Since the days of Madmen, marketing has meant many things to many people. Today is a new day. Modern marketing focuses on one, very important goal: GROW REVENUE. But many companies are still undervaluing and/or underutilizing the role of the marketing or are confusing it with the role of sales, all the while blunting growth opportunity. Not convinced? Check out some interesting stats:
In 2020, B2B digital commerce revenues nearly doubled, accounting for around half of all B2B revenues (Accenture)
Email collection forms were the most successful at converting viewers, with a 15% conversion rate in 2020 (Hubspot)
70% of marketers lack an integrated content strategy whereas the most successful marketers spend 40% of their total marketing budget on content marketing (B2B content marketing report)
Strategic landing pages help 68% of B2B businesses acquire new leads (Marketo)
Yesterday’s view of marketing lacked a visible tether to core growth goals.
Today’s role of marketing is strategic and focused on growth and profitability. How can your company embrace this idea and prepare to unleash the revenue-generating power of strategic marketing?
1. Hire the right leader
Your CMO (Chief Marketing Officer) is primarily tasked with three critical objectives: (1) Understand the market today (2) Know where the market is heading so that as Wayne Gretzky says the company can “Skate to where the puck is going” and (3) Define/direct the marketing strategy. Just like a CEO, your CMO should spend at least 25% of their time outside the office with sales, customers and industry partners consistently evaluating the changing needs of the marketplace.
2. Know your data
Smart marketing REQUIRES actionable data and insights from customers, competitors, company & industry sources. You can’t improve what don’t measure. Take time to execute research and establish the right data points to set and measure ALL your performance marketing tactics.
3. Customer acquisition plan
Armed with data & insights, the next step is mapping out a tactical plan to bring new business into the organization. This is the most expensive area to budget for – but is ESSENTIAL to growth. This very important area involves strategic content marketing and multi-channel strategies to influence 3 targeted areas:
ü Lead generation (fishing for and pulling in qualified “net new” customer leads)
ü Lead nurturing (pulling lead through the buying decision or sales funnel)
ü Lead conversion (converting new leads into a buying decision)
4. Customer lifetime value & retention strategies
Intuitively customer loyalty matters- however, not all customers carry the same economic impact to the company. While not as “easy” to establish as counting costs is, figuring out how to understand the lifetime value of different customer types and implementing customer experience plans that invest accordingly to retain in your high contributing customers, grow the middle tier and create mitigation strategies for the lowest tier will directly impact profitability. Value-centric marketing will segment these customer types and monitor and deploy customer experience strategies around those segments.
For more information on how to power up your marketing efforts to fuel growth for your company, contact Nivalmi today!
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