Market for Revenue
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Read Time: 3 Minutes Market for RevenueThere's been a big push lately for marketers to spend less time hitting MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead) goals or to report on vanity numbers like traffic/engagements. This is most prevalent in the B2B space but applies across the board. This is a great movement, I don't believe there's a marketer out there that would argue that marketing with a focus on generating short-term or long-term revenue is a bad thing. But then the question is.. how did we get here? Why do most marketers report on metrics like traffic, impressions, MQLs, etc. The Answer = tools Pre-2000 we didn't have all these fancy digital marketing tools to track every metric around our work. The real metrics that advertisers tracked were foot traffic and revenue. Funny enough, these were basically always directly correlated. Foot traffic up? Revenue up. So marketing for revenue was the standard practice. But as the dotcom era came around we suddenly had access to incredible quantities of information. Every data point can now be tracked and connected. So naturally, businesses started to report on them. As time went on, the gap between marketing & sales responsibilities became clear. Marketing:
Sales:
So guess how KPIs got assigned? Marketing:
Sales:
Initially, this made sense and seemed to be working. Businesses were able to make informed decisions that they had never been able to make before. Growth happened quickly. But as time went on, goals became more and more bloated. Causing marketers to use less-than-ideal tactics to increase their attainment of goals. You can push out a cheap lead magnet to get 500 MQLs overnight if you'd like, however, sales likely won't close any of them. This backward structure of measuring performance forces marketers to make the wrong decisions. So how do you market for revenue?It's way easier than you think. Cut out 90% of the metrics you'd typically see in a marketing campaign. Don't set KPIs based on them. Click rates, open rates, reply rates, impressions, engagements, traffic, session time, etc. All of these metrics could indicate revenue. But they aren't revenue. If you set your objectives based on these numbers, your actions will be completely different than if you set your focus on revenue. Does that landing page have an insanely high conversion rate? Awesome. Does it also never convert into revenue? Not awesome. Don't set team goals for anything other than revenue-related activities. Measure it, ask about it, think about it, and make efforts to improve it. Always, always, ALWAYS; set your goals based on $$$. Thanks for reading this week's issue of Marketing 123's, I hope you've found it valuable. If you did, I'd love to hear your feedback here: Leave a Testimonial Ready to take the next steps?Take your brand to new heights by working with me & the 2POINT team. Promote your brand/business by sponsoring an issue of this newsletter. |
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