We see this first piece of our Business Maturity Model as the environment in which the right sort of behaviour and people flourish. Employees buy into a culture before they buy into your mission. Does your business have a plan in place to create the right sort of behaviour and mindset in each elements of your marketing strategy?

Senior sponsorship by CEO or CMO

• Empowerment. If your leadership team thinks driving a culture that empowers people is a waste of time, your organisation is doomed. Empowered people is what leads to the right sort of behaviour and the sense of psychological safety that encourages responsible risk taking.
• Data. If your leadership team thinks investing in better data is a waste of time, and prefers to follow their gut, because they have been successful in the past, your organisation will eventually fall behind. Data driven decision making is what leads to the right sort of outcomes.

Cross-functional and agile teams

• Co-locate teams that work together or should be working together better. Rotate people and teams within those areas to ensure barriers to communication are limited to the bare minimum.
• Rotate between teams to break down cross functional barriers and encourage internal mobility.
• Small teams continually test new things. Monthly goals that are evaluated rigorously and according to pre agreed set of KPIs.
• These new teams report in to the most senior level to ensure the right level of support for any organisational roadblocks the teams might encounter.

Test and learn and share both success and failure

• Every assumption is tested. What can you test up with an A/B test? The highest paid person opinion (Hippo) is tested, verified and refined where necessary.
• Tests are set up continuously. Ideally they run for a month or so, so learnings can be gotten and applied continuously.
• Celebrate success and failure. Learn from both and reward both equally. Failure is fine as long as it accomplished fast.

Organisations that score well on the above are able to continuously hold on to talented people. People feel empowered to make decisions and feel appreciated. Organisations that do this will manage to learn over time and keep learning in their teams going.

We see this first piece of our Business Maturity Model as the basis to built on. Does your business actually use the data available to them in different elements of your marketing strategy?

Strategic Partnerships

• Who owns data in your organisation? Is (ad tech) data stored centrally?
• How many external partners do you employ for crucial marketing functions? How often do they align (with internal team)?
• How do you compensate your partners?

Specialist skills

• Do you have in house data scientist? How do they engage with marketing?
• Do you have a dedicated marketing measurement specialist?
• Do you have channel specialists that understand the fine details of Social, Search or specific Marketing Tech platforms?
• Do you have a set of shared KPIs across all marketing teams? Do you have measurable outcomes and conditions connected to those?
• How do you ensure continuous learning across all of your marketing functions? Is there an L&D program in place?

Organisations that score well on the above are able to continuously improve their marketing operations. They have happy and motivated people in their marketing organisation that work together towards a common goal, share information and key learnings. They continuously explore the use of data to get smarter about achieving marketing goals.

We see this second piece of our Business Maturity Model and as an important part of your strategy to execute. Does your business have the right set of tools available to implement and automate critical elements of your marketing strategy?

I did extensive research on 7000 websites, comparing their marketing technology over a period of two years. It resulted in this article on Think with Google about some of the trends in Marketing Technology we were seeing in the United Kingdom. We learned a lot about what tools gaining market share and what tools were loosing, and how to asses a specific sector and whether or not businesses were actually using the tools.

Roughly, marketing tech can be split in these three areas.

Web and app analytics

• Are you able to track customer journeys across all your digital assets? Is offline data integrated into your tools?
• Are these tools integrated with your media buying efforts?
• Have you set up goals and are you evaluating all marketing efforts towards a jointly agreed set of KPIs?

Media buying technology

• Do you have the right buying platform for your marketing goals? Are you integrating different channels so you have one unified view across channels?
• Is your ad tech tailoring messaging based on the data and behaviour of the audiences you are targeting?
• How are you scoring versus your competitive set in terms of media mix and marketing technology used?

CRM and Automation

• Are you using all of your customer data to leverage your marketing strategy?
• Are there patterns in customer lapse, retention and acquisition that we could use to drive stronger performance?
• Have you automated these processes? How long does it take for (predictive) data to feed into your automated marketing strategy?

Organisations that score well on the above questions have the right set of tools to support their marketing goals and execute on their connected data. They use data to efficiently pull customers through their funnels into their stores or onto their digital assets. Marketing tech tools allow successful businesses to automate the use of data to use the full potential of marketing automation.

We see this first piece of our Business Maturity Model as the basis to built on. Does your business actually use the data available to them in different elements of your marketing strategy?

Let’s start with first-party audience connected data

• Does your web analytics capture all relevant data from the customer journey and the sale? Do you use this information in marketing activations and or creative building?
• Do you have an audience strategy for retention, loyalty and/or acquisition? Are you aware which audiences drive the most value?
• Are all of your marketing channels connected to your most important source of data
• Have you connected offline information to your online audience? Can you follow customers as they interact with different channels?

You should audit this and decide to what extent you are really using your first-party data before venturing out. But once you feel you score reasonably on the above you can explore third party data:

• Can you buy third party data to use in your marketing funnel? Is there an easy way to test the value this could drive?
• Can you use third party insights for offline visitor data? Can you derive insights from this data that you can use for marketing activation?
• Are you using Google Maps data to discover where demand for your products and services resides from?

Organisations that score well on the above use data to determine where their brand fall short. They use data to decide on content creation. They continuously explore the use of data to power marketing goals.