Revup Marketing, Inc.

“Marketing Change Agents” - new cartoon and post https://lnkd.in/grVfBVJX Marketers are frequently the biggest agents of change in a business. Inside marketing teams, there’s a constant drumbeat for change, particularly when new members join the team. In my first marketing job, junior managers rotated to new brands every 12 months. Each new assignment brought fresh energy to make a mark on the brand. Higher level marketers rotated less frequently but pushed for higher level changes. In general, new CMOs are often the biggest change agents of all. From new packaging, to new campaigns, to new agencies, brands are constantly evolving. In some ways, the openness to change in marketing is healthy. Businesses overall can get stuck in a rut. But what’s gets lost in the revolving door of marketing newness is the power of consistency. Marketers get tired of our marketing long before consumers do. In many cases, constant change just makes it harder for consumers to recognize our brands. System 1 released a study last month proving that “consistency compounds creativity.” They tested brands in the UK and US on 13 measures of “creative consistency” (from positioning to distinctive assets to agency tenure) and mapped against brand and business outcomes. They found: “Not only were the most consistent brands more likely to produce better ads (3.3 stars on average vs 2.8 and 2.6 for somewhat and least consistent brands, respectively), but those in the top 20% for consistency generated more very large brand effects and very large business effects than those in the bottom 20%, including reporting twice as many incidences of profit gain.” As Contagious recapped the System 1 study: “It challenges the idea that brands need to be fearful about ad wearout. The creative success of good ads that are allowed to wear-in continues to grow. “It also emphasises the importance of identifying and committing to long-term brand platforms. Brands should be wary of abandoning a successful brand platform if the concern is merely a fear that people are getting bored of seeing the same work.” >>> For related cartoons and all the links in this post, click here: https://lnkd.in/grVfBVJX To sign up for my weekly marketoon email newsletter, click here: https://lnkd.in/gZsC7Nhz #marketing #cartoon #marketoon

If you're a B2B SaaS CMO going into a board meeting, or 2025 planning meeting this week, here's the data you need to know: Feel free to take any of these slides and stick them in a presentation: ?? Spend more on brand than demand In a survey of 265 B2B SaaS companies, I found that companies who exceeded their growth/revenue goals spent more on brand, while companies who missed their targets spent more on demand generation. I classified brand activities simply as activities not designed to result in an immediate action (e.g. clicks, downloads, shares etc.) Many thought leaders here have written about this, but put simply, you've got to feed the top of the funnel. And investing resources into building your brand, and making as many people aware of it as possible is the best way to improve the success of your demand generation. ?? Don't spend less than 10% of revenue on marketing I found that companies who spent less than 10% of their annual revenue on marketing performed worse across their lead conversion rates than companies who spent more. There is a point where you can't do more with less. And cutting below the 10% mark seems to be it. ?? Marketing should get at least 30% of the combined Sales and Marketing Budget: I ran a quick and dirty analysis of 17 publicly traded software companies with annual revenues between $100 and $500M. On average, these companies allocated about 41% of their annual revenue to sales and marketing, a figure that was remarkably consistent. According to Benchmarker data, the median range for marketing spend (as a percentage of annual revenue) was 11-15%. Based on that, you should be allocating between 28% to 39% of your sales and marketing combined budget to marketing. I'd say if you're comfortably between that range at 30%, you're good. ?? Paid content works better than organic content I found that high converting companies (companies that converted at more than 20% across their mid to bottom funnel stages) were investing more resources in their paid channels (paid search, social and ads) compared to low converters, who allocated more resources to email and content marketing. This reflects how companies whose budgets have been cut are again trying to do more with less. Email and organic content are relatively cheap, compared to digital advertising. But the reach and awareness you get is exponentially low, and often they're assets that work better lower down the funnel than at the top. If marketing is ultimately an awareness game, you've got to pay to play. #b2bSaaS #B2Bmetrics #marketingbenchmarks

When you realize marketing needs to be revenue-accountable, you realize marketing needs to be involved at every stage of the sales process not just till the hand-off. Hand-offs are where Go-To-Market strategies break down and why marketing organizations can hide behind MQLs or Leads as their core accountability when they are really accountable to revenue. Did scanning 500 badges at that conference really matter? Ask a marketer in a hand-off environment and their answer is very different than a marketer who is revenue accountable. We want revenue accountability for marketing. That's the only way we can scale marketing's impact. Oh, by the way, buyers want marketing more involved too. They want more content at every stage of their journey and less interactions with sales people. Listen to your buyers.

Every so often, I find myself advising a company that is committed to making a specific tactic work (events, ABM, SEO etc.). They’re so committed to the tactic, that they’ve made it the focus of their limited resources: time, money, people, technology. However, in a lot of these cases, the company has not done the earlier (and critical) step of looking at all the possible ways to allocate their limited resources and prioritizing the right area to channel those resources. Yes, SEO works. Yes, ABM works. Yes, Partner Networks work. In fact, all of it works. In a lot of these companies, the problem statement is defined as: “How to make X work?” The right problem statement is: “What is the best way to allocate our resources to drive the most amount of growth, pipeline and revenue?” This is how you shift away from being married to the solution, and instead, being married to solving the problem. The better you do this, the more likely you are to think like a true business leader and get support from across the organization and board.