Creating a maturity model for your marketing organization is a vital first step in aligning your team with institutional goals, but it’s just that—a first step. The real challenge for any organization lies not in defining the plan but in acting on it. Just as strategic plans can collect dust on shelves, maturity models often suffer a common fate: they sit on the proverbial shelf while day-to-day operations and urgent tasks take precedence.

This isn’t because the plans themselves lack merit but rather because implementation requires deliberate, ongoing effort. It’s one thing to articulate where your organization is today and where you want it to go, but it’s another thing entirely to actualize that vision. To bridge the gap between intention and transformation, you need a structured approach that ensures your team can grow in meaningful, measurable ways.

That’s where a gap analysis framework becomes invaluable. My favorite was developed at the University of Southern California (U.S.) by Richard Clark and Fred Estes, which they explain in their book, Turning Research Into Results: A Guide to Selecting the Right Performance Solutions. Their framework outlines knowledge, motivational, and organizational (KMO) gaps. I discovered it while doing my doctoral work on leadership and organizational change and found it to be perfect for evaluating performance within a maturity model. I have worked in central marketing communication offices in higher education for more than 20 years and have found the maturity model paired with the KMO framework to be transformational in setting an actionable road map for teams and organizations. This approach allows leaders to identify specific barriers to growth and develop clear paths to overcome them.

Creating a Marketing Maturity Model

There are different approaches to developing marketing maturity models. I’ve developed these at many different universities and I’ve found that a mature marketing and communications organization should focus on a consistent set of responsibilities. The model becomes a matrix, with areas of accountability down the side and the level of maturity across the top. I recommend using the following areas of responsibility:

Brand Management

Brand management can look very different depending on whether your college, university, or school’s marketing organization is centralized or decentralized. If it’s centralized, brand management is about clearly defining your brand and making sure it’s incorporated into everything you do. For decentralized organizations, things get a bit trickier. You need to make sure everyone involved in marketing has the tools and resources to represent the brand consistently and effectively, even if team members work in different areas.

Integrated Audience Journey

A big part of great marketing is choreographing how you communicate with your key audiences, like donors, students, and alumni. It’s about delivering the right message at the right time, through the right channel, to inspire action. Tools like persona development, segmentation, and journey mapping can make this process more sophisticated, helping you create branded, audience-centered content that’s timely and relevant.

Insights Infrastructure

You can’t improve what you don’t measure. A strong marketing organization has a solid process for tracking its success—whether that’s the impact of campaigns, internal workflows, or how well it’s serving its audiences. The goal is to build a team culture in which decisions are guided by data, so you’re always learning and getting better.

Strategic Alignment

Every organization has a strategic plan, a mission, and big-picture goals. A great marketing team makes sure everything it does aligns with those priorities. This means tying every campaign, initiative, or decision back to the organization’s overall purpose. When marketing is aligned this way, it drives real results that move the needle.

Risk Management

Marketing isn’t just about promotion—it’s also about protecting the organization. Risk management is a key part of the job, whether it’s compliance with spam or privacy laws, or preparing for potential public relations challenges. The best marketing teams take a proactive approach to spotting risks and have strategies in place to handle them before they become problems.

Organizational Culture

A strong team culture is at the heart of any successful marketing organization. You need an environment in which people feel encouraged to take smart risks, be creative, and innovate. At the same time, building up skills and maintaining a positive, collaborative culture ensures that everyone is working toward the same vision—and enjoying the process while they’re at it.