It’s easy to get swept up in the hectic battle for marketing, with companies constantly flooding customers’ inboxes or posting ads wherever they can grab the space. While some companies instinctively want to just throw more resources at their marketing efforts to keep up with their competitors, it’s even important to remember this: it’s not about how big or noisy your marketing efforts are but about how effective they are.
That’s where marketing maturity comes in.
By evaluating your company’s marketing maturity level, you can determine if your marketing strategy is set for long-term success and make adjustments to create a well-oiled marketing machine.
By definition, marketing maturity determines the sophistication level and effectiveness of your company’s marketing strategy. Don’t sweat it if that sounds like a doozy of a sentence; marketing maturity is simpler than you might think.
For example, let’s say you only posted an update on LinkedIn only when good news happens with your company. While this does count as marketing and can have positive results, it would be considered a lower level of marketing maturity because it lacks any long-term strategy and is hit or miss on whether it will attract more customers.
Marketing tactics such as sending out mass generalized emails are also considered low-maturity because they emphasize quantity over quality rather than making efforts to reach their precise target audience.
On the flip side, a marketing strategy with high maturity levels is much more detail-oriented. They place emphasis on long-term content strategies, use specific customer data to create personalized advertising, and have well-integrated marketing & sales teams that know the exact ratio of customer-to-deals closed.
When a company’s resources simply cannot allow its marketing outreach to grow any bigger, its focus turns to having the most efficient use of its systems possible. Once marketing efficiency has reached its full potential, a company will reach its maximum maturity.
Of course, there are many steps between the lowest and highest marketing maturity levels. Every company must honestly self-assess its marketing maturity levels to identify how it can reach its maximum maturity.
Luckily, there are many, many ways to improve your marketing maturity level. However, it is crucial to know where to start so you can grow effectively.
Naturally, you’ll want your company’s marketing maturity to reach its potential quickly. However, developing proper growth pacing and a successful long-term growth plan is a crucial step that cannot be overlooked.
Suppose you wanted to be able to bench press 500 lbs like future NFL Hall of Famer Aaron Donald. Unless you’re a superhero, attempting to bench all 500 lbs immediately would be silly. It’d be unlikely that you could even move the bar!
The only way you’ll properly tackle a lofty goal is to make consistent improvements over time. Just as every time you bench press, you’d add a bit more weight to the bar, so you should make realistic and continual improvements to your marketing strategy.
To continually improve your marketing maturity over time, improve your customer data collection systems to have greater accuracy, adjust your target audience to be more specific, or improve communication between your marketing & sales teams.
Pacing your marketing growth will make it easier to correct and identify where your marketing efforts can be improved and which strategies bring in the most revenue.
However, if you tried to overhaul your marketing strategies immediately to reach maximum maturity, you'd run into significant roadblocks. Not only is it extremely challenging, but it would also entirely skip over the necessary trial and error process essential in discovering what works best for your customers. Without a natural growth process, you’ll spend valuable time and money on systems likely to provide inefficient results.
Your best bet is to have a simple and practical plan to have your marketing maturity incrementally improve and one day reach its full potential.
If building the perfect plan to improve your company’s marketing maturity sounds daunting, we've got you covered.
At Gorilla, we understand the importance of marketing maturity. By having our own experience building MSP business, we have helped ourselves and other companies improve their marketing maturity levels to get the most out of their business.
With our Marketing Maturity Roadmap, we can precisely design a plan perfectly tailored to your company’s needs. By providing both long-term and short-term objectives, your process will be easy to track and readily achievable to help your business grow at a realistic and efficient pace.
If you’re ready to raise your marketing maturity, download our Roadmap and contact us to find out more about how Gorilla will guide you along your marketing journey.