From scrappy to savvy: Moving up the marketing maturity curve
When you're building a business, one of the primary challenges you face is the evolution of your marketing efforts. It often starts from a makeshift, basic approach, ultimately moving towards a more sophisticated, integrated and algorithm-driven strategy. This journey is not merely a growth trajectory, but a maturity curve that reveals how your organization can graduate from scrappy to savvy.
Understanding this curve is vital, as it equips you with insights and strategies to navigate through each stage, as we explain in the following:
Stage 1: The Grassroots
At this early stage, businesses typically have little marketing experience. Owners, driven by their passion and determination, don the hat of marketers themselves, or delegate marketing tasks to a part-time team member. Marketing at this stage is primarily instinctual and reactive, guided by immediate needs rather than long-term strategies.
The measurement of marketing success is rudimentary, often based on visible outcomes such as sales or simple metrics like website traffic or social media likes. Marketing efforts might show results, but the lack of a systematic approach often leads to inconsistent results and inefficiencies.
Resource needs
People: The business owner or a part-time team member with basic marketing skills.
Tools: Basic digital tools such as a website, social media profiles, and an email marketing service.
Budget: Minimal to low budget, mainly used for creating basic marketing materials and running simple campaigns.
Stage 2: The Experimental Stage
As businesses grow, so does their understanding of the importance of marketing. This stage sees the organization experimenting with different channels, techniques, and messages. They might hire a dedicated marketing person or a small team, leveraging their skills to explore new horizons.
While the measurement becomes more sophisticated at this stage, it's still largely channel-specific. Businesses will measure the success of their email campaigns, social media strategies, and search engine optimization efforts independently. There is little integration or understanding of how different channels influence each other.
Resource needs
People: A dedicated marketing professional or a small team, bringing more diverse skills.
Tools: Expanded range of tools, which may include SEO tools, social media management tools, and possibly a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system.
Budget: Moderate budget, enabling experiments with different channels and techniques, including paid advertising.
Stage 3: The Strategic Turn
As businesses continue to mature, their approach to marketing becomes more strategic and structured. They adopt more complex marketing tactics, such as content marketing, search engine marketing, influencer marketing, and even start dabbling in data analytics for marketing decisions.
In this stage, marketing measurement also sees significant improvement. Businesses begin to recognize the interdependence of different marketing channels and start tracking cross-channel impact. However, the ability to orchestrate campaigns across channels remains limited, and attribution is often rule-based and simplistic.
Resource needs
People: A marketing team with members having specialized skills in areas such as SEO, content creation, social media, and email marketing.
Tools: More sophisticated tools, including advanced SEO and analytics tools, marketing automation platforms, and possibly a Content Management System (CMS).
Budget: Increased budget, allowing for more substantial campaigns, more extensive content creation, and investment in more advanced tools.
Stage 4: The Integrated Approach
Moving further up the curve, businesses develop the capability to plan and execute multi-channel campaigns with a unified strategy. At this stage, businesses have specialized marketing roles to manage different channels and techniques effectively.
Measurement at this stage becomes more refined, too. Businesses adopt more advanced attribution models that consider multiple touchpoints in the customer journey. They also start using predictive analytics to guide their marketing decisions.
Resource needs
People: A larger marketing team with roles dedicated to different channels. Depending on the size of the business, there might be teams within marketing, such as a digital marketing team, a content team, and a data analytics team.
Tools: Advanced marketing technology stack that could include multi-channel marketing platforms, customer data platforms, predictive analytics tools, and more.
Budget: Significant budget to support multi-channel campaigns, invest in advanced tools, and hire and train specialized marketing professionals and analysts.
Stage 5: The Savvy Apex
The top of the maturity curve represents a state where businesses have sophisticated, data-driven marketing operations. Here, marketing is not just a function but a strategic driver of business growth. Businesses at this stage have a mature marketing team with specialized roles and robust capabilities for cross-channel campaign orchestration.
Measurement at this stage is algorithmic and comprehensive. Businesses use advanced machine learning algorithms for attribution, taking into account the complex interplay of multiple channels and touchpoints. Everything is measured, analyzed, and optimized, ensuring that marketing efforts contribute maximum value to business growth
Resource needs
People: A mature marketing organization with highly specialized roles, such as data scientists, marketing technologists, and channel-specific experts. The role of a Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) or similar might be necessary to coordinate and strategize all marketing efforts.
Tools: State-of-the-art marketing tech stack, with machine learning algorithms for advanced analytics, attribution modeling tools, and sophisticated campaign orchestration platforms.
Budget: High budget to support large-scale, data-driven campaigns, investment in cutting-edge technology, and the hiring of top-tier marketing talent.
The evolution of maturity
Moving up the marketing maturity curve is a journey of constant learning, experimentation, and refinement. As you navigate through these stages, remember that the goal is not just to become savvy but to build a marketing function that is seamlessly integrated with your business strategy and contributes actively to your growth and success.
While this list outlines a general guideline, the specific resources needed at each stage can vary based on your industry, business size, target audience, and other factors. The aim should be to acquire and allocate resources that help your business move progressively towards more strategic, integrated, and data-driven marketing.
