Macy is a marketing writer with over five years of experience creating content for dozens of industries including food and beverage, home services, and education. She also specializes in creating SEO and PPC content. Her work has been featured by Search Engine Journal, HubSpot, Entrepreneur, Clutch, and more. In her free time, Macy enjoys trying new crafts and reading comic books.
What’s the ultimate goal of your marketing efforts?
The answer: To drive revenue.
That’s why investing in revenue marketing is one of the best ways to ensure you drive sales and growth that boosts your company’s bottom line.
But what exactly is it?
What is revenue marketing?
Revenue marketing aligns marketing and sales to achieve revenue goals. It focuses on strategic campaigns, designed to increase leads, sales, and ultimately bottom-line growth for businesses.
On this page, we’ll cover everything you need to know about revenue marketing, including:
Keep reading to discover everything you need to know about driving revenue through your marketing strategy!
What is revenue marketing?
Revenue marketing is a strategic approach that aligns your marketing efforts with revenue generation. It leverages first-party data to create more optimized and personalized marketing strategies that drive better return on investment (ROI) for your business.
🎥 Video: An introduction to revenue marketing
Revenue marketing vs. digital marketing
Revenue Marketing
Digital Marketing
Revenue marketing focuses on one goal: Earning your business more revenue. It involves uniting your sales and marketing teams to maximize revenue outcome.
Digital marketing focuses on multiple goals, including increasing traffic, earning sales, and boosting revenue.
Revenue marketing is distinct from other forms of marketing, like digital marketing and growth marketing. That being said, revenue marketing and digital marketing are relatively similar. They both focus on leveraging online strategies to promote your business and drive sales. So, what’s the difference?
The only real difference is that digital marketing focuses on achieving multiple goals, from increasing traffic to obtaining leads to earning more sales.
With revenue marketing, the focus is on one thing: Revenue.
The ultimate goal of revenue marketing is to utilize strategies that help your company drive more revenue and increase your bottom line. It does involve using digital strategies to achieve that revenue growth, but the focus is on increasing revenue.
Why should I invest in revenue marketing?
If you’re unfamiliar with revenue marketing, you may wonder if it’s a worthwhile investment.
Expert insights from
Trevin ShireyWebFX Vice President of Marketing
“Revenue marketing is crucial because it aligns marketing efforts directly with revenue generation, ensuring that every campaign and strategy contributes to the bottom line. In today’s competitive landscape, leveraging data-driven insights maximizes ROI and helps bring on the right long-term customers for your business.”
Here are five reasons why you’ll want to invest in this approach:
1. Revenue marketing helps you earn more revenue
At the heart of it, revenue marketing does what the name suggests — helps you earn more revenue. This approach focuses on the strategies that impact your bottom line, allowing you to optimize them to drive even more revenue for your business.
Considering that 64% of marketers closely monitoring their sales pipeline, ensuring you earn more revenue is at the forefront of your mind. With revenue marketing, you can put it into full focus and ensure you maintain a strategy that increases your company’s bottom line.
2. Revenue marketing helps you align marketing with company goals
No matter your company, your ultimate goal is to drive revenue, whether that’s through selling products, obtaining new clients, or earning contracts. When you take the revenue marketing approach, you align your marketing with your company goals (plus your sales team!).
This alignment is key to business growth: Marketing and sales team alignment results in a 38% higher sales win rate than companies that aren’t aligned.
Revenue marketing ensures your strategies and activities align with the goal of generating revenue. It enables you to prioritize the strategies and metrics that help improve your bottom line, and ultimately, grow your business.
3. Revenue marketing helps you outpace your competitors
Earning more revenue means you have more opportunities to expand and grow your operations — and leave your competition in the dust.
Consider this — 89% of marketers say you must continually innovate to remain competitive. That’s why a unique approach, like revenue marketing, is key.
With revenue marketing, you focus on the strategies directly impacting your bottom line. Not only that, but you leverage your first-party data to inform your marketing campaigns, which means you get better results.
That means you’re spending time, money, and effort on tactics proven to help you grow, while your competition relies on outdated strategies that may or may not work.
4. Revenue marketing improve customer lifetime value (CLV)
A key component of revenue marketing is leveraging first-party data to inform your marketing decisions. First-party data helps you better understand your audience, as well as their needs and preferences.
When you better understand your audience and use that information to inform your campaigns, you create happier leads that feel valued and heard. This leads to improve customer satisfaction and loyalty, which improves CLV.
