In the world of digital advertising, achieving sustainable and profitable growth requires a strategic approach suited to various stages of business maturity.  Identifying the stage you’re in and its corresponding challenges and goals will allow you to make informed decisions and choose the right partners to help you accelerate your growth.

Let's explore the maturity levels of digital advertising operations and highlight their unique characteristics to help you find out the stage you're in and ways to level up faster and more efficiently. 

Maturity Level of Your Business—why is it Important to Know where you are?

Understanding where you are in this journey is crucial for many reasons, including:

Strategic Decision-Making: Understanding your organization's stage helps you make informed decisions about resource allocation, investment priorities, and growth strategies. Each stage presents unique challenges and goals, requiring different approaches and priorities. By recognizing the stage, you can align your strategies and efforts accordingly.

Partner Selection: Choosing the right partners is essential for success. Different partners specialize in serving organizations at specific stages of maturity. Recognizing your organization's stage allows you to identify partners who have expertise and experience in helping businesses at that specific level. This ensures that you can leverage their knowledge and support to accelerate your growth effectively.

Resource Optimization: Recognizing the stage your organization is in helps you optimize your resources. It allows you to identify gaps and areas that require improvement, enabling you to allocate resources appropriately. Whether it's investing in talent, technology, training, or process optimization, understanding your stage helps you focus your resources where they are most needed for maximum impact.

Goal Setting and Measurement: Each maturity level has its own set of goals and metrics for success. Recognizing the stage your organization is in allows you to set realistic and achievable goals based on the specific challenges and opportunities at that level. It also enables you to measure progress accurately and track performance against relevant benchmarks, ensuring you stay on track and can make data-driven adjustments as needed.

Learning from Others: Recognizing the stage your organization is in helps you connect and learn from others who have been through similar growth journeys. By understanding the experiences, best practices, and lessons learned from organizations in the same or similar stages, you can gain valuable insights and avoid potential pitfalls. Learning from others' successes and challenges can significantly enhance your own growth trajectory.

Managing Change: Knowing the journey stage of your organization allows you to prepare and manage change effectively. Each stage requires adjustments to processes, structures, and capabilities. By understanding your current stage, you can anticipate and plan for the changes needed to progress to the next level smoothly. This helps minimize disruptions and ensures a more seamless transition as your organization evolves.

Recognizing the stage your organization is in provides strategic clarity, helps optimize resources, enables goal setting and measurement, facilitates learning from others, and supports effective change management. It is a critical step in navigating the growth journey and achieving long-term success in the digital advertising landscape.

Find Out the Maturity Level of Your Organization

Understanding where you are in this journey is crucial for many reasons, including:

At this stage, businesses have a basic understanding of lead generation but aim to increase their volume of leads. The primary focus is on establishing a strong foundation for growth. Key characteristics of this stage include:

•  Searching for the right talent: Businesses struggle to find a successful profile that aligns with their unique requirements and can drive results.
• Enhancing sales team productivity: Training and enabling sales representatives become a priority to improve their performance and ensure long-term success.
•  Showcasing ROI: Case studies play a crucial role in demonstrating solid return on investment for customers.
• Deeper metrics and specialized sales skills: Businesses aim to go beyond superficial metrics and train their teams for specialized sales skills.
• Implementing effective tools: Companies seek suitable enablement tools for sales and marketing, while also focusing on reporting and business intelligence for accurate forecasting.
• Measuring activity and scaling proficiency: Tracking and analyzing activities to fine-tune processes and scale production becomes essential for growth.

Having established a firm customer base, businesses in this stage now focus on scaling their operations. Key characteristics include:

• Reduced attrition: Efforts are made to decrease overall attrition rates, ensuring stability and continuity.
• Evolving sales models: Sales and staffing models are adjusted to eliminate over-specialization, allowing for more flexibility and adaptability.
• Intelligent segmentation: Customer bases are segmented strategically, leveraging data-driven insights to maximize efficiency.
• Trigger-based upselling: Utilizing customer success triggers helps identify opportunities for upselling and increases revenue generation.

At this stage, businesses expand into new markets while streamlining their operations. Key characteristics include:

• Market diversification: Scaling beyond enterprise and mid-market segments to explore new markets and opportunities.
• Reduced specialization: Focusing on understanding the unique needs of each segment to avoid excessive specialization.
• Increased revenue per campaign: Leveraging improved efficiency and segmentation to achieve higher revenue per campaign and sales.
• Reinvestment of revenue gains: Businesses allocate revenue gains to reinvest in further growth and optimization.
• Partner optimization: Conducting A/B tests to identify the most effective partners for sustainable growth.
• Continuous improvement: Seeking new efficiencies at every stage of the operation to optimize performance.
• Addressing persistent challenges: Engaging experts to overcome long-standing obstacles in well-established processes.

This final stage involves hiring at scale and maximizing market share. Key characteristics include:

• Increasing share of wallet: The primary focus is on expanding the customer's share of wallet and overall spending.
• Utilizing health scoring: Implementing comprehensive health scoring mechanisms to monitor and enhance all customer accounts.
• Advancing playbooks: Constantly refining and expanding playbooks to improve proficiency and efficiency.
• Leveraging advanced tools: Utilizing cutting-edge tools that provide insights into the customer journey and sales cycle at every stage.
• Exploring new markets and products: Considering expansion into new market spaces and introducing innovative product offerings to drive aggressive growth.

Understanding the maturity levels within a digital advertising operation is crucial for businesses aiming to achieve long-term success. Partnerships play a vital role in lowering customer acquisition costs and improving service delivery. With a clear roadmap and the right support, businesses can navigate these maturity levels and unlock their full potential in the digital advertising landscape.

Why Partner with an Outsourcer?

When it comes to scaling your digital advertising operation, partnering with MarketStar in stages 2, 3, and 4 gives you easy access to top experts in the field, specializing in product and strategy. By focusing on what we do best, we ensure that your brand is represented in the most compelling way, leading to increased sales, customer growth, and revenue generation. 

One of our core strengths lies in our ability to hire and train the right talent. We understand the importance of having a skilled and motivated team. With our expertise, we can efficiently identify and onboard teams who possess the ideal candidate profile. By seamlessly integrating them into your buying cycle at the right time, we guarantee maximum impact and minimize ramp time to sales and revenue generation.

Through our extensive experience, we have developed the ability to explore new possibilities, expand into new geographies, and introduce innovative product offerings that may otherwise be unachievable. Our expertise allows you to push boundaries and achieve remarkable results while minimizing the risk associated with entering new markets.

Over our +35-year tenure in the market, we have created, captured, and perfected best practices across multiple accounts and motions. By leveraging our wealth of knowledge, you benefit from enhanced sales motions that have been proven to drive success. We constantly strive for improvement, ensuring that your digital advertising operation is optimized for maximum effectiveness.

We have cultivated an environment that fosters performance and creates growth, enabling our team members to excel in their roles. When you work with us, you can trust that you are partnering with a company that values its people and empowers them to deliver exceptional results.

We are committed to your success. Let us be the driving force behind your revenue generation and propel your digital advertising efforts to profitable exponential growth.

Check out our eBook How to Increase Digital Ads Revenue!