Social marketing is reaching maturity. It is moving past the awkward adolescent stage and is trying to become a responsible adult. But similar to similar to those awkward adolescent years, a social marketing program can take one step forward and one step back. Marketing leaders tell us that developing their social marketing capabilities is frustrating because they make progress in some areas and fall short on some others. And even best-in-class social marketing programs are not immune to development challenges. For example, an award-winning social marketing initiative may regress because the social marketing team fails to get more resources to grow their program(s) and/or their customers' social behaviors are changing. This is why you must assess your social marketing capabilities on a regular basis and make it part of your planning process. As soon as you become complacent, you lose your edge.

To assist you with this effort, we just published our new social marketing assessment report and scorecard. It evaluates your social marketing capabilities across the four elements of Culture, Organization, Strategy, and Data and identifies whether you are in the Repair, Elevate, Optimize, or Differentiate stage. And to make it even easier, we have an online scorecard you can complete in a few minutes. Once you submit it, it will tally up your score and let you know which maturity stage your organization is currently in. If you are a client, you can also assess the score card in the published report and get a ton of insightful details on the capabilities we included in the assessment and what each social marketing maturity stage means. 

 

 

 

Stay tuned for a follow-up report on how to advance to each stage. In that report, we will cover the specific actions you can take to accelerate your maturity.

What stage of social marketing maturity is your company in, and how are you preparing to move to the next stage?