‘But what do you actually do for a living?’
If you’re in marketing, that’s probably a question you’re familiar with. It's a broad discipline, and explaining what we actually do on a daily basis can be hard. In no small part because ‘marketing’ isn’t really the job, we all have our specialism.
And the fields included in marketing are getting increasingly narrow: product marketing, customer marketing, content marketing, developer marketing... The list goes on. Today, we’ll be talking about revenue marketing. What it is, how to do it, and why it’s so important.
What is revenue marketing?
There are as many different types of marketing as there are functions in a business. Revenue marketing refers to marketing designed to generate revenue for a company. This differs from traditional marketing, which is typically associated with growing brand awareness or advertising the release of new products.
The purpose of revenue marketing is to generate sales-qualified leads, align marketing and sales, and increase focus on the customer. Marketing sources revenue through lead generation, and the value of the leads you produce represents the amount of revenue you’ve brought in.
If you work in traditional marketing, you may wonder what the distinction is between this and what you do. Lead generation is part of all marketing strategies in one way or another. In some shape or form, you’re funneling people toward your company.
But revenue marketing explicitly connects your marketing strategy to revenue goals, overarching business targets, and the efforts of your sales team. You track key metrics to scale up your lead gen activities, and the revenue that marketing brings in is measured and distinguished from other sources.
Why does revenue marketing matter?
Revenue marketing has a myriad of benefits for your Go-to-Market strategy, as well as your business as a whole.
- Acknowledging the value of marketing
If a team isn’t viewed as directly impacting revenue, it can be overlooked or siloed in favor of prioritizing teams like sales, who’re seen as bringing in the big bucks. A revenue marketing function measures exactly how much money the marketing team is bringing in and clearly defines your financial value to the company.
So when the budgets getting divvied up, it’ll be far easier to make your case and get the resources you need to do your job properly. We all know how important marketing is, but demonstrating its impact on revenue makes sure everyone else knows it, too.
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When it comes to proving marketing’s value, Gaston Tourn, CMO at Curio, offers this advice:
2. Go-to-Market alignment
Done right, Go-to-Market is a cross-functional, collaborative strategy. It brings together teams and stakeholders from across your business to ensure your positioning, messaging, and sales strategies are consistently delivered and reflective of your brand’s broader image and goals.
Revenue marketing isn’t dissimilar. In order for a marketing strategy to be built around your business goals and objectives, it can’t just be marketing that designs it. At the very least, sales and marketing need to be aligned to make sure they’re building complementary strategies that further one another, rather than working at cross purposes. Plus, marketing needs to understand revenue goals if they’re going to create a strategy that supports them.
The more you implement functions like revenue marketing, which inherently require stakeholder collaboration, the easier it’ll be to naturally develop a culture of cross-functional working in your business. Teams working together and understanding one another’s goals and priorities, rather than being siloed, results in a far more effective Go-to-Market strategy.
Want a better understanding of cross-functional Go-to-Market and how it works to make your product launches successful? Download your free copy of the Cross-Functional Go-to-Market playbook here:
Kate Onley-Gregson
3. Prioritizing the customer
Old-school marketing is all about creating demand. Selling a narrative that makes it incomprehensible for the consumer to live without your product. And that’s not a bad tactic, we all know the power FOMO has over our lives. Playing to that emotion is usually an easy win.
Revenue marketing doesn’t throw that out the window, but it does focus more on the individual customer. Rather than trying to dictate the interests of the market, revenue marketers find out what the market wants and target those needs.
Revenue marketing is personal. It gets into the nitty gritty of a customer's pain points and what they need from a business to convert. Plus, the collaborative nature of revenue marketing means you can deliver a consistent customer journey from product, to marketing, to sales, and beyond.
Customer-driven marketing establishes a relationship between you and your buyer. You can extend the customer lifetime value of your users and increase their loyalty to your brand over time. In an over-saturated marketplace with seemingly endless options, establishing that relationship and trust with your customer is more important than ever.
