Do You Know Your Marketing Maturity? Identifying and Transforming Marketing Strategy

By Michael Shanker, CEO & Director, Extraprise

For many BtoB marketing organizations, implementing multi-channel marketing to optimize revenue at the right time in the customer life cycle is an imperative, but an elusive goal.

It begs a couple of questions to arrive at an effective multi-channel marketing strategy – do marketing organizations understand their marketing maturity? Moreover, do they need to transform their marketing strategy and how? The answers to these questions create the necessary foundation to drive a multi-channel marketing strategy that grows revenue.

Why Marketing Maturity is Important
Just like the industry you compete in marketing organizations and their strategies, mature and grow. It’s critical to perform a self-assessment of marketing maturity to understand how to evolve to multi-channel marketing that ensures you’re making the right offer, at the right time, to the right customer. A Marketing Maturity Model can assist marketers in increasing their revenue growth as it helps companies evolve in three stages from product-centric to customer-centric, and finally, the “Holy Grail” of customer value optimization.

In stage one, companies are product-centric, focused on selling product with a mass market approach. In stage two, marketing organizations shift toward using buyer behavior to gain more customer insight. This insight involves analyzing commonalities among buyers in the final stage of marketing maturity, marketing organizations are able to drive their strategies and tactics to create value optimization, using customer intelligence and sophisticated business rules, to optimize the customer experience and revenue and create a one-on-one relationship with buyers.

How to Achieve Maturity and Transform Your Strategy
Every marketing organization needs a sustainable multi-channel marketing strategy that produces separation from the competition. But, in the rush to create one, the necessary foundation to create marketing maturity and transform the strategy is often ignored.

This foundation includes:

• Using customer intelligence to drive engagement and ultimately a buy decision
• Aligning the marketing organization to multi-channel marketing
• Implementing a closed-loop sales and marketing system to provide constant feedback on multi-channel marketing performance

Let’s quickly examine each and their impact on transforming multi-channel marketing strategy.

Customer Intelligence
All marketing organizations have access to data, but very few of them are able to leverage customer intelligence to produce actionable insight to drive marketing strategy. Marketing organizations do not need to take a “boil the ocean” approach to customer intelligence. A customized approach to the use of existing data, based on business objectives, can yield immediate results that enable marketers to learn.

Eventually, marketers can use customer intelligence to answer questions that will drive their multi-channel marketing to greater levels of performance:

• What are the most preferred marketing channels to engage particular segments, and what is the right offer to incent action?
• What is the right mix of channels at each stage of the customer life cycle?
• What is the right offer through the right channel to put in front of prospects that have interacted with my company in different ways in a concentrated timeframe?

Customer intelligence is multi-dimensional across a variety of segmentation attributes, buyer characteristics, and customer interactions, and it intersects with business metrics like penetration rates, revenue, and profitability. Ultimately, it proves that past behavior is the best predictor of future results.

Aligning the Marketing Organization
Aligning the marketing organization to multi-channel marketing is not a simple task of determining skill sets and defining responsibilities. Achieving effective alignment is about understanding how to optimize revenue from those channels, and then applying customer intelligence, marketing strategies, tactics, budget and perhaps, most importantly, business process and organizational design.

This is where a Business Transformation Plan plays a pivotal role in marrying an organizational design for the marketing organization to the interaction model (methods and channels to identify, acquire, sell to and manage target audiences), information and technology, and performance measurement. Each of these elements is viewed against the Marketing Maturity Model and the stage to which the marketing organization seeks to evolve.

The Closed-Loop Sales and Marketing System
Implementing a closed-loop sales and marketing system is the final foundational element to create a strategy that will optimize revenue through multi-channel marketing. This typically means a marketing automation application that is integrated with a sales force automation and/or a service application. A system is said to be closed-loop if inbound data can be captured and used to target future campaigns, the results of which flow back to the original system (or some related system). In the ideal case, a marketer can track a campaign to a sale and then use that information to improve marketing activities.

Where do closed-loop systems intersect with multi-channel marketing, and why should they be part of your marketing strategy transformation? Simply, a closed-loop system is the most adept way to bring together data, customer intelligence, campaigns and response, across multiple channels, to measure your organization’s performance at optimizing revenue at different stages of the customer life cycle.

Michael Shanker is CEO and Director of Extraprise, a leader in right time revenue optimization for BtoB and BtoC enterprises, providing database marketing and demand generation services.. For more information, contact the author at mike.shanker@extraprise.com, visit www.extraprise.com,  or call +1(888)i2iMKTG.