6 Strategies to Improve Your Marketing Maturity

Congratulations! You know your marketing maturity level, have reviewed your scores, and understand your strengths and weaknesses. Now the real work begins. Boosting your strategic marketing is the way forward. Here are six strategies to elevate your marketing maturity and take your organization to the next level.

1. Understand and Prioritize Your Target Market

Research is time-consuming, so it’s tempting to put it on the back burner while you focus on other daily tasks. However, it provides the critical background information and data you must have to make clear marketing and design decisions. Companies that conduct audience surveys or interviews to influence their marketing decisions have a 14-point higher marketing maturity score on average than those that don’t, according to the “2023 Marketing Benchmarks for Mission-Driven Organizations,” report released by Mighty Citizen.

Knowing your ideal customer’s demographics, interests, and behaviors is critical. Once you have a clear understanding of your audience, you can build targeted campaigns around their interests.

Additionally, make an effort to glean information from your competitors. Analyze what they are doing. Review their messaging. Read their customer success stories or testimonials. By understanding your competitors, you may learn why a client chooses them over you or why their messaging is resonating while yours may not.

2. Align Your Marketing and Sales Teams

Aligning marketing efforts with sales and customer success is crucial. Companies with sales and marketing alignment have achieved a 208% increase in revenue from their marketing efforts, according to HubSpot.

Sales and marketing must agree on end goals and metrics to track success. Shift from siloed terms like “marketing pipeline” and “sales funnel” to a “shared marketing funnel” to emphasize teamwork. Some companies even establish a revenue team encompassing both sales and marketing, ensuring everyone works toward the same goal.

3. Optimize Your Marketing Efforts and Set Measurable Goals

Refine your targeting strategies, improve messaging, and develop effective lead-nurturing campaigns. Clear goals provide unbiased data to track effectiveness and demonstrate ROI to leadership while revealing unproductive paths for course correction.

Leverage messaging platforms and documented communications plans to organize your messaging and set a clear guide for brand positioning. Documented communications plans with clear goals, tasks, and metrics ensure accountability and demonstrate marketing’s impact on strategic goals throughout the year. Organizations with a clearly documented communications platform boosted their maturity scores by 19 points on average, according to the Mighty Citizen study. 

4.  Invest in the Right Technology and Data Infrastructure

Leverage tools such as marketing automation, CRM, and analytics platforms to gain valuable insights into customer behavior and preferences. Doing so will enable you to create more targeted marketing campaigns.

Mission-driven organizations that use their marketing automation platform (MAP) to its full ability see sizable improvement in their overall marketing effectiveness. Make training on the MAP a priority and look for new ways to use it effectively. Audit your tech stack annually and maximize integrations to ensure seamless, customized experiences for customers. Continually research new digital marketing solutions to stay at the top of your game.

5.  Regularly Assess and Adjust Your Strategies Based on Performance Metrics

Set clear KPIs, track progress, and make data-driven decisions to optimize your efforts over time. Maintain a consistent schedule, post regular quality content, and interact with your customers. 

Success takes time, so keep pushing forward and correct errors to avoid repeating mistakes. Track pertinent metrics like conversions, opportunities generated, and overall revenue to measure and enhance success, driving revenue growth. 

Focus on long-term goals with short-term milestones to meet and celebrate along the way. That will help keep you on track and motivated. Remember, tracking and measuring these metrics is merely the initial step; true success lies in our ability to glean insights and implement strategies that enhance conversion rates, thereby propelling revenue growth. 

6. Partner with a Marketing Agency

Marketing agencies offer expertise across various skills, stay current with industry trends, and have access to specialized tools and resources. They provide flexibility and scalability, adapting to changing business needs and offering more services as necessary

Virago Marketing specializes in holistic, revenue-focused marketing solutions for supply chain, logistics, and transportation companies. Partnering with experts who understand your industry’s unique challenges and opportunities can accelerate your marketing maturity and achieve your business goals faster.