Revenue Marketing: Transitioning from Cost Center to Revenue Driver

by Dan Freeman 
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Modern marketing is no longer an intangible, creative endeavor; it produces tangible and measurable results. Today, revenue can be traced back to marketing activities and touch points; not with exactitude, but with enough precision to steer an organization’s strategy towards its most profitable marketing activities and to avoid those without much payoff. Because the revenue impact of marketing is now intelligible, companies are less willing to put money into marketing’s black box and hope sales happen. Increasingly, the marketing department is expected to perform as a revenue generator, not a cost center.

But making the transition from cost center to revenue engine is not easy. It’s a gradual process, one that can take two to three years to accomplish, and requires ongoing investment in marketing technologies as well as in the data, content, and business processes that enable these technologies.

The good news is that at each stage, you will see a significant and measurable impact on your marketing results. Learn the four stages of transformation from basic, cost-centric marketing to revenue driven marketing and discover the key differentiators of each stage.

Basic Marketing

At this stage, a marketing department follows a checklist of activities, but none of these activities are effectively monitored for results. Sure, there are “must do” activities—the website, email marketing, a social media presence, and trade shows, for example—but these are mostly dictated by historical precedent and there is only a hazy idea which of these activities produces results. Instead of hard data that provides real insight into the effectiveness of marketing actions, the focus here is on activity itself. Marketers speak in terms of spending and outlay rather than expected response rates and revenue impact. At this basic stage, marketing is a cost center where anecdotes, theory, and history—not hard data—support the decision on the marketing spend.

Lead Generation

As the marketing department realizes that activity alone is not enough, attention shifts to strategies that generate leads for the sales team. At the lead generation stage, budgets shift from activities whose results are purely theoretical to those producing tangible results—leads. The nascent awareness of which marketing channels and techniques produce tangible leads is a significant leap beyond basic marketing. At this stage, companies concentrate on developing content, attracting visitors through search engine optimization, and using email marketing to get their content in front of prospects with the hope of generating clicks. Emphasis may be put on development of white papers or other downloadable content.

The quality of the lead, however, is still not considered. Leads delivered to sales are neither scored nor prioritized. Here marketing can influence revenue but it’s still largely considered a cost center. While it’s a major step up, a business that focuses on lead generation rather than lead scoring, nurturing, and development is still far from maximizing its marketing potential as a revenue generator.

Quantitative Marketing

When the marketing team moves from amassing leads to scoring, prioritizing, and sorting those leads, it reaches the third stage: quantitative marketing. This stage is marked by a shift to repeatable and quantifiable processes. Here, a marketing automation platform is required. Two new dimensions characterize the quantitative stage. First, lead scoring enables marketers to deliver higher quality leads. Whereas in the lead generation stage, a white paper download alone may constitute a lead, in the quantitative stage, marketing takes a richer view of the prospect, taking into account firmographic, profile and behavioral information before sending it to sales. Second, nurture campaigns allow marketers to deliver customized streams of contents based on prospect profiles and behavior. By combing scoring with nurture workflows, the quantitative stage represents a major leap from the lead gen stage.

Revenue Marketing

At the apex of modern marketing is the revenue marketing stage Here, not only are leads quantified by their profiles and behavior; each opportunity can be tied back to a set of marketing activities. The impact of every marketing activity is now associated with revenue results. This is accomplished through integration of marketing automation and CRM systems like Salescorce.com. Leads flow into CRM where they are converted into sales opportunities and revenues.

This integration between sales and marketing enables marketers to use advanced nurture flows to influence and accelerate the sales cycle. Each lead is qualified and moves through a customized nurture program. Every marketing activity serves a purpose and is a part of the greater whole. The cost of every campaign can be assessed in terms of expected returns on the company’s investment.

At the revenue marketing stage, revenue generated and attributed to marketing is now repeatable, predictable and scalable. The revenue marketing stage requires advanced use of marketing automation software but the payoff is huge; marketing has now fully transitioned from a cost center to a revenue driver.

© Marketing Tech Report 2015 All Rights Reserved.

Driving Lead Generation with Marketing Automation

by Dan Freeman 
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Generating high-quality leads is one of the key marketing challenges for most B2B companies. Without a regular and adequate flow of qualified leads, the opportunity spigot dries up and revenues fall off quickly. Marketing automation offers a host of benefits, but how does it fit into your marketing strategy specifically as a lead generation tool? Here’s a look at how automation help drive new leads and nurture existing leads from initial contact through sales conversion.

