How To Be a Revenue Driven Marketer

Revenue is the lifeblood of a company.

As enterprises embrace the growing role of marketing in business growth, revenue has become a crucial metric to track.

Now more than ever, executives demand that marketers demonstrate their role in business growth and revenue generation. This means that marketers must re-examine their efforts to demonstrate that their activities have a positive impact on the company's ROI. 

One way to do this is by becoming a revenue-driven marketer. A revenue driven-marketer works with data to prove the impact of marketing initiatives in attracting new leads, converting them into customers, and retaining their business.

Let's review some of the steps to becoming a revenue-driven marketer. 

Understand Your Company’s Revenue Goals

Learn how to develop marketing goals that increase revenue

Businesses set revenue targets to increase their revenue or profits on an annual if not quarterly basis. Some of these revenue goals may include:

• Creating brand awareness to more people in the target market 
• Attracting new customers to the business
• Launching new products 
• Expanding into new markets, for example, overseas
• Reducing churn rates

Understanding your company’s revenue goal is the first step in generating effective marketing goals. These goals are more actionable as you can attach a figure to them. For example, if the organization wants to generate $3 Million in sales for the quarter, you can develop a strategy to attract the number of leads that results in that figure.

Knowing your company's revenue goals also helps the revenue-driven marketer set useful key performance indicators to determine the impact of each marketing initiative. 

For instance, instead of counting the number of likes and shares your posts get, you can calculate the number of leads the business gains from a marketing effort. This also allows you to calculate the revenue one lead generates for a business over a given period.

Here are a few tips to keep in mind when developing marketing goals based on the overall business’ revenue goals:

• Identify the revenue you need to generate from your marketing efforts. For instance, if you need to grow revenue by 30%, you must establish how much the thirty percent represents and the timeline to achieve it.
• Determine the number of sales you need to meet the revenue goal
• Identify the target close rate and opportunities you will need to achieve the revenue goal. Work backward from the goal. For example, if one customer brings in $1500 per year, how many customers do you need to bring in $12,000?
• Identify the number of sales qualified leads and market qualified leads you need

Plan and Execute Marketing Campaigns that Generate Leads and Sales 

Get the most from your marketing budget

In the last step, you identified your business' overall revenue goals and the number of leads you need to generate to achieve these goals. In this step, you need a strategy to generate these leads and convert them into sales.

Marketers often generate leads from new audiences who are unaware of the brand or the solutions offered. Alternatively, these audiences can be leads who already know about your products and have interacted with your content or bought from you previously.

Planning and executing a successful marketing campaign to generate leads and sales can be summarized into the following steps:

• Set a purpose for your campaign 
• Identify key performance metrics that will help you measure progress on your marketing goals 
• Define your target audience based on their buying journey (awareness, consideration, or decision), pain points, where they are online, the kind of content they engage with, and the type of problems your product solves. 
• Identify the marketing channels that you will use to meet various marketing goals. Marketing channels depend on your budget, brand engagement levels, and audience preferences. 
• Determine the costs and budget for your marketing campaigns
• Determine the type of content you will create for the marketing campaign, including the ideal content for each marketing channel you choose
• Determine who will handle activities in the campaign (they can be employees or freelancers)
• Set a timeline for your campaigns. A defined timeline allows you to create a promotional calendar for each marketing channel, which increases the effectiveness of your campaign. 

Measure Campaign Results

Metrics + Inspiration = Revenue

A revenue-driven marketer can demonstrate the impact of their marketing initiatives on a company’s revenue. This calls for setting and tracking the right metrics. 

Too often, marketers are caught up in tracking vanity metrics such as the number of likes or views a post gets, but they fail to look at more important metrics such as the amount of revenue generated from engagement with content.

Different marketing channels will have different metrics as follows:

Email Marketing

If you are sending out regular emails, some of the key performance indicators to track include the open rates, click-through rates, and unsubscribe rates. These metrics tell you whether your emails are appealing enough for users to open and engage with them. In the case of unsubscribe rates, it can tell you which content does not resonate with your audience. 

Blog

Marketers use blog content to generate leads and grow a company’s audience. Some of the metrics you can track for your blog marketing include the number of people who visit your website (including how they find your website), the number of leads your blog generates, and the number of subscribers. 

Sales Enablement

 The metrics to track for your sales enablement process include the lead-to-customer conversion rate, the opportunity-to-customer conversion rate.

Product marketing 

Product marketing metrics include adoption rates, conversion rates, and revenue. They tell you how much your audience is interacting with your content.

Other metrics to track include organic traffic, return on marketing investment, referral traffic, customer acquisition cost, customer retention rates, and customer lifetime value.

Continuously Optimize Your Marketing Efforts 

Drive revenue and optimize your marketing efforts with data

Revenue-driven marketers are always looking for ways to optimize their marketing campaigns. One significant way to achieve continuous optimization is through drawing actionable insights from data. Unlike vanity metrics such as likes, examining your data helps identify patterns and trends across various marketing channels.

You can use data to track a customer's journey from their first contact with the organization to when they make a purchase. Marketing optimization, especially using data, involves collecting data, cleaning data, analyzing the data, and implementing the insights you gain from that data.

Collaborate with Other Teams for a Cohesive Marketing Strategy

Unlock new revenue opportunities by working together

Successful marketing rides on the collaboration between marketing, sales, and revenue teams. Through collaboration, an organization's revenue, marketing, and sales efforts move in the same direction, ensuring consistency.

The benefits of adopting collaboration as part of a revenue-driven marketing strategy include:

• Marketing and sales teams deliver a consistent message and experience to their customers. This consistency is vital in setting the tone for what customers can expect from you during the marketing journey. Consistency is also key to delivering value-driven customer messaging and higher customer engagement rates. 
• Increased revenue. When marketers and sales teams collaborate, they generate more results for the business by eliminating duplication and disjointed efforts. 
• Collaboration between marketing and sales teams results in developing buyer personas that match a company's target audience. Both sales and marketing teams rely on buyer personas to curate targeted sales and marketing messages. 
• When marketing and sales teams collaborate, they effectively keep their businesses ahead of the competition. 

Marketers that want to become revenue-driven must be ready to embrace collaboration. This way, they can tie their efforts with the results that translate into sales and revenues.

Some of the tips for marketers to foster collaboration with sales teams include:

• Ensure proper communication with the sales team. This includes identifying common goals and KPIs, brainstorming on marketing efforts, and communicating what each team needs from the other.
• Hold each other accountable for meeting shared goals 
• Share knowledge between sales and marketing teams to facilitate continuous communication outside scheduled meetings 

Keep up with the Latest Marketing Trends and Best Practices 

How to stay ahead of the curve

The marketing space is constantly evolving. Whether it's new technologies or marketing strategies, the revenue-driven marketer always has a pulse on the industry. Being aware of the trends and best practices in the industry allows you to launch competitive marketing strategies that bring in more leads and revenue to your business. 

While keeping up with these trends is important, it's also crucial to diversify your marketing strategies, so you are not overly reliant on one tool. 

The goal is to continue to optimize strategies that work and test new ideas and technologies on a smaller scale.

Conclusion 

The art and science of revenue marketing

Becoming a revenue-driven marketer involves combining the artistic and scientific sides of marketing. It means being willing to look beyond the likes, shares, or leads your efforts have generated but looking at the positive ROI these leads have brought to the organization. 

Becoming a revenue-driven marketer means understanding your company's revenue goals and developing marketing strategies that drive growth and revenue to meet the objectives. It also means working with data to draw insights into what efforts are working, how customers engage with the company, and the returns from marketing investments.