Don’t Just Do Stuff!
The marketing landscape is confusing. Today there are over 7,000 marketing technology tools to choose from, up from just 150 tools in 2011. Visit chiefmartec.com to learn more. In addition to all the tools available it can be overwhelming to determine what marketing channels to use or what activities to do.
Should you use email, marketing automation, search engine optimization (SEO), a blog, content marketing, direct mail, or other print or media advertising? How about social media? If so, which platforms and what should I do? How about digital advertising? And what about the website. Is it good enough?
There’s so much you can do it’s difficult to figure out where to start. The key is to learn how your best customers became customers. If you focus on the types of companies that are a good fit for your business and the decision makers in these companies, you’ll find that figuring out what to do next will become apparent.
A Revenue Roadmap
After talking to numerous clients I’ve developed a roadmap I use to learn where their new business comes from and to plan out improvement processes.
A common goal that most companies have is to increase profits. In its most basic form, the only way to increase profits is some combination of decreasing costs and increasing revenue. Any money that you save that does not negatively impact revenue directly adds to profits. How much profit additional revenue provides depends on your profit margin as well as additional costs you incur to get the additional revenue.
Decreasing costs is pretty simple – stop doing some things that your are doing. The problem is you don’t want to stop doing the things that are needed for getting revenue. Therefore you need to determine which sales and marketing activities are helping to drive revenue and those that are not.
How to Increase Revenue
There’s only a couple of ways to increase revenue. They are:
- Get more customers, or
- Sell more to existing customers
You need to do this while retaining existing customers.
Often the easiest way to increase revenue quickly is to sell more to existing customers. This can include upselling where customers upgrade the products they buy or services they use. You can also cross-sell, or sell different product lines or ancillary services.
At some point, though, there’s not going to be more revenue available from your customer and you’ll need to rely on getting newe customers.
Getting more customers is difficult and expensive. You may need to pay for advertising, create large amounts of quality content to nurture prospects along their customer journey, and pay for sales resources to guide new customers through the final sales steps and closing.
Have a Purpose
For every sales and marketing activity you do determine how it helps to minimize costs or increase revenue. The How to Grow Your Business diagram can be a very useful tool for this. You may have programs that takes a customer through several areas of the diagram, but each activity you do and each piece of content you create has to have a place on the diagram.
To be effective focus each activity on one place in the chart. A single blog post or white paper should only attempt to address one thing on the diagram for one type of person in a particular place on their Awareness > Interest > Consideration > Revenue customer journey.
Define Your Customer’s Journey
Do the following to effectively increase revenue:
- Define your ideal customer
- Define the decision makers in this customer
- Determine how the customer will become aware of you
- Define the steps each decision maker takes to become a customer
- Define the content required to move people through the process
- Define how you will deliver the content to them
- Define your sales processes and who will implement them
- Once you have a customer have a process to retain them by keeping them satisfied
- Define opportunities for revenue growth from existing customers
