Marketing technology has become a pragmatic player in successful marketing strategies.
No longer a trend, data generated from MarTech deployments reveal quantitative shifts in consumer engagement (mobile first, for instance) and have opened the possibility for marketing teams to integrate with sales and customer relationship management teams.
By breaking these silos, strategies to move B2B clients through the sales funnel with higher rates of efficiency and familiarity have been created and adopted. For example, the kind of personalization that existed strictly in B2C sales has been adopted by many B2B organizations thanks to improved granularity in metrics and higher quality client-provider relationships.
Leading your organization from a traditional marketing strategy to a MarTech-driven strategy requires a thorough understanding of revenue marketing, an organizational assessment of your current marketing strategy and goals, an inventory of your SaaS resources and a clear strategic vision.
1. Assess your organization's marketing strategy
Since MarTech has not been deployed equally across all organizations, there isn't an established gold standard for B2B digital marketing. However, the rise of revenue marketing strategies indicates that an industry standard is solidifying.
If you are wondering how your organization's digital marketing strategies rate in relation to this standard, then consider the following.
Traditional marketing and lead generation marketing
It is highly unlikely that any contemporary organization is 100% dedicated to a traditional marketing strategy. Traditional strategies include educating consumers about your product or service, actively promoting it, placing it in a position of high visibility and assessing your organization's return on marketing investment. At this stage, analytics are centered around impressions and campaign costs.
While traditional marketing is the core of many existing marketing strategies, sophisticated marketing technology tools allow marketers to get a better look at the outcomes of their campaigns.
Metrics like email open rates, ad click-through rates, form submits and costs per lead allow marketers to determine the limitations of their campaigns as well as to improve upon existing success.
The role of marketing technology
The ability to track consumer engagement and analyze points of interest has contributed to an increase in lead generation strategies. These strategies are highly effective and would not be achievable without the continuing development of marketing technology.
The rise of software-as-a-service and integrated CRM tools capable of linking sales and marketing data allow even small companies to track sales, collect lead information, determine lead quality, follow up on leads and learn where to find more.
Lead generation strategy moves beyond traditional marketing by ensuring that new clients or consumers are continuously making their way to the sales funnel. However, this might not be occurring in a repeatable or predictable way. Worse, your organization might be experiencing flat growth. To reach the next level, your organization has to break through the lead generation plateau.
2. Break the plateau
At this point, you can probably figure out what kind of hybrid marketing strategy your organization uses and likely has been using for a while. But if your organization is starting to develop a MarTech stack, then it is entering the revenue phase of digital marketing.
Reports show that only 10,000 organizations have achieved this level of marketing operations. If your organization is one of the 10,000, then take a moment to congratulate yourself and your team. Your organization is prepared to move into robust revenue marketing. Inventory your MarTech stack and get ready to lead your team to their next challenge.
MarTech stack inventory
Your organization may have started its platform collection slowly as a way to better organize data or improve customer service. Over time, several of the following platforms have made their way into your organization:
- Customer relationship management
- Account based marketing systems
- Data management platforms
- Content management platforms
Some of these platforms might live in the HR department while others reside in sales, but each of these platforms holds a marketing component. Moving to the final stage in the revenue marketing journey requires a strategic vision that integrates these platforms in a way that directly increases revenue.
3. Adopt a revenue marketing strategy and vision
Your organization's vision guides its revenue marketing strategy. For instance, if your company has adopted a cost mindset, then marketing is considered a necessary expense to build growth. Within that framework, a good marketing strategy is to reduce marketing costs while achieving higher marketing yields. While this model has been effective for centuries, new consumer behaviors have disrupted the model.
Marketing technology exists across the enterprise and the data it gathers, analyzes and disseminates generated revenue across the enterprise. A reduction in marketing budgets limits revenue growth across the company. When start-up B2C companies began breaking down silos, a new marketing strategy emerged. Revenue marketing is integrated throughout the sales funnel and touches on every interaction between client and provider.
What B2B can learn from B2C
Business-to-consumer sales are increasingly reliant on customer engagement and interaction. Positive reviews, excellent reputation and personalized services and interactions have become more important as digital services increase. Studies show that consumers are more likely to trust a company and purchase a product when a third-party review recommends it. When applied strategically, revenue marketing spawns its own advertising without any direct spend
In addition to organic forms of brand visibility, B2C organizations have experienced revenue-generation by shortening the sales funnel. By leveraging detailed consumer data, marketers and sales personnel are able to generate a predictable campaign outcome.
At the same time, campaigns are agile. When reports show unpredicted outcomes, teams can quickly assess and course correct. Using this process, marketers, sales teams and potential customers are in lock-step. While the internal pieces of revenue marketing are in motion, the end result meets predictions. When the process is repeated, it regularly yields the desired outcome. Whether the number of consumers increases, decreases or remains the same, sales funnel accommodates to scale thanks to integrated cloud-based platforms.
While automated marketing platforms are necessary to achieve revenue marketing visions, your marketing strategy will not adopt a true revenue marketing strategy unless clients and consumers are engaged in personalized and interactive ways. Revenue marketing strategies that are effective on the B2C side of the equation are now necessary, efficient and effective on the B2B side.