4. The death of the sales rep
Ok, that might be a slight exaggeration. But it's not an exaggeration to say customers are increasingly skeptical and impatient when it comes to traditional sales methods. Cold calling, the hard sell, and outbound Go-to-Market strategies are increasingly unpopular.
The modern consumer likes to do their own research, weigh up the options and reach out to companies on their own terms. The self-serve model is where the majority of sales now happen. This is why you need to make your sales and marketing assets easily accessible and convenient for customers to reach.
Revenue marketing, which ensures information reaches the right customers at the right time and drives the customer down a sales funnel until they convert themselves, is your key to succeeding in this new, self-serve era of consumption.
How to lead a revenue marketing strategy
Learning a new way of marketing may seem daunting, but don’t worry. You’ll be bringing a lot of your traditional marketing know-how to your revenue marketing function. Rather than starting from scratch, this is more of a restructuring of how you currently carry out marketing to prioritize different goals and marketing channels.
And to set you in the right direction, we’re breaking down the key steps to a successful revenue marketing strategy:
Collecting customer data
If you’re going to create a personal marketing strategy, you need to know who you’re marketing for. That means getting to know your customers: what they care about, what their problems are, and the kind of solutions they want.
There are lots of ways to collect this data. You can conduct surveys and focus groups, use social media surveys, use email sign-up info, and more. You can also use competitive intelligence to learn more about your customers, their priorities, and what they value in your competitors.
Building out buyer personas is a great way to get a really strong grasp of who your customers are.
Not sure where to start? Use our ready-to-go template to build comprehensive buyer personas:
Kate Onley-Gregson
Establish cross-functional alignment
As we’ve said, revenue marketing requires close collaboration between teams. To build a marketing strategy that directly impacts revenue goals, you need input from sales, product, and your product marketing team if you have one.
Plus, for a revenue marketing strategy, or a Go-to-Market strategy, to work, you need all your stakeholders on board and on message. Getting everyone involved in the strategy from the start will ensure your teams understand one another’s responsibilities and workloads, meaning they can deliver work consistently and effectively.
Plan your strategy
With your data collected and your stakeholders assembled, it's time to build out your roadmap. Decide which marketing channels you’re going to use, build out personalized campaigns based on your customer research, and plan the customer journey.
This is when you figure out how you’ll reach your prospective customers, and how you’ll take them from first interaction to successful converts. Crucially, set your goals now. Your metrics won’t mean anything if they’re not predetermined.
Implement your strategy
Now it’s time to put your revenue marketing strategy to work. When you plan your strategy you’ll have chosen which communication channels will be the most effective for your target customers. Now it's time to use them.
Whether you’re using email campaigns, social media, in-product communications, or something else, it's important to put out consistent messaging that reels customers in and gets them ready to buy.
As you can see, implementing a successful revenue marketing strategy depends heavily on technology. So if you’re going to do it right, you need to invest in your tech stack. You’ll need a strong CMS (content management system), as well as sales software with integrated marketing automation.
Measure, measure, measure
Last but not least, measure the results of your strategy. One of the key differences between revenue and marketing and traditional marketing is it's a repeatable and scalable strategy. This means it grows with your business and ensures sustained growth. But none of that’s possible if you aren’t measuring.
Choose the metrics you’re going to track and ensure you measure them at regular intervals for accurate results.
Some of the most effective metrics to track for revenue marketing are:
- Predicted revenue.
- Win rates.
- Marketing sourced revenue.
- Marketing ROI.
- Sales cycle length.
- Time to value.
Ready to make your mark on the Go-to-Market community?
Go-to-Market is the backbone of so many businesses, but Go-to-Market job titles are still new on the scene.
That’s why we’ve set out to find out what the GTM job market looks like, how much you can expect to be paid, and what it actually means to work in Go-to-Market.
Complete the survey now. 👇
