By Our last blog focused on stage one of the Relequint Marketing Maturity Model: Organizational Structure. Today, we’re moving on to maturity stage two: Marketing Strategy.
This is a critically important consideration in a world where 41% of B2B companies conduct their marketing strategy in-house. It could easily spell the difference between the success and failure of your business.
In this blog, we'll focus on marketing strategy’s role in an organization's overall maturity. Then, we’ll explain how organizations can improve their marketing strategy to increase their maturity stage.
Why Marketing Strategy Matters
Teams face daunting challenges when marketing their products and solutions in today’s hyper-competitive marketing environment.
Not only are they required to meet department goals and navigate internal issues, but they must also contend with shrinking marketing budgets, a challenging omnichannel marketing landscape, and higher churn rates than we’ve seen in decades. As a result, only 13% of B2B companies currently report having a proactive marketing strategy.
Fortunately, changing that is one of the best ways to promote marketing maturity.
The 4 Levels of Marketing Strategy Maturity
Relenquint’s Marketing Maturity Model details four tiers of Marketing Strategy:
- Reactive. Companies with a reactive marketing strategy are primarily focused on generating leads. These teams rely on siloed marketing campaigns that either focus on shallow, top-of-funnel metrics or are entirely reactionary. They lack cross-functional alignment and knowledge about how to use insights to form campaigns.
- Proactive. Teams in the proactive stage of marketing strategy use an account-based strategy focused on generating Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs). These teams are highly reactive to sales and count on them to deliver various campaign tactics, which leaves minimal time for intentional, strategic collaboration.
- Integrated. Teams with an integrated marketing strategy focus on marketing tactics driven by business revenue goals, and the primary metric they care about is the number of opportunities they can generate. These teams are highly aligned on outbound tactics and utilize a fully integrated approach in all their marketing efforts.
- Catalyzed. Teams with a catalyzed marketing strategy are at the highest tier of marketing maturity. These teams are highly focused on the buyer’s journey and are proactive about developing programs to reach buyers across channels. These teams are excellent at driving growth and generating measurable results.
How Companies Can Improve Their Maturity Stage
To improve your marketing maturity, you must focus first on improving your marketing strategy. Here’s a breakdown of how to do that, depending on your current maturity stage:
Teams in the Reactive Stage
Teams in the Reactive stage of marketing strategy should focus on defining the key pillars of their strategy, including roles, responsibilities, and functional competencies.
We recommend following the same tips we laid out in part one of this series and revisiting your strategy every 6-12 months, spending on your progress.
If you need help taking your marketing strategy to the next level, Relequint is here for you. We’re a full-service growth strategy that provides inbound marketing services for B2B companies who want to optimize their ROI and achieve data-driven marketing.
Teams in the Proactive Stage
Teams in the Proactive stage of marketing strategy have one key task: to focus on developing cross-functional collaboration and communication.
This requires confronting and restructuring information silos between teams and departments, investing in account-based marketing strategies and automation, and improving CRM data. By focusing on these initiatives, you should be able to take an intentional path to improve your marketing strategy.
Teams in the Integrated Stage
Teams in the Integrated stage have already spent time building a solid foundation for marketing maturity. Their tasks, now, are to learn and test. This requires integrating all the platforms they use in their tech stacks, prioritizing cross-functional experimentation, strengthening trust between marketing and sales, and aligning their inbound and outbound tactics.
Teams in the Catalyzed Stage
Teams in the Catalyzed stage of marketing strategy have a solid marketing approach and must now focus on continuing to optimize their methods. Key tactics include enabling cross-functional feedback loops, future-proofing their tech stacks, and establishing triggers that reevaluate strategy performance benchmarks.
Stay Tuned for the Next Installment
In the next blog in this series, we’ll discuss Marketing Technology and how teams can use martech to integrate and empower their campaigns, optimize organizational structure, and promote overall marketing maturity.
