Don’t worry: I’m not here to support your New Year’s resolution with work-out advice. But if you want to review the six requirements for planning a mature enterprise marketing strategy, then keep reading.

Real-time, contextually relevant customer experiences require a significant investment in enterprise marketing technologies. However, customer insights (CI) professionals often struggle with defining marketing technology requirements to match business objectives. It’s difficult because you must balance multiple stakeholders, accommodate channel-specific processes, and integrate products from different vendors to align with your firm’s enterprise-wide business technology (BT) agenda.

To support CI pros with requirements planning, Forrester offers a self-service assessment tool to help you determine how your firm stacks up using our enterprise marketing maturity model. We believe that customer-focused enterprise marketing initiatives rely on improved capabilities across six core competencies. The first three – strategy, resources, and processes – focus on organizational readiness. The remaining three – data, analytics and measurement, and technology – underscore the importance of the right tools to enable successful execution. 

A strategic planning tool complements the maturity assessment, rolling up your scores for the six core competencies to provide an overall view of your enterprise marketing capabilities. Regardless of your current situation, the strategy tool provides graduation criteria to help you evolve to the next level. The starting point is mastering the operational requirements for individual channels, followed by achieving cross-channel integration, and optimizing your marketing execution.  The ultimate goal: real-time unification of customer experiences across the entire customer life cycle.

To see how organization is doing, download the enterprise marketing maturity assessment tool and answer all six sets of questions. You can then refer to the strategic planning tool for guidance on how to address any shortcomings across the six competencies – not only to graduate to the next maturity level, but to help you build your strategic roadmap.

You may wish to have multiple stakeholders complete the assessment, discuss different perspectives, and calculate a composite viewpoint of your current maturity level. If you need help, just let us know. We can answer your questions, or work with you on completing the assessment and understanding the implications for your organization based on the graduation criteria.  Feel free to send me an email or set up an inquiry to discuss enterprise marketing maturity.