Marketing Tactics to Kickstart Your Revenue Engine

Your marketing department’s job is to:

1. position your company as the leader in your industry with your particular value proposition and 
2. provide your sales team with qualified leads. 

Period. How they get there optimally and efficiently is the real challenge. 

At its core, a marketing strategy is a revenue driver, and when it works in conjunction with the rest of the revenue engine - Branding, Marketing, Sales, Customer Success, and RevOps - it can be an exciting opportunity to scale the company past your current revenue plateau.

Some executives look at marketing as “table stakes”- something that just has to be done to be a player in the market. The view of “oh, we have to have a website and social media to legitimize our existence with our potential clients” is missing out on the opportunity to leverage marketing as a crucial part of the Revenue Engine.

Let’s discuss some tactics to kickstart your Revenue Engine and how to start integrating your marketing department into your long-term strategy.

Hire or Appoint One Marketing Decision-Maker

A marketing professional should run your marketing operations and present strategy, not operations or sales. There will be a lot of internal conflicting opinions on your marketing initiatives, but honoring a Marketing Manager’s ultimate authority of being the one person making the final decision eliminates confusion on the direction.

Of course, this isn’t always realistic for smaller companies to afford, so a fractional marketing professional or Fractional CMO can be an affordable way to provide an expert perspective without the full-time commitment (or the overhead).

Particularly with smaller companies under the $10 million annual recurring revenue (ARR) mark, marketing departments commonly can be pieced together with contractors operating independently with no real overarching strategy. In some organizations, contractors are reporting to inexperienced managers or to different departments. 

For example, we have seen SEO contractors report to the COO and social media report to the CEO, opening up the risk of conflicting priorities and messaging. In addition, marketing fragments commonly don’t work in tandem with the rest of the Revenue Engine, ending up with competing priorities that don’t “jive” well together.

A marketing manager or Fractional CMO can holistically review and audit the marketing department as a whole and help integrate it with the other departments. Additionally, they can provide a long-term strategy to drive revenue, establish and track KPIs, and hold the department accountable for performance. 

Research your (Ideal) Audience

None of your marketing initiatives will matter unless you are accurately representing your ideal clients in your entire Revenue Engine. Start each year by checking in and getting feedback from your clients, employees, and peers. Schedule interviews with each segment to gauge where you are and their perception of your performance. Who do you want in your pipeline? 

After you’ve investigated your competition, spoken with clients, and gotten feedback on how to improve, you can develop a detailed Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and buyer personas so you can craft your marketing around their pain points and how to fix them. 

This doesn’t just apply to marketing. You may be surprised to find that 4-5 unbiased client interviews can also reveal insights into your product strategy and sales processes!

Tracking Marketing Performance Data is Essential

Is your website converting leads? Are those leads turning into sales? Is my Google ad spend converting clients? Is my ideal client even seeing my website? The good news is, in 2023, almost every digital marketing initiative’s performance is trackable in some way.

Why this matters:

• Putting KPIs and success measurements in place ensures that the money you’re spending with marketing contractors, paid media, social media, SEO, website performance, etc., is worth your time and expense. 
• With platforms like Hubspot, all customer and marketing data and activity are collected in one place, making it easy to report to senior management and investors.
• 88% of marketers agreed data is vital for marketing and advertising and helps better understand the client.

Google Analytics also allows you to track and understand your customer's behavior, user experience, online content, and more. It also helps evaluate and measure how marketing, content, and lead capture forms are performing.

Developing Marketing Content

The modern way of advertising can be approached as - “who is the best content creator”- not just for social media influencers but companies as well. And it just so happens that SEO performance hinges most heavily on online content. 

Types of content include:

• Webinars & Podcasts: Marketers say that webinars are cost-effective, and over 70% of webinar marketers say that webinars are either highly effective or most effective in converting leads.
• Blogs & Articles: This type of content is most important for SEO and building domain authority, but it is also a way to drive traffic to your website if optimized with the right keywords.
  • If you want to produce articles at scale, one of our favorite long-form AI article production tools is called Content at Scale.
• Lead Magnets: A type of eBook or downloadable content to entice a prospect to fill out a form and become a part of your CRM system.
• Social Media Marketing: Video clips, articles, and engaging posts can actually drive people to your website and build a community of followers. It isn’t just a necessary evil to stay relevant.

Building a content roadmap can establish your strategy, plan, and processes for monitoring on-time delivery and establish KPIs for delivering optimal content for your buyer personas.

Using Marketing as Part of the Revenue Engine

Insufficient lead generation provides bad leads. Bad leads mean low sales. Low sales mean a frustrated sales department with high turnover. The Revenue Engine is only as strong as its weakest link. 

Start fine-tuning your engine by empowering your marketing leader(s) with measurement tools, established KPIs, audits of your current system, and identification of who you want to fill your sales pipeline. Align your teams with strategic meetings to make sure everyone has the same understanding of who the ICP and buyer persona represents. 

With an aligned team, companies enjoy growth in the number of qualified leads, an increase in lead conversion rates, growth in new accounts, better retention, growth in account size, and revenue growth.

Ready to Get Started? Our Revenue Teams are Ready to Help.

We know it can be challenging to commit to significant investments without a high level of cash flow. However, this investment in marketing will set your business up for success and yield massive results, both in the short and long run.

At House of Revenue, we know significant revenue results start with strategic marketing foundations, and we're ready to help as your HubSpot Certified Partner.

For more information on how our team can help optimize your revenue, reach out and chat with us today. Let’s see if we’re your perfect partner in your quest to build your House of Revenue.