Celeste has worked in the online marketing space for twenty years. She has written for sectors including tourism, sustainability, education, lifestyle, food, and marketing. You can find her work featured by Green Building Media South Africa, Stodels Gardening, and The Post House Hotel. In magazines, you may have seen her in The Cape Times, Oprah South Africa, and The Property Magazine. While you can find her writing up on the latest SEO trends and exploring digital techniques during the day, her love of story-telling carries on in enriched games and books after hours.
Companies have focused on lead generation and brand awareness for the last couple of years. But today, they are transitioning toward a revenue-centric approach.
Business-to-business (B2B) revenue marketing is a strategy that can generate leads, like traditional strategies, while tying marketing efforts directly to revenue growth.
This article explores how B2B companies can use revenue marketing to create sustainable growth for their own business and thrive in an ever-increasing market.
Revenue marketing 101
A revenue marketing strategy focuses on aligning marketing strategies with sales goals to deliver tangible financial outcomes. Let’s take a closer look at what this marketing strategy offers.
What is B2B revenue marketing?
B2B revenue marketing is a strategic approach where marketing is accountable for measurable revenue outcomes, aligning its efforts with the entire sales funnel. Unlike traditional marketing, which primarily focuses on lead generation only, revenue strategies aim to drive real, quantifiable revenue.
Why does revenue marketing matter?
Buyer journeys have become more complex and added technology such as social media, website expansion, and AI has shifted the industry. Today, revenue leads created are measured by B2B marketing strategies, not just lead volume.
What is a sales funnel?
A sales funnel is a visual representation of the process that businesses use to guide potential customers through a journey that leads to a purchase. It is called a sales funnel because it illustrates the narrowing of potential customers from a broad base of awareness down to a small group of customers who are ready to purchase.
So, how does this tie in with B2B revenue marketing? A sales funnel transforms potential customers into paying clients while aligning marketing efforts directly with revenue goals. It treats the entire customer journey as a revenue-generating process. Every stage is integrated, maximizing profitability and streamlining the marketing-sales relationship.
Building a winning revenue marketing strategy involves aligning marketing and sales through data-driven insights and long-term growth. There must be clear communication between all teams and knowledge of your customers.
Here are six ways that you can improve this communication and drive every individual, team and department toward the same goal!
The foundation of any successful B2B revenue marketing strategy is goal-setting. However, instead of being vague with their goals and using broad terms, such as “to generate more leads,” businesses want to focus on more concrete goals, such as:
We should aim to generate a specific amount of marketing-sourced revenue.
A targeted percentage of high-value leads should convert into paying customers.
Monthly recurring revenue (MRR) should increase by X%.
X% should increase lifetime customer value.
Achieving these goals requires alignment between the sales and marketing teams. Traditionally, the sales team focuses on the bottom of the sales funnel — when the clients and users are ready to buy — and closes deals. The marketing team handles the top of the funnel, which concerns awareness and brand visibility.
However, in revenue marketing, the two teams work hand in hand, using shared metrics. They exchange information, such as lead quality and win rates, to direct the customers to conversion as efficiently as possible.
2. Targeting high-value decision-makers
With revenue strategy, the focus is on high-value clients — the prospects that are most likely to contribute significantly to your bottom line. Tactics that are often used include using customer data, marketing research and analytics.
Once you have identified your target audience, the next step is to create personalized marketing campaigns that resonate with them. The campaigns contain marketing messages around the unique pain points of the target audience. Engagement is then increased by using a mix of channels such as personalized ads, direct outreach and mixed content.
3. Analyzing KPIs
Revenue marketing relies heavily on data to drive results. From the first point of contact, each client interaction is tracked, and every movement is noted until the final touch point or purchase. This data is used as cornerstone information to optimize future campaigns.
To understand whether your revenue strategy is working, you need to track the right metrics. A few key performance indicators (KPIs) to use include:
Market-sourced revenue: Analyze the exact revenue that is coming in from your marketing efforts.
Pipeline velocity: Track how longyour customer’s journey is through the sales pipeline.
A well-mapped customer journey allows businesses to see how potential buyers interact with their brand, from the initial touchpoint to the final purchase and beyond. It’s a way of stepping into the customer’s shoes and understanding their experience and the key moments that influence their decisions with your brand.
Once you understand their movements, you can start to craft personalized, data-based strategies to meet their expectations and encourage them to convert.
5. Nurture your leads to maximize your revenue
To keep leads engaged throughout long, complex buying cycles, companies build nurturing campaigns that offer value to the client at every stage.
For example, content marketing can offer educational and problem-solving content, to build trust. Each piece of content is also optimized with call-to-actions (CTA), to guide the user to the next stage and to predict their next thought.
Multitouch point strategies are used to engage the prospect across all channels, from email to social media, to reinforce the brand and imprint on the user.
Ready to optimize your lead generation strategy?
It’s time for your B2B businesses to transition from traditional marketing to a revenue-driven model that will produce measurable results and grow your bottom line. Implement these strategies, and WebFX will help you earn more on your investment from your revenue marketing efforts.
WebFX has driven the following results for clients:
$10 billion
in client revenue
24 million
leads for our clients
7.14 million
client phone calls
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