Marketing’s contribution as a revenue generator is often the culmination of many small, critical steps says Sakina Najmi, global marketing director, mid-market at Criteo
As passionate marketers, we’re all looking for the big idea; that beautiful creative concept that resonates immediately with an audience, multiplies sales many times over and ensures senior leadership teams recognise the value in an outstanding marketing concept, well delivered.
In reality, success in marketing and business is often much more measured, thoughtful and hard won. It’s the culmination of a multitude of small, critical steps – research, focused plans, robust testing and analysis – that lead to a successful marketing campaign and demonstrable ROI. And ROI ‘s the key, as the more we coherently align marketing with sales, the more it becomes a revenue generator, not a cost centre. When this is achieved, stakeholder perceptions of marketing change dramatically.
I’m a firm believer it’s ‘doing the little things right’ that leads to significant success and growth. At Criteo, we work to the powerful adage ‘we win or we learn’; a simple, highly-effective process predicated on three principles: Making consistent marginal gains, placing a laser focus on the objective, and ensuring expectations are managed from the outset. We build small first, then test, iterate, test, succeed, or repeat until we do. And, when we do win, we undertake the same forensic analysis to understand why.
The first step to achieving this is to build a team of creative and critical thinkers – those who ‘conceptualise the creative’ and those who ‘dissect the data’, all motivated by a skilled leader who can build a high performance marketing operation that reflects these complementary skills. A good marketing team should always bring the discussion back to its primary objective – to play a key role in creating a favourable selling environment for the company’s products or services. It seems obvious, but not always that common. We need to spend more time talking in a language our stakeholders understand, with solid evidence of how marketing can drive the business forward.
The more we take considered steps, analysing the data and making qualified decisions, treating marketing as a revenue generator rather than ‘just’ a creative process, the more we can show where the real value in marketing lies. Do this and I assure you, your efforts will not be wasted.
If you’re serious about driving growth, putting the customer at the heart of everything you do is crucial, says Finastra’s CMO Martin Häring
There’s no doubt about it – behind every great business you will find a great marketing team. Regardless of what you provide, without good marketing no one will know who you are or what you stand for. The best marketing teams not only build a company’s brand but drive sales and open opportunities for growth.
Generating business from existing customers must be a priority and is proven to be far more cost effective than acquiring new ones. By implementing customer lifecycle marketing strategies that drive customer loyalty at multiple touchpoints, and using persona-based marketing techniques, CMOs can maximise successful outcomes and propel customers along the path-to-consume, as well as creating long-term engagement opportunities.
To achieve this, businesses and marketing departments must adopt a customer-centric approach, putting the customer at the heart of everything they do. While customer-centricity can’t be built overnight, it’s important to start sooner rather than later. Key areas of focus for B2B marketers will revolve around harnessing data and technology to deliver a truly personalised experience.
Thanks to social and digital channels, businesses today have access to a wealth of data and should use this to understand the best ways to engage with customers. Smart marketers will also use this data to complement CRM systems, ensuring all interactions are of high quality and make customers feel their needs are understood and are being met or even exceeded.
Forward-thinking CMOs will also explore how AI and machine learning technology can support their strategies. Using AI to analyse data collected from all sources, savvy marketing teams can create and deliver personalised services, offering the most appropriate products to customers exactly when they need them.
To be truly effective, a customer-centric approach needs buy-in from the whole organisation – starting at board level and cascading down so that it becomes an integral part of company culture.
Your customers should feel they are being heard without having to shout. With a customer-centric approach, happy customers will become your driver for business growth – recommending your products or services and becoming an extension of your sales force.
Adopting a demand waterfall approach to marketing has been a game-changer for growth at Ivanti, allowing it to see the direct impact of marketing on revenue, says director of field marketing Sarah Lewis
One of the many great things about working for Ivanti is our obsession with being an organisation that operates with best-in-class marketing strategies and processes. We do this by utilising industry best practices, cutting-edge technologies, and by empowering our teams to all help drive our closed-loop marketing processes.
We have been doing this for some time, but about a year ago we embarked on a project to implement new improved processes. These were based on the SiriusDecisions Demand Waterfall, and it has been an absolute game-changer for the organisation.
We now have full visibility into our sales and marketing funnel, and can see the direct impact that our marketing efforts have on our revenue. We are seeing dramatic pipeline growth in our organisation, and we can attribute an accurate proportion of this directly to our marketing activities. We can also map marketing activities onto sales cycles to see at which point marketing is contributing to, and influencing, the overall funnel.
A big benefit of this style of marketing pipeline management is that it involves regular report reviews, which enable us to adapt our marketing strategy to target various stages of the funnel, as and when needed. Our enhanced agility has been instrumental in the improvement of our lead and pipeline generation and, of course, our company growth.
Being able to see how marketing is contributing to the growth of our business is not only great for internal promotion of the marketing function, it’s a reliable way to secure future budgets and, even more importantly, is a fantastic way to motivate our hard-working team.
I’ve been in marketing a long time and I still get really excited when I can see the fruits of our labour in the form of impressive numbers and pretty graphs.
Accountability and understanding each other’s roles has been key to growth says Deltek’s senior marketing director Kylie Webb
Marketing’s contribution to growth at Deltek is intrinsically tied to expanding our market presence and filling the sales funnel.
The keys to achieving these goals are accountability, understanding the role that marketing plays within the wider organisation, and how we intersect with sales and other stakeholders. Further still, it’s about collaboration and communication. You can’t build success in a silo, everyone needs to understand each other’s roles. One of the great things that happens at Deltek is both bottom-up and top-down communication. There is transparency over what’s going on across our entire business. It’s not just reporting at the end of the year or every quarter. We consolidate our performance in real time – taking it from our tools and putting it into dashboards, so everyone in the business knows where they are against their targets, can be action-oriented and understand the impact of every activity.
Within my EMEA and APAC region I can access a consolidated view, but I can also drill into performance of a certain product line in Australia, for example. Each campaign manager knows how they’re tracking against their goals and how they match up to the sales reps they’re working alongside and supporting. Those connected objectives and transparency have driven better results for the business and allowed us to grow. People know what they’re working towards together, so there’s no lost accountability. Another positive consequence is individual empowerment, as people develop a results-driven mindset which contributes to the positive culture Deltek fosters.
Our approach isn’t a case of producing information for the sake of it; data is meaningless if it doesn’t deliver insights and inform actions, so measuring the right things is critical. You won’t build relationships and credibility if stakeholders don’t believe in what you’re doing or if they can’t connect that work to what it means to them.
I believe marketing is constantly evolving for the better and we should be proud to be recognised as a key contributor to business growth. Marketers have a great opportunity to develop collaboration and commercial skills that will continue personal development and contribute to the growth goals of their organisation.
