Matthew is a marketing expert focusing on the SEO & martech spaces. He has written over 500 marketing guides and video scripts for the WebFX YouTube channel. When he’s not striving to put out some fresh blog posts and articles, he’s usually fueling his Tolkien obsession or working on miscellaneous creative projects.
What is a revenue marketing strategy?
A revenue marketing strategy is a business plan that sets concrete goals for your revenue marketing campaigns.
Marketing is vital for any business — but why? Ultimately, the answer is that it drives revenue. So, it makes sense that revenue marketing is rapidly growing more popular among many companies. Your business needs to develop a revenue marketing strategy to drive sales.
But how do you do that? What even is revenue marketing, and how can you put together a cohesive strategy for it? That’s what we’ll discuss on this page. We’ll cover the following:
Keep reading to find out more about each of these topics. Then subscribe to Revenue Weekly — our email newsletter — to get more helpful marketing content sent straight to your inbox!
What is a revenue marketing strategy?
A revenue marketing strategy is a business plan that sets clear goals for your revenue marketing campaigns. Revenue marketing is a form of marketing that focuses on directly targeting prospects and driving conversions and sales in the short term, as opposed to longer-term approaches like growth marketing, which focuses more on brand awareness.
🎥 Video: What is revenue marketing?
Benefits of setting a revenue marketing plan
There are several benefits to developing a revenue marketing strategy for your business. Those benefits include the following:
Alignment between marketing and sales
A revenue marketing plan helps you better align your marketing and sales teams. That’s because revenue marketing focuses directly on sales, so it’s in the marketing team’s best interest to collaborate with the sales team on how to generate sales-qualified leads (SQLs) that can be easily turned into customers.
Companies who execute on this are at a big advantage. B2B organizations with tightly aligned sales and marketing operations achieve 24% faster three-year revenue growth and 27% faster three-year profit growth.
More actionable goals
Another benefit of revenue marketing is that it allows you to develop more concrete, actionable goals. With something like growth marketing, your goals might be to increase brand awareness and improve your company’s reputation, which are harder to quantify.
But revenue marketing operates on specific, measurable data, making it easier to set clear goals. That’s important because according to 70% of workers, a lack of clarity in their goals tends to throw those goals into jeopardy.
Improved marketing attribution
Finally, a revenue marketing strategy can vastly improve your attribution process. If you’re not familiar with marketing attribution, it’s a process whereby companies identify which campaigns or web pages drive specific conversions. Because revenue marketing relies on solid customer data, it’s easier to see exactly which campaigns drive which actions, giving you better marketing insights. That’s a huge win because good attribution can make you 15–30% more efficient.
5 revenue marketing best practices
Now that we’ve explained the advantages of developing a revenue marketing strategy, let’s talk about the best way to go about actually doing that. Below are five revenue marketing best practices you can use to build a strong, effective strategy:
Read on to learn more about each of those revenue marketing tactics.
1. Implement the right technology
The first step in building your revenue marketing plan is to get the right tools. In particular, you want to get tools that will help you track, organize, and analyze customer data.
One of the best tools to get is a customer relationship management (CRM) platform. This tool integrates customer data from various different sources, organizes that data, and helps you analyze it for patterns and trends.
You can also use tools like Google Analytics and SEMrush to track activity on your website. The data from those tools can then go into your CRM.
2. Gather customer data
Once you have the tools you need, the next step is to put them to use tracking and accumulating customer data. You want to focus on metrics that are relevant to how users become leads and customers — in other words, revenue-driving metrics. Here are some examples of key performance indicators (KPIs) you can focus on:
Conversion rate: The percentage of users who convert in response to a particular campaign (out of the total number of users who interacted with it).
Return on investment (ROI): The amount of money you earn from a given campaign relative to how much you spend on it.
Average sales cycle length: The amount of time it takes for the average customer to go through the full sales funnel and convert.
Be sure to track each of these metrics to help inform your strategy.
3. Map out the customer journey
Another revenue marketing tactic is to map out the customer journey. This basically means tracing how users move through the sales funnel and become customers. You can do that using the customer data you gathered in the previous step.
For example, you might find that many customer journeys start when someone discovers one of your blog posts in search results. Then they spend a while reading pages on your site before submitting an email signup form to become a lead. And finally, they convert to a customer in response to one of your emails.
Just from that simplified example, you now know that you should prioritize blog posts and email marketing to help streamline the sales process going forward.
4. Audit your current campaigns
You likely already have some marketing strategies in place. The question is, are those strategies optimized to drive revenue? To answer that question, you can perform an audit of your current campaigns.
Place your current marketing alongside the information you’ve gathered from the previous revenue marketing best practices to see if it meets all your needs and takes advantage of prime revenue-driving opportunities. Then identify any weak spots and reoptimize those to drive more sales.
5. Set SMART goals based on KPIs
When you’ve successfully reoptimized your existing marketing campaigns, it’s time to set some goals for those campaigns going forward. In the case of revenue marketing, your goals should — of course — be revenue-focused. That means they should be built around the KPIs we mentioned earlier.
Since you have hard data to work with in the form of your customer metrics, you have the ability to set SMART goals. SMART stands for specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound, and your goals should cover each of those things.
For example, let’s say you come up with the goal of driving more revenue. Not very actionable, right? How much revenue? Within what amount of time? A better goal might be to drive $500 through your latest email marketing campaign over the course of the next two weeks.
When your goals are that specific, it’s easier to track whether you’ve successfully achieved them or not.
Increase your profits with revenue marketing from WebFX
Using all of the revenue marketing tactics on this list, you can start to increase the number of sales and revenue you drive. But it’s a lot of work, and it takes a lot of trial and error if you don’t know the best way to go about it. That’s why many businesses prefer to partner with a professional agency like WebFX.
When you work with us, you’ll get access to over 29 years of revenue marketing experience. And though our specialists will handle all the work, you’ll still have full control over every facet of your campaigns.
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.