Blog · marketing · assessment
How to know whether your marketing is working
Without a baseline, any marketing plan is guesswork with a nice slide. Six pillars, a score from 0 to 100, and the bottleneck that holds the other five back.
by Fábio Andrade · · 2 min read
Every marketing meeting in a small company stalls on the same question: is it working?
Almost nobody has an answer. Not for lack of effort — for lack of a baseline. Without knowing where the business stands today, any number looks good or bad depending on the mood of the month, and any plan becomes guesswork with a nice slide.
What marketing maturity is
Maturity is not how much you spend or how many channels you keep alive. It is how well the pieces of your marketing hold themselves up — and that reads across six pillars:
- Positioning: someone can explain, in one sentence, why they buy from you.
- Offer: what you sell is designed for the customer to decide, not for you to present.
- Presence: whoever looks for you finds you, and what they find is standing.
- Acquisition: there is a predictable path that brings new people in.
- Relationships: people who bought come back, and you know why.
- Measurement: at the end of the month someone can say what worked, with a number.
There is only one bottleneck
In practice, a single pillar holds the other five back. Paying for ads with confused positioning is paying to confuse more people. Nurturing relationships without measurement is repeating what may never have worked.
That is why the assessment does not hand you six tasks. It hands you one: the pillar that, moved first, unlocks the rest.
What the score is for
For nothing, if you use it to compare yourself with competitors — different sizes and markets have different bottlenecks.
For a great deal, if you use it to compare yourself with yourself. A score today, a 90-day plan, and the same score three months from now: that is how marketing stops being an opinion and becomes a decision.
Marketing without a score is an opinion. With a score, it becomes a decision — and decisions can be revised.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need an agency to run this assessment?
No. The assessment is an honest conversation with your own business, and the person who runs it answers best. An agency helps later, in the execution.
How long until the score moves?
Ninety days is how long a well-chosen bottleneck usually takes to move the number. Less than that is luck; more than that is a badly prioritised plan.
Can I use the score to compare my company with competitors?
No, and that is on purpose. Businesses of different sizes and markets have different bottlenecks. The comparison that matters is with your own previous score.