketing department has several areas of expertise.   Managed Marketing has a prominent role in the organization. Results are monitored and adjusted if necessary. Marketing works with dashboards and key performance indicators (KPI).   Optimizing This is the fine tuning. One can improve detailed processes in a specialized way. The management has no management information, but management insight!

Focus Areas   Communications The way of communicating. e.g. Thought Leadership, Outside-In, Content, Structure, Timing, and Relevance.   Channels Use of channel, multichannel, channel selection, channel adolescence, target audience relative to channel, and interaction.   Salesenablement The way marketing ‘blends’ with sales. Are there bidirectional services level agreements (SLA) with sales? Things like aarketing automation, leadnuturing, and campaigning.   Customer Insights This has everything to do with (social) CRM, but also with outside-in thinking and knowing what moves or engages the customer.   Marketing Intelligence What is the competition doing? How is the market organized? From looking at the past to forcasting for the future. Understanding opportunities and threats.   Business Value   Low, Medium and High The way focus areas contribute to the business, financially.

 

Questionnaire for a quickscan

What do you need to determine the business value and maturity for the focus areas? By means of a questionnaire a score can be assigned to all areas. Do you want a quick scan? Contact Diederik Martens to make an analysis of your organization (maybe compared to some competitors) and to set up a customized growth.

 

Issues with the model

Measurability of business value
Measuering in Low, Medium and High leaves room for interpretation. The problem lies in the fact that marketing ROI is difficult to measure and report. It is difficult to measure to what extent campaigns, channels, and so forth (financially) contribute  to the business. This can be illustrated with the following example: There’s not just one marketing activity that leads to buying a software package, but it’s a combination of activities (e.g. events, sales visit, e-mail). But to what extend does each of these activities contributed to the sale? By using software like Marketo, the contribution of all marketing activities can be allocated to a conversion.

 

Potential updates for the model (26-5-2011)

Besides business value you can also considder other vertical axis like: customer value or customer engagement.