5. Revenue marketing helps you maximize your marketing budget
With the revenue marketing approach, you’re focusing on strategies that drive revenue for your company or directly impact your sales pipeline. With the help of marketing technology like MarketingCloudFX, for example, you gain visibility into which channels directly impact your company’s growth.
Based on that performance data, you can adjust and allocate your digital marketing budget to the strategies that provide the best ROI.
How to increase revenue with marketing
Ready to take the revenue marketing approach to your digital strategy? Here are some strategies to help you increase revenue with marketing:
1. Audit your current marketing efforts to identify revenue-driving strategies
If you have a marketing plan in place, the first thing you’ll want to do it identify which strategies have the biggest impact on your bottom line.
The goal is for your business to identify the strategies that have the best ROI for your company, so you can invest more in them. It helps you shift your budget allocation towards strategies you know have a good return, so you can maximize your marketing investment.
Here are some common strategies businesses leverage with revenue marketing:
Digital advertising: From pay-per-click (PPC) ads to display ads, digital advertising is a powerful strategy to use for revenue marketing. You can leverage your first party data to power ad campaigns and create more targeted ads that drive revenue.
Search engine optimization (SEO): SEO helps businesses continually drive traffic to their website. From blog posts to product pages to pricing pages, SEO is a core strategy for driving revenue.
Content marketing: Back in 2020, the average business-to-business (B2B) buyer read 13 pieces of content before making a decision — which holds true today. Content marketing is a valuable strategy for reaching people through all stages of the revenue marketing funnel.
2. Set revenue marketing goals
If you want to see success with revenue marketing, you need to set revenue marketing goals. Like any company project, the goals help guide you and ensure you’re on track to achieve growth.
So, how do you determine your goals?
First, evaluate your past performance to see what your business is capable of achieving. Knowing this information ensures you set realistic goals for driving revenue in the future and set your team up for success.
Next, consider what you want to achieve. How much more revenue growth do you want to experience? This helps you set a realistic target for your marketing.
Once you have all this information compiled, you can create your revenue marketing goals and identify the key metrics that will help determine if you met those goals.
3. Take a full-funnel approach
A common misconception about revenue marketing is that you only need to focus on the end goal — the conversion stage. To do revenue marketing successfully, though, you need to take a full-funnel approach.
So, what does that mean?
That means targeting all stages of your sales funnel, from awareness to conversion, with marketing strategies that help nudge leads down the funnel.
With the help of first-party data, you can create more impactful strategies that help nudge leads down the funnel towards becoming sales.
3. Connect your data
The key to successful revenue marketing is data — especially first-party data. Your company has tons of data about your target audience, from their demographics to their interactions with your business. You also have a lot of campaign metrics from your marketing strategies, like website visits and clicks.
By connecting all this data together, you can turn clicks into revenue.
With MarketingCloudFX, for example, you can marry your business data with marketing campaign data to get a full picture of how your marketing impacts your revenue growth and find opportunities to capitalize on.
By connecting all your data, you can leverage it to create more personalized campaigns that lead to increased sales and revenue.
4. Invest in marketing software
As you’ve seen before, a key component to revenue marketing is data. From audience data to marketing performance data, this information helps inform and shape your marketing approach. That’s why it’s valuable to invest in marketing software.
Marketing software, like MarketingCloudFX, helps you process and organize data from your marketing efforts. You can quickly identify the results of your marketing, what strategies drive the best ROI, and more.
Instead of sifting through the data yourself, you can use marketing software that does it for you in seconds. That means you can spend more time identifying your next marketing move for generating revenue, rather than trying to sift through data.
2 revenue marketing examples to help explain how it works
To help you understand how revenue marketing works, take a look at these two examples of fictional companies and how they would implement revenue marketing for business growth!
Revenue marketing example #1: A software company
In this first example, let’s take a look at a software company that wants to leverage revenue marketing. Here’s a basic look at how they could implement it:
Targeted advertising campaigns: Leveraging their first-party data, the software company creates targeted ad campaigns to show to people interested in their software.
Marketing automation software: The software company uses marketing automation software to help them track leads and score them, amongst other tasks, so they can prioritize the leads to contact first. This helps create a smooth hand off of leads from marketing to the sales team.
Personalized email campaigns: To engage leads, the software company creates tailored email campaigns for subscribers. They segment their subscribers and deliver campaigns based on interest and position in the sales funnel.
So, as you can see, the software company not only leverages first-party data for some of their strategies, but they also use automation software to help them focus on leads likely to drive revenue.
