First, let’s make a simple, gut-level assessment of where your company is today regarding Marketing Operations Maturity. Let’s consider the five levels of Marketing Maturity. Which one has your company actually achieved?
1. Reactive — This includes “unplanned and spontaneous” content, usually sent in response to ad hoc requests from the sales team, or in a desperate attempt to keep up with a competitor. Often supervised by administrative personnel, it tends to vary in quality. There is a measurement of sorts, but it does not inform decision making.
2. Proactive — At this stage, content is produced by a small but dedicated team, and is guided by a strategy and an editorial calendar. The company understands that “content created in chaos inhibits its ability to enhance the customer experience on the path to purchase.” But most of the resulting content is top-of-funnel, and these firms tend to use “lightweight, top-of-funnel” metrics like page views and retweets. Finally, they’re still burdened with impromptu requests.
3. Correlative — These teams have achieved stability (and maturity). They are subjected to fewer ad hoc requests, and take a nuanced approach, creating products for different stages of the customer journey, and for different personas, in multiple formats. What’s more, they can tell if these efforts are bringing in new customers. And they’re working on integrating everything, from production to measurement.
4. Adoptive — We have reached the level on which results rule. The typical Adoptive team “focuses on many different formats, and has found ways to expand promotion and reach of content. They are able to optimize and adjust content based on robust performance metrics that can attribute parameters like headlines, images and promo copy to engagement.”
5. Predictive — Reach this plateau and you are a content master. But only 4% of B2B organizations ever get to it, according to Forrester. At this rarefied level, “everyone involved in the creation and distribution of content collaborates on one centralized platform, but decisions are only made based on data. Topics, formats and distribution methods need to perform well in order for the team to continue to utilize them as part of their strategy.”
What does this tell you? Are you barely at the beginning?
What next? Airways.360 has exceptional experience to coach you from your current state to the next performance level. We'll quickly demonstrate specifically HOW to execute. No fluff, no fuzz here. You can accelerate as fast as your budget permits, using Airways.360 support to act on program execution in one or more of these areas:
A. Content Marketing - Use Customer Persona Segmentation to drive Engagement Mastery. This is a profit play, to save wasted dollars.
B. Marketing Automation - Scale up with power tools that manage demanding staff workloads to reacting faster to daily opportunities. This is a profit play.
C. Predictive Customer Data Sources - It’s practical now, it’s effective, and you can expand your customer base today. This is a growth play, when A and B are nailed.
This three-step priority overcomes common growth barriers our customers cite to lack of progress due to lack of budget.
When you’ve achieved successful operational changes, you’ll make better decisions. Your new strategy can look like this:
