Marketers who want to move from traditional marketing to revenue marketing need to do the same thing.
They need a Revenue Marketing Playbook™.
Marketing is much more than building brand and driving impressions. B2B marketers who have spent the better part of the last decade chasing leads are only in the early stages of the journey. In truth, it takes a committed organization 12-24 months to successfully move from traditional marketing and lead generation to demand generation and revenue marketing.
Revenue Marketing is the successful integration of people, process and technology that works together to drive repeatable, predictable and sustainable revenue. Today’s Revenue Marketer™ incorporates these components into their playbook:
- Assets (Content)
- Campaigns
- Campaign Calendar
- Channels
- Customer Engagement
- Database for Marketing
- Hypothesis and Testing Plan
- Lead Definitions / Scoring
- Lead Management Process
- Lead Nurturing
- Metrics
Each company will be stronger in some areas vs. others. The key thing to do is measure your maturity and skill area in each area, determine your objectives and priorities, and plan out component development based upon your current skill level and company need. On a quarterly basis, reassess and reprioritize as needed.
This week’s article will focus on the first four areas of building a Revenue Marketing Playbook™.
Assets
Before assembling assets, the first thing in building a Revenue Marketing Playbook™ is to create personas of the key buyers of your company’s products and services. What are the demographic, firmographic, behavioral and psychological components that make up your buyers? All buyers first decide on emotion and then back up with logic. What are the emotional trigger points of your buyers and what phrasing and content would appeal most to them? After defining your personas, you then need to map out the buy cycles of each persona to determine what their needs are at any given time during their decision cycle. Once you have determined each element of the buy cycle and what each persona needs to move to the next step, you can then start on your content cycle.
Before developing any new content, the first thing you should do is run a content audit. A content audit summarizes all of your company’s assets by type and purpose. You can then map your available content to each persona and buy cycle phase to determine where your gaps are. Content production should then begin by addressing the gaps in the greatest area of impact first.
Campaigns
Campaigns that drive revenue are much more than sending out emails. Before creating any campaigns, first address your methodology and nomenclature for planning and measuring campaign performance. Every campaign should fall under a naming convention that rolls up to multiple components such as timeframe, division and channel. Campaigns should initiate in your CRM system and be integrated in with marketing automation, online and offline assets for tracking properly. Once your structure is in place, you then need to develop a ROI formula for measuring the effectiveness of one campaign over another. Good ROI formulas should contain the costs of execution, revenue produced, and timeframe for rate of return. This will allow your team to compare one campaign vs. another to determine where you should spend your time and money. Revenue producing campaigns can contain a single channel such as email, but are often more effective when combining multiple channels together in a varying sequence.
Campaign Calendar
Creating visibility into revenue production is essential to unifying sales and marketing. A common complaint from sales is that they have no idea what marketing is doing and often find out from customers and prospects. A good campaign calendar should be public and shared, ideally through your CRM system. It should contain a monthly view into all planned campaigns and when they drop. Each campaign should be hyperlinked in the calendar, so that drilling down will show the campaign description, objective and anticipated rate of return. It will also have links to the assets involved. Showing sales how to access this calendar will allow them to be better prepared and build teamwork. It also shows the organization that marketing is being thoughtful and decisive in its planning, not reactionary.
Channels
We live in a multi-channel world. Marketers that are using email exclusively are akin to the coach who only runs the same play. Competitors anticipate and shut it down. In B2B marketing, it will be the prospects that shut you down because your message gets lost in the noise. It takes 3-5 channels and multiple personalized messages to reach today’s discerning buyer. Each marketing department needs to test and work with multiple options, including social media, mobile, search, video, audio, direct mail and more to determine the optimal mix for their company.
In the next installment, we will look at how Customer Engagement, the Marketing Database and Testing help you build a successful Revenue Marketing Playbook™.