Revenue marketing example #2: A healthcare practice
In this second example, let’s take a look at a healthcare practice that’s looking to increase patients (and therefore, revenue). Here’s a basic overview of how they might approach revenue marketing:
Website design: To help build better brand recognition, the healthcare practice invests in giving their website a new look. They optimize the design so that, when leads visit their website, information is easy to find.
Creating high-quality content: The healthcare practice knows they need high-quality content to build themselves as a trusted authority in the healthcare space. They craft industry-relevant content for all stages of their funnel to help build trust with their audience.
Optimizing their local presence: For this healthcare practice, local leads are their bread and butter. They spend time optimizing their Google Business Profile and leveraging automation software to help them manage their local citations and give prospective patients the correct business information.
As you can see, the approach for the healthcare practice looks different than the software company. For this practice, focusing on building their reputation and reaching local leads is paramount to their revenue growth — so their revenue marketing strategy focused on that as a result.
Revenue marketing FAQs
Have some lingering questions about revenue marketing? We’ve got answers!
Revenue marketing comes with its own set of unique challenges you may face as you develop your strategy. Here are some common challenges companies face:
Generating high-quality leads: The key to revenue growth is generating high-quality leads that turn into sales. Many businesses struggle to drive leads actually interested in what they offer, which can make revenue marketing challenging.
Adopting the revenue-marketing mindset: A big challenge with revenue marketing is getting your team to adopt the revenue-marketing mindset. Since it requires taking a different approach to marketing, it can make the transition challenging for your team.
Finding the right software: Since data plays a pivotal role in revenue marketing, you need the right marketing software to help you process it. Some businesses struggle to find the right marketing software to meet their needs.
Attributing revenue to strategies: Marketing attribution is a common obstacle with revenue marketing. Many companies struggle to determine what strategies have an impact on their revenue, which can make it hard to determine the best ROI-driving strategies. (This is where partnering with an experienced agency can really help!)
When looking at revenue marketing vs. growth marketing, you may wonder how they’re different. Both focus on growing your business, but the focus for each is different.
Revenue marketing is focused directly on driving sales and revenue that increase profit and business growth. The key performance indicators (KPIs) of focus are typically things like ROI and conversion rate.
With growth marketing, the focus is on increasing customer retention and company reputation, which helps increase long-term revenue growth. The KPIs of growth marketing are things like customer lifetime value (CLV) and customer retention.
Basically, these strategies work in tandem. Revenue marketing focuses on turning leads into paying customers, while growth marketing focuses on keeping those leads as customers.
When looking at revenue marketing vs. demand generation vs. lead generation, you’ll notice some similarities. They all require you to know your customers and understand what they need, and all of them leverage inbound marketing techniques to reach audiences.
Their focus, however, is different.
Revenue marketing focuses solely on generating revenue through marketing tactics. Demand generation focuses on building interest and awareness around your brand. Lead generation focuses on capturing information of high-value prospects and converting them into customers.
Realistically, all of these strategies work together to help you grow your business. You can’t do lead generation without building interest and awareness through demand generation. You can’t generate revenue without credible leads through lead generation. So, while each of these strategies have a different focus, they all work together to help your business improve your bottom line.
Revenue marketing reporting ensures you understand how your marketing efforts impact your performance. To track the performance of your revenue marketing efforts, you’ll need to determine what revenue marketing analytics to track. Tracking this information helps you understand where sales come from, how much people are buying, and more!
Some common revenue analytics to track include:
Closed/won leads
Cost per acquisition (CPA)
Average order value (AOV)
Customer lifetime value (CLV)
Return on ad spend (ROAS)
Sales by channel
The revenue reporting analytics you choose will depend upon your business type and goals. In general, though, you’ll focus on analytics that show insight into how your business drives revenue and what impacts your revenue growth.
Our digital marketing campaigns impact the metrics that improve your bottom line.
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
Unlock your revenue growth with revenue marketing services from WebFX
If you’re looking to grow your business’s bottom line, it’s time to invest in revenue marketing. And there’s no better partner to help you drive more revenue than WebFX.
Craft a tailored online marketing strategy! Utilize our free Internet marketing calculator for a custom plan based on your location, reach, timeframe, and budget.
Craft a tailored online marketing strategy! Utilize our free Internet marketing calculator for a custom plan based on your location, reach, timeframe, and budget.
By connecting all your data, you can leverage it to create more personalized campaigns that lead to increased sales and revenue.
Macy is a marketing writer with over five years of experience creating content for dozens of industries including food and beverage, home services, and education. She also specializes in creating SEO and PPC content. Her work has been featured by Search Engine Journal, HubSpot, Entrepreneur, Clutch, and more. In her free time, Macy enjoys trying new crafts and reading comic books.
