As part of MeasureCamp 2018 in Brno, we organized a workshop called Marketing Meter – an indicator of the company’s marketing maturity, led by our principal analyst Marek Čech.
The idea for this workshop comes from the experience we have, like most marketing consultants and agencies, with clients. Very often, a company’s marketing is managed in a haphazard to a punk way, regardless of the size of the company. In such a situation, the marketing consultant or analyst tries to make the company aware of the need to address the planning, organization, strategic management and evaluation of the entire marketing. The approach of clients varies, but quite often you hear the response that there just isn’t enough time. It is then difficult to explain the benefits in the future, which hardly outweigh from the client’s point of view their intensive handling of urgent tasks, which is unfortunately where most of the focus goes.
Digital architects are attempting to change this and develop a relatively simple marketing methodology. Our current efforts in this area are moving towards a methodology based on the STDC framework complemented by other proven marketing practices. We are trying to gradually verify, test and get feedback and opinions from other professionals in the field.This was also the purpose of our workshop at MeasureCamp, where more than 15 experts gave their opinions on this issue. During the workshop, we tried to identify the key attributes of modern marketing and then use a simplified Delphi method and Likert scales to rate the importance of each attribute.
This effort should be directed towards the creation of a simple indicator of a company’s marketing maturity – known as the Marketing Meter.
As a result of the workshop, 27 attributes were subsequently rated on a scale of 0 – 5, where zero means that the attribute is not valid for the given issue (modern marketing) to 5, which means that the attribute is absolutely necessary for the given issue (modern marketing). The evaluation of the importance of the attribute was then implemented as an arithmetic average of the ratings given.
The result is shown in the table below.
| attribute | importance (average rating) |
| customer definition | 5 |
| knowledge of the service product | 4.8 |
| knowing the margin and overall pricing | 4.67 |
| correct targeting | 4.67 |
| marketing objectives | 4.67 |
| cashflow | 4.67 |
| strategic objectives (2 to 5) | 4.63 |
| UTM parameters | 4.4 |
| service quality and knowledge of the quality of my product service | 4.4 |
| budget planning | 4.2 |
| meaningful allocation of budgets | 4.2 |
| website | 4 |
| retention – why, how | 3.8 |
| CRM | 3.67 |
| web analytics | 3.6 |
| acquisitions – why, how | 3.5 |
| marketing organisation (HR) – e.g. inhouse, externally | 3.29 |
| ROMI | 3.2 |
| positioning, branding | 3.17 |
| retargeting | 2.83 |
| multichannel communication and synergy | 2.83 |
| net profit – knowing it | 2.8 |
| testing | 2.5 |
| research – customer interviews, user testing | 2.5 |
| controlled experiments (e.g. a/b test, channel testing) | 2 |
| competition monitoring | 1.83 |
| real-time customer research | 1 |
It is evident that the primary place is occupied by absolutely essential items that every company should address before starting any campaigns or marketing activities. The reality, however, is quite often different. At the same time, other interesting components of modern marketing have been identified that are not necessary at the initial stage but are finding their place as the company’s marketing becomes more mature (e.g. ROMI – return on marketing investment, guided experiments, testing, customer research or more advanced analytics).
Based on the input, we released the first version of the Marketing Meter in the autumn of 2020.
We have also found that other companies and agencies in the marketing and analytics industry are dealing with this issue on a targeted or marginal basis. We will try to contact them and discuss the possibility of creating a common model that would make life easier for everyone involved and move the industry forward overall.
