What is your Marketing and Lead Generation Maturity Score?
What is Your Marketing Maturity Score?
I’ve been a marketing strategist and a campaign manager for over 100 B2B clients and owned a Canadian-based lead generation agency for over 13 years. Utilizing this experience, my team and I have developed a marketing maturity scoring system for our prospects and clients. This system allows us to forecast the success of each of our client’s campaigns and the return on their marketing investments.
Our marketing maturity and lead generation client scoring system is based on six primary criteria:
1. Understanding your market:
How well do you and your employees understand your market? Who are your customers? Why do they buy from you? Where are they located? What priority do your products/services take in their daily life? Who are the stakeholders? How do they make decisions? Are they end customers or resellers.. and many others.
2. Branding and messaging:
Modern marketing is 100% content driven. If you know your customers well, you can produce great offers, telemarketing scripts, websites, social media posts, white papers, etc. The history of your content creation and distribution activity is very valuable. How much do you value your content? Do you believe your customers read it and benefit from it? Do they share your content? Do they click on your Call to Action links?
3. Marketing Strategy:
Do you understand the difference between marketing strategy and individual campaigns? Do you have a long-term integrated marketing vision and lead generation strategy, or do you keep throwing money into individual marketing campaigns here and there (telemarketing, blog, a website, a brochure, etc? )
4. Measuring results:
Have you defined your lead generation activities’ Key Performance Indication criteria (KPIs)? Are you familiar with your website analytics? Do you track your SEO rankings monthly? What are your content distribution and social media results? (Clicks, shares, engagements, etc.)
5. Technology:
Are you using technology to connect your company with your prospects and customers? What is your experience with CRM, process management and communications management? What are your sales channels reporting, and do you have feedback systems?
Investing in lead generation without proper technology is like navigating savage waters in total darkness. You may survive it, but most probably, you, your investments and your assets will be badly damaged.
6. Monetization:
From our experience, the lower our customer’s marketing maturity score, the more importance they put on monetizing their short-term marketing and lead-generation campaign. Many B2B business owners still believe in a direct correlation between dollars invested in a single movement and dollars received in corresponding sales contracts. In our experience, these expectations are often primarily unrealistic.
When you know your marketing maturity criteria, try to calculate your score, giving each category a score from 1 to 5.
For example:
- How well do you understand your market? Your score: 4 Great!
- Is your company branding defined, integrated, implemented, sufficient and across multiple platforms? Your score =3? Good for you!
- Do you have a long-term marketing strategy with a calendar of events, campaigns, and activities? I hear 2? Wonderful! Great start!
- Do you use marketing technology outside your MS Office and Outlook tools? Yes? You are a rock star!
- Are you making money from your marketing campaigns and communications? Give yourself 5!
Are you laughing yet? Let’s get serious: It is rare when a small or medium-sized company can achieve a higher marketing maturity score without the help of a marketing consultant or an outside marketing agency. Business owners often confuse marketing strategies and marketing campaigns. Instead of creating long-term marketing strategies, calendars and budgets, they hire multiple providers to manage their marketing and lead generation activities (website design, SEO, social media, telemarketing, etc). These investments often bear no results because their efforts are not integrated, measured and planned. We advise hiring an integrated marketing agency rather than hiring a specialist. This will save you money and frustration for years to come.
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