Personalization and Customization

How do you interact with those you want to impress in a face to face meeting?
For one thing, you address them properly. When shaking hands you probably don’t say “Hello Friend”. It’s probably more like, “Hi Jason”. Automation allows you address prospects & customers individually or as member of a group that has some relevance to them. For example, “Dear Customer” or “Attention IT Managers”.

If you want to have an engaging face to face conversation with a prospect, you don’t just spew talking points; you respond to other’s comments, questions, and thoughts. Automation lets marketers respond with content based on your prospect’s past digital conversations. If they have demonstrated interest in product X, you can respond with some benefits that product X provides. As with a face to face conversation, the more relevant your message is, the more engaging it will be. By delivering customized content, you increase your response rates dramatically – sometimes by over 500 percent.

Timely Testing

Marketers have used A/B split testing to find the most effective ways to reach their audiences for decades, but modern marketing automation technology makes testing more valuable by shortening the gap between tests and live releases from days to minutes. Think of how the nearly instantaneous communication possibilities of email revolutionized how we talk to one another, and you’ll have an idea of how much of a difference timely test results can make in your lead generation strategy. Automation lets your marketing team find the best email, landing page, banner ad, or promotional message and blast it to audience segments almost in real time, ensuring that every campaign uses optimal content.

Drip Campaigns

Not all your leads start off ready to buy. That’s where drip campaigns can help, feeding small amounts of information to a prospect at a measured pace to nurture that contact over time. You don’t have the bandwidth to run drip email campaigns by hand, especially as your marketing operation expands, but marketing automation gives your team the power to optimize every part of the campaign. Channeling the flow of leads through a drip campaign keeps every potential customer moving forward in your marketing pipeline.

Marketing to Sales Hand-Offs

Your sellers work most efficiently when they don’t have to sort through an undifferentiated pile of leads to find the ones who are sales-ready. With marketing automation software, you can score and rank leads, and set sales alerts when those leads reach a sufficient score. Because all the marketing work has been done, sales people can focus on the high value work of selling. Instead of tossing leads over the fence to sales, your marketing team hand-delivers them complete with useful analytics as gift wrapping.

Lead generation is where your content and prospects intersect, and that’s where a marketing automation system truly shines. To learn more about how marketing automation drives lead gen, contact us.

© Marketing Tech Report 2015 All Rights Reserved.

What's Automated About Marketing Automation?

by Dan Freeman 
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Note, this blog post was originally published at Reach Marketing.

You’ve all heard of marketing automation.

It’s what we call that class of software that helps marketers nurture and quantify leads.

But the term marketing automation does not do justice to the software it’s named for.

Tracking visitors, sending emails, scoring leads, creating workflows, generating sales alerts…all of these automation features are critically important. But the real value behind marketing automation software lies in its ability to reach and engage with more prospects and to covert these prospects into leads, sales opportunities and customers. These benefits extend well beyond automation.

Here’s a synopsis of how marketing automation software can help your business.

Discover

First and foremost, marketing automation software helps you discover more about who your prospects and customers are. You can track and expand your prospects’ profile data, including demographic and firmographic info that you can use to better segment and target the marketplace. Profile data can even include attitudinal info obtained from surveys or form questions that can provide powerful insights into prospects’ intentions and/or authority.

By tracking what was previously invisible—the interactions your prospects have with your content—you gain a much richer view of your audience and how your content meets their needs.

Reach

Armed with a greater understanding of your prospects, you are in a position to expand your market
reach. With automated outbound messages, whether in the form of newsletters, messages triggered by site registrations, or intricate automated nurture campaigns, you can exponentially increase touch points with prospects and expand your marketplace presence.

Engage

More touch points mean more interactions and a deeper knowledge of your prospects—who they are and what content they consume—and you have now primed them for engagement. Engagement starts with understanding the buyer’s journey, the process that a buyer goes through from awareness to research to a purchase decision. You can now create content to better meet your prospects’ information needs at every stage of their journey, and track their level of engagement.

Convert

As marketers, your ultimate goal is to convert visitors to leads, and leads to sales opportunities and profitable customers. Marketing automation software enables you to convert anonymous visitors into qualified prospects using features such as reverse IP look-up and real-time website personalization. You can then track and score these leads and convert into sales opportunities based on agreed upon lead scores and activities that reflect their level of engagement.

So, the next time you hear the term marketing automation, think about these benefits.