Measure Marketing’s Impact On Revenue, Profit, And Customer Growth

A few years ago we learned that the role of marketing would under go a dramatic change immeasurable to anything we have ever experienced before. Experience based thinking would leap ahead of other approaches to creativity and digital business transformation would become the way to compete in the age of the customer – we are indeed in the midst of an incredible shift across the marketing landscape.

Companies today have never had more powerful technologies for understanding and interacting with customers. Interestingly, many of them still operate by traditional marketing standards. Businesses that market to other businesses (B2B) have shown difficulties transforming their own operations to cultivate differentiate value for their customers.

What happens when an organization has no coherent marketing business strategy?

When B2B Marketing executives cannot definitively quantify what their company gets in exchange for the money it spends on in-person events, sponsorships, advertising, and sales support, CFOs see marketing as a cost center, sales execs see it as a resource diversion, and CEOs do not consider it a strategic part of the management team. 

Marketing business plans and strategies are used to allocate corporate resources into projects and operations that need them. Without a coherent marketing business strategy, it is difficult to create budgets for special projects and understand the personnel and funding resources necessary to launch new products/services and grow the company. It is equally more difficult to get ideas off the ground when personnel are left without adequate leadership.

The Art of Strategy and Structure

The online world has upended how businesses and consumers engage with brands. The Internet has transformed the economics of marketing making traditional marketing strategies and structures obsolete and previous models unsustainable. 

What does appeal to executives revolves around three basic requirements – revenue, profitability and customer growth.

Marketers will always focus on brand awareness, demand generation and post-sales/event experiences. The leap will be on marketing’s impact on sustainable profitable revenue growth. The firm must equip marketers with the ability to quantify the outcome of marketing’s work across the entire customer life cycle to obtain the insights of the prospective client and learn to improve performance at each stage of the buyer’s journey.

In order to create competitive advantage B2B Marketers must decompose the firm’s structure into parts but also craft a vision of an integrated marketing strategy that aligns with the business.

Create new growth platforms!

Reinventing B2B Marketing

Marketing transformation is a movement that marketers understand as an evolution of business. Reinvention must become part of the marketer’s repertoire, where we must take big strides in adapting quickly to new challenges and to not be outflanked by the competition. It requires collaborative effort through market analysis, strategic planning, business issue identification and fact-based insights. 

One might argue that we ought to avoid focussing on short-term metrics (e.g. sales pipeline); and rather stretch to uncover metrics that take a long-term view (e.g. retention, market share, etc.) Marketers gain respect when they can quantify sustainable business development.

Measure the right things – value!

Charting the Company’s Future

Bring smart, credible people on board. Organize a B2B Marketing team with diverse backgrounds, analytical skills, and individuals with the strength to frame and address issues that cut across business and political interests. To allocate corporate resources into projects and operations a firm requires a clear visualization of strategy.

A B2B Marketing team with the ability and the tools will generate and capture profits from any industry. Ensuring they have access to common sets of data and a common set of approaches this “marketing transformation” will derive revenue, profitability and customer growth through added value.

Growth will always remain marketing’s focal point!

Make your mark in 2018.