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Integrated Marketing Maturity Curves


“If you don’t know where you are going, you’ll end up someplace else” – Yogi Berra

The role of marketing continues to evolve, with today’s CMO and her team adding technology, behavioral tracking, new channels, and other disciplines to their already crowded list of responsibilities.  Welcome to the rise of integrated digital marketing, a holistic approach combining marketing strategy, process, and technology to improve the cost and effectiveness of customer acquisition and loyalty efforts. 

In this evolving landscape it’s hard to recognize, let alone keep up with the rapidly changing and expanding tool sets and practices to compete.  In a 2019 study, BCG found much room for growth, with 55% of businesses stuck in the first 2 stages of maturity, and only 2% of responding companies operating in the highest stage 4 maturity.  The majority of respondents who improved their maturity ascribed a 30% cost savings and up to 20% revenue increase from their integrated efforts. 

How does a CMO determine if she/he should prioritize content, marketing stack, or test and control?  Once you’ve prioritized the skills needed, how can you set targets to identify and achieve the required level of mastery?  The integrated marketing maturity curve answers these questions.  First, let's define the 4 components of integrated marketing.

Components of Integrated Marketing:

Figure 1: Components of Integrated Marketing.  PerformSolutionsLLC all rights reserved.

Why a maturity curve? 

The maturity curve provides two important benefits to the integrated marketer in understanding and prioritizing their efforts. 
  1. Synchronize skill sets: Integrated marketing requires a cohesive set of contributing skills.  Advanced campaign prioritization, for example, relies on data management, tracking, analytics, and test & control.  Weakness in any one skill is likely to limit potential to optimize other skills.
  2. Highlight areas for specialization:  While skills are integrated, there’s still room to prioritize specific skills that have the highest opportunity for impact.  For example, an acquisition focused company who spends a large amount of their marketing budget on new leads may want to accelerate their lead management and the related data and tracking skills. 

Here’s an example of Lead Management skill maturity curve within Marketing Operations.  You can see sub-skills evolve from adhoc, through opportunistic, systemic, and predictive stages.
Lead Management Maturity Curve:







 Figure 2- Lead Management Maturity Curve. Perform Solutions LLC all rights reserved

The Integrated Marketing Maturity.  

Now we take the 14 individual skills that make up the 4 skill categories and plot a maturity curve for each.  All 14 curves are included in the full report.  Below is a summary of all 14 skills on one curve. 

Figure 3- Integrated marketing maturity curve summary.  Perform Solutions LLC, all rights reserved

Using the Curves:

  • Make your own curves: Every industry and business is unique.  While this curve is a good starting point, you are encouraged to consider your own set of skills and competitive landscape. 
  • Assess your organization: Take some time to do an honest assessment of your current organization and partner network across each of the relevant skills.  Extra points if you can also get an idea of the competition on these same skills.
  • Align Skills with Strategy: Just because you are good at something, doesn’t mean that drives bottom line results.  Work with each of your core skill teams to connect the dots between what they do and the defined business strategy.  Capture any blockers that the skill team sees as a limitation to their success. 
  • Set your targets: Assuming there’s clarity on which skills support the strategy, you can now set maturity goals for relevant team members.  For example, by the end of next year, we integrate 2 internal and 1 external data sources into our customer profile. 


Please contact me to learn more about the integrated marketing maturity curve summary or to discuss one or more of the 14 maturity curves in more detail. 
 

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