The economy is improving. The recession has come to an end, which is especially apparent in Dutch companies, and more businesses are once again investing in their marketing and communication activities. The market clearly shows increased investments in these areas, but the measurability of online activities is not entirely transparent.
In a modern marketing organization, also known as a revenue marketing organization, a combined approach of strategy, processes, people, technology, customers and results offers various advantages:
- Gain qualified leads for sales
- Make leads “ready to buy” faster
- Make marketing efforts measurable and predictable
- Increase the return on marketing and sales investments
How can you do it? We’ll show you!
Tip 1: Utilize marketing technology
A revenue marketing organization utilizes various technologies to get insight into which marketing campaigns can successfully reach company objectives. Through monitoring and analytical programs, the marketers are able to analyze and connect their marketing campaigns to their results. By using these technologies, they are able to redirect marketing campaigns and improve them.
Information that is collected by a revenue marketing organization through the analysis and monitoring of marketing campaigns can be used at all points of the marketing funnel. This data will give you more insight and ensure your marketing campaigns can be used more efficiently. This data allows you to:
- Increase online reach
- Generate qualitative leads
- Retain existing customers
- Extend customers to ambassadors
Examples of tools that make B2B marketing measurable and transparent include Google Analytics, Mailchimp, Hubspot, Funnel.io, and Matomo (formerly Piwik).
Tip 2: Formulate objectives
There are company objectives (people, planet and profit), marketing objectives (revenue and turnover) and marketing communication objectives (influencing the knowledge, attitude and behavior of your target group). Online marketing is a part of marketing communication. Therefore, you should utilize your resources and channels to influence knowledge, attitude and behavior of your target group. Write down your marketing objectives or (derived) marketing communication objectives. Using these objectives, you can determine what needs to be accomplished in terms of communication.
Make sure you utilize communication effectively. Don’t just use something solely because it is part of communication – not all forms of communication are relevant for every organization. Utilizing too much irrelevant communication methods can lead to information overload for customers. This means your target group sees too much communication activities from your company, which makes them view the company negatively – or they simply no longer can process the information. It is paramount you know your target group well and adjust your message specifically to your target group.
Consider what phase your target group is in – this way, you will influence them at the right moment to get them to the next phase in the buyer journey (information phase to the persuasion phase to the decision phase)
But how do you accomplish this?
- Write down your marketing objectives or communication objectives, e.g. increase brand awareness, get more visitors to the website, increase online sales, retain current customers, or turn customers into ambassadors.
- Make sure you have insight into your target group. What type of communication is effective to deploy and what is not?
- Prioritize these marketing objectives.
Check if your current objectives are measurable. Are you utilizing tools and techniques to measure these objectives?
Tip 3: Start measuring and analyzing
Once you have mapped out which technologies are available to analyze your marketing activities and have prioritized your company objectives, you can start to get insight into your activities. Make sure you have the tools for your most important business objectives, which you can use to measure your marketing activities.
But just measuring results is not enough! It’s important to map out your current results before deploying new marketing activities. Find out the following data:
- Current number of website visitors per month
- Monthly revenue
- Number of leads per month
- Average reach on social media per month
- Average reach of blogs per month
If you identify these figures before the execution of new marketing activities, you know what your marketing activities have achieved, and you can make it measurable and accountable. By working with a sales funnel, you can calculate what you have to achieve with your new marketing activities to reach greater revenue.
There are certain challenges with a revenue marketing organization, but they can all be solved:
- Hire the right people for your organization. Each member of your team should have good communication skills, strong analytical capacity, creativity, affinity with technology and qualities in their field of information technology.
- Use the right tools.
- Choose the correct objectives.