A recent study by Heinz Marketing and Integrate has looked at the how and why of marketing maturity in an environment driven by consumers.

As consumers are increasingly somewhere on a spectrum between digitally fluent or at least more digitally astute, businesses need their marketing operation to optimise customer experiences.

Nothing new about this, but to help, the report highlights 3 pillars of marketing maturity:

Firstly, your marketing structure in terms of roles, responsibilities, goals and communications and how they align with each other and with the rest of the business.

Secondly, how you use the technology you have effectively, and with impact.

Thirdly, effective use of your marketing strategy whether it’s marketing-driven, buyer-driven or sales-driven.

Together, these three pillars help you map your level of marketing maturity in stages:

• from low-tech, makeshift and reactive
• to more defined, co-ordinated, sales-driven programmes, teams and goals, and standard tech
• to intentionally and actively managed aligned goals, managed and reported use of tech, and some multi-channelled strategy
• to buyer-driven, intentionally managed goals with fully integrated tech supporting an optimised multi-channelled strategy.

So, it might be worth asking whether you think that your current strategy, tech, and structure supports your goals. Are your leads likely? Do your outreach emails get anywhere? Using a single channel just won’t cut it.

But how are you going to use the channels at your disposal? What does the purchase journey look like? Do you personalise your offering? Are you catering for precision demand?

One approach would be to think about your structure and in the light of that, define your strategy. Then you can see what tech you need to apply, using better quality data and management, to carry out your strategy.

Put simply, you need to align your marketing goals with your business goals from a customer-centric perspective so you can offer a better targeted and personalised customer experience.

But first, do an honest appraisal of your marketing position.

Is it ad hoc, defined and co-ordinated, or managed and intentional?

Because once you know where you are, you can decide where you need to go next.