Most people that know me, know that I love a good old Boston Matrix for marketing solutions.

Why reinvent the wheel, when the square will do 😉

It sparked a thought for isolating opportunities in 2024.

Scribble on a piece of paper, with the Y-axis being the level of marketing maturity of your business; and the X-axis being the ability to show the measurable proof of the shifts in customer value (CV) due to your marketing activity.

Where’s your current position, and what’s realistic for 2024?

Are you in the red zone?

A challenging zone, or potentially starting out stage.

Either way, there’s a great opportunity to crawl, walk, run.

Set the foundations in place with most relevant data capture; establish a framework for linking customer sales data to a customer ID; and start with simplified, yet impactful communication and activity, that builds habits and valued relationships.

Are you in the green zone?

This may be all about scaling up.

Or your team is identifying customer value from a sales perspective. However, maybe it’s only from an ecomm or silo channel perspective.

The opportunity is to analyse down to a margin or profit level. And then start to link activity from other channels.

My tip. Pick a test cell and prove it to your business in 2024. Then scale and move up the marketing maturity stages.

Are you in the orange zone?

Often the most puzzling place for marketing teams to be.

Major martech transformations have been underway for a while, however, a significant tech debt exists; major complexity exists in the business; silo departments are proving their worth, yet not unifying to give a complete picture to the C-Suite; and most activity isn’t linked to shifts in CV.

“Drowning in reporting” sound familiar?

Therein lies the massive opportunity for 2024.

Cut through the complexity, establish a pathway to link to CV, and walk before run.

It takes a visionary leader to help the marketing team move to top right.

Are you in the blue zone?

Easy to summarise. Not always easy to achieve. However, not insurmountable.

The opportunity here is to optimise activity to ensure incremental CV is being created and measured.

True customer focus is embedded in the company. And AI can assist with next-level thinking throughout 2024 (although you’re probably already testing it out).

The added opportunity here is to refine costs and efficiencies to improve ROI. Identifying where cost can be taken out of your marketing approach, without hindering outcomes.

Where would you place your marketing team?

You don’t need to broadcast here. However, wherever you ‘ticked’, now’s the time to relook, reset, and refocus.

It may not be about moving out of a zone. It may simply be about setting clear objectives, refining your strategy to get there, and moving incrementally.

Bring on 2024.