Why Revenue Marketing is Critical for Every Business

Every business shares three goals that translate directly to the revenue line:

• Driving new customer acquisition
• Maximizing average sales value
• Building lifetime customer value

In recent years, the role of marketing in achieving these goals has evolved. We’re now in the age of “Revenue Marketing”, an approach that focuses every marketing activity and investment on growing revenue and increasing customer value.

That statement may sound obvious but few companies, particularly early stage companies, successfully execute revenue marketing. That’s because there are best practices to follow and organizational changes required. In this article, I will focus on the best practices. Once you implement them, the necessary changes in organizational process and behavior will be easier to manage.

A Deeper Definition of Revenue Marketing

Revenue Marketing is the science of targeting a specific customer set, profiling the decision-maker and facilitating the buyer’s journey through the progressive stages of problem awareness, solution evaluation, and sales engagement. This requires the total alignment and integration of marketing strategies for each stage of the customer journey.

Key steps for successful Revenue Marketing execution:

1. Target a specific customer set based on product and market fit
2. Implement campaigns that make buyers aware of their problems or needs
3. Educate buyers on the superior value your solution and business outcomes
4. Trigger buyer behavior for initiating the sales process with an actionable inquiry

Each step has a unique purpose and implication for marketing programs and content. At the same time, all steps must work together as a unified campaign for capturing buyer attention, nurturing buyer interest and guiding their decision-making process.

When executed successfully, revenue marketing drives pipeline activity, increases opportunity value and accelerates the sales process. It eliminates the tendency of marketing to devolve into a series of tactical, one-off experiments. Revenue Marketing provides purpose and focus for each marketing action. It’s best executed as a coordinated game plan for driving revenue and customer acquisition in each target market you serve.

Revenue Marketing in Action

The best way to illustrate Revenue Marketing in action is with an example. The following real-life marketing challenge is told from the perspective of a fictionalized company we’ll call LegalTec Solutions.  LegalTec is a small US-based technology company providing cloud-based practice management software to law firms in several geographic markets. The company has a highly effective sales process with a 40% close rate for opportunities reaching their Practice Analysis stage and 60% of opportunities reaching the Technology Demonstration stage. Their excellent conversion ratios indicate a high value solution and strong buyer demand.

For marketing, the company maintains a solid website, social media presence, participates in lead sharing and holds seminars to generate leads. They use outbound phone calling and face-to-face sales calls to drive opportunities into their sales pipeline. However, a low volume of qualified leads is holding back growth. Specifically, the number of quality digital leads generated from the website is only a few leads per month.

LegalTec wanted to accelerate its rate of customer acquisition and expand its geographic footprint. To achieve that goal, the company’s digital marketing strategy and execution needed to be reworked to drive a higher volume of quality leads and improve the performance of its offline marketing. A Revenue Marketing Game Plan was created to accomplish this mission.

Revenue Marketing Objectives

LegalTec worked with Virtual CMO to develop a Revenue Marketing Game Plan for driving sustainable growth using proven digital marketing methods. Following are the high-level goals established by the plan:

1. Brand Identify and Authority: LegalTec must be positioned as a thought-leader and best-in-class provider of digital solutions for law firms. It must convincingly establish buyer pain points and the business impact of addressing them, or not addressing them.
2. Lead Production: Monthly lead production from digital sources must increase substantially and become the principle source of new customer inquiries for the business. This will be accomplished through a combination of inbound and outbound marketing methods.
3. Sales Acceleration: In addition to providing more actionable opportunities for sales, digital marketing must also accelerate the sales process with authoritative content that educates buyers and influences their decision-making process.

Revenue Marketing Game Plan

To achieve these objectives, a Revenue Marketing Game Plan for building a scalable sales and marketing operation was created. It followed a proven process for aligning all aspects of marketing into an integrated plan of action. The game plan identified new, sharply focused messaging, a website optimization strategy, a digital content strategy, and an inbound/outbound campaign plan. Key performance metrics were identified for measuring progress and performing continuous improvement.

The process took about 8 weeks to conduct the analysis, build a comprehensive plan and recruit the necessary freelance resources to execute various elements of the plan.

Major Components of the Revenue Marketing Game Plan:

1. Messaging: A fresh look at messaging was conducted to strengthen the value proposition. Buyer personas, value statements, sales triggers, competition and ways to leverage customer evidence were re-assessed and documented. Quantifiable and provable business value (e.g., levels of efficiency and profitability) was identified as a key theme of the value proposition.
2. Website: Because the website acts as the cornerstone for all digital marketing activities, it was evaluated for its ability to generate traffic, engage visitors and convert leads. The website experience was enhanced to convincingly tell the LegalTec story and to facilitate buyer journey stages from awareness to consideration to purchase decision. This led to specific actions for search optimization and conversion optimization.
3. Content: As the fuel that powers digital campaigns, all existing content was reviewed and repurposed to reach targeted buyers, capture their interest and motivate taking action. Storytelling was used to communicate the value of LegalTec Solutions realized by similar law firms. This is critical because value statements from vendors are just product claims. Customer validation builds trust and motivates action.
4. Campaigns: An enhanced website with new content was used to execute integrated inbound/outbound campaigns. Inbound campaigns leveraged the power of organic search to reach potential buyers and generate online inquiries. Outbound campaigns targeted a precise buyer profile and leveraged LinkedIn and Email marketing to improve lead generation performance.
5. Analytics: Essential metrics were established to track monthly performance of campaigns and enable continuous improvement of the revenue marketing operation. For LegalTec, this was a simple matter of configuring Google Analytics reports to track its traffic volume, engagement level, site conversion rate and lead generation goals. Other performance metrics were identified to more to closely align quarterly marketing results with LegalTec’s strategic business goals.

The Revenue Marketing Game Plan was an effective vehicle for transforming LegalTec’s marketing efforts into a focused and purpose-driven program for new customer acquisition. It has put the company on a path to grow its business and its brand in new geographic markets. It will serve as the blueprint for introducing new products and expanding its market presence. And it has more closely aligned the marketing and sales staff as they share ownership of revenue targets and work together to drive new customer acquisition for the business.

Do you follow Revenue Marketing best practices in your business? Take the Revenue Marketing Quiz and find out.