The advancement of technology gives consumers greater decision-making and purchasing power. Gone are the days when you shop for a new car in the newspaper and haggle over price with a sales manager at the dealership. Reviews and reports are easily accessible, and pricing can be negotiated online with several sellers at the same time.
In June 2014, Oracle commissioned Forrester Consulting to evaluate marketing’s maturity in targeting, engagement, conversion, analysis and technology. 492 surveys and six phone interviews were conducted with marketing decision-makers across the US and Europe.
Have fun and see how you rank on Forrester’s marketing maturity scale– you might gain some insight and rethink your marketing practices.
Novice Marketers:

• Segment inconsistently and use basic information like title, industry, company size or geography.
• Don’t use formal data to inform understanding of customers.
• Have primarily outbound communications. They focus mostly on brand advertising and promoting messaging through direct channels like email and sales calls.
• Use conventional conversion; they run campaigns and turn respondents over to sales to qualify and close.
• Have disorganized customer data: It’s incomplete, siloed, difficult to work with, and few people trust what it says about customers.
• Measure channels and campaign efficiency based on each specific channel.
• Do not use marketing automation systems.

Developing Marketers:

• Segment using readiness criteria like BANT (budget, authority, needs, timeline) in addition to basic information.
• Having superficial understanding of customers: Data gathering and analytics around customer types are inconsistent and ad hoc.
• Distribute to the market, information about customer successes and thought leadership on topic that customers care about.
• Having conversion processes that begin to adopt practices like the waterfall method to develop demand ahead of sales involvement.
• Are working to clean up customer data. They still have disparate systems but are doing manual analysis and augmenting with third-party data.
• Measure the halo effects of channels and campaigns.
• Have separate, disparate automation systems running for various campaigns

Experienced Marketers:

• Segment based on expressed preferences or interests in addition to basic information and BANT.
• Have advanced customer understanding: They gather and use data about customers based on roles, responsibilities and involvement.
• Strive to build a two-way dialogue with buyers about the issues they face and the problems they want to solve.
• Have conversion processes that are maturing beyond scoring and nurturing to include behavioral triggers and lead recycling.
• Are maturing their customer data management. They are investing in more technology and skills to help streamline data management, and find hidden or novel insights across all transactional systems.
• Measure limited channel and campaign effects.
• Have separate marketing automation platforms that are integrated together.

Modern Marketers:

• Use a combination of expressed preferences/interests/BANT, and basic criteria and also employ intelligent targeting based on real-time feedback.
• Have customer understanding that is comprehensive: They use data to develop personas for every major audience type and use these tools to guide marketing strategy, messaging and execution.
• In dialogue with buyers, give them exactly what they need at every stage of the purchase journey, personalized to their preferences.
• Have conversion processes that are comprehensive and apply scoring, nurturing, behavioral triggers, and recycling across not only the sales pipeline but after sales to retain customers and increase loyalty.
• Have customer data that is current and accessible in real time. They use predictive models and statistical technique to model things like look-a-likes.
• Leverage attribution measurement to help understand the impact of multiple channels.
• Have a standard, fully integrated cross-channel marketing automation platform.

The results of the research were clear. Modern marketing maturity has a positive impact on business: 44% of modern marketers said their companies exceeded their revenue goal by 10% or more, compared with 23% of their peers. But don’t despair, there’s a long way to go for most companies, only 11% of respondents scored well enough to be considered a modern marketer.
As integration marketing specialists, we’re working with our clients on several fronts including personas, look-a-like reporting and cross-channel marketing automation. Give us a call, we would luv to chat.
Read the full report