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What is Revenue Marketing? Complete Guide on How to Get Started
Implement revenue marketing and track which of your lead sources, keywords and ads are having the most significant impact on your bottom line.
Marketers are constantly under pressure to deliver the best ROI.
Our data backs it up. We found that 55% of marketers are tasked with the responsibility of increasing ROI and sales.
Most marketers consider tracking ROI as the holy grail of marketing measurement.
But, many aren’t getting it right through a lack of data, tools and processes.
So, what’s the solution?
The answer lies in revenue marketing.
As a provider of marketing attribution, we’re going to show you how revenue marketing works, why you should be using it, plus tips on how to get started.
Here’s what you’ll learn:
💡 Pro Tip
Ruler Analytics makes revenue marketing easy. It closes the loop between your leads and revenue data to determine which marketing channels offer the highest ROI. Download the guide and prove your impact on revenue.
How to track and forecast revenue with Ruler
Revenue marketing is the process of identifying the marketing channels that lead to revenue growth.
Once you understand how to identify the opportunities that directly drive ROI, your marketing function can become more accountable and prove that it isn’t an unnecessary cost centre.
Rather than focusing on metrics such as cost per click or cost per lead, revenue marketing allows marketers to hone-in on revenue-focused metrics such as cost per acquisition and return on ad spend.
Related: Why return on ad spend is important and how to track it
“It’s always a good idea to take on a revenue marketing approach. You can analyse results from campaigns based on revenue, rather than basing it solely on lead generation and interactions,” added Peter Horne, Content Lead at Geoff McDonald and Associates.
Most sales and marketing teams are disconnected. They’re both prioritising two ends of the funnel.
The marketing team will focus on top-of-the-funnel activities and generate as many leads as possible.
These leads are thrown over the wall for sales to close.
As these teams work in silos and focus on different stages of the funnel, data isn’t transferred between them.
Do you know what that means?
Sales don’t know what marketing activities generate the best leads, and marketing has no way of tracking which campaigns drive the highest ROI.
But this is where revenue marketing comes in handy.
Revenue marketing creates a cycle of data between all your teams.
It lets you see which marketing efforts generate the most revenue, allowing your teams to work together to provide maximum value.
It’s a win-win for everyone.
A clear picture of your marketing ROI isn’t the only benefit of using a revenue marketing model. There are multiple other advantages too, including:
One of the main constraints many marketing teams have is that they are viewed as a cost centre and not a profit centre.
Once you can prove that your marketing efforts have a direct and positive impact on company revenue, it will be easy to build buy-in for new projects and experiments you want to run.
You’ll also be able to prove why company revenue should be spent on marketing and not elsewhere due to the value your activities provide.
By focusing on revenue, you’ll know what works and what doesn’t.
If a channel seems expensive, you can look past vanity metrics such as the number of leads generated and judge success on whether it brings in revenue or not.
Related: Vanity metrics vs actionable metrics: Guide to tracking the right stats
For example, in the screenshot below, you can see that Facebook generated more leads than Google Ads.
On first impressions, you’d want to start spending more on Facebook.
However, if we focus on revenue, we can see that the Google Ads campaign led to higher revenue and ROI investment, therefore making it a better channel to focus on.
Revenue marketing allows you to make decisions using reliable data, rather than letting metrics that don’t really matter to you affect your choices.
If you’ve worked in marketing for a while you’ll know how difficult it is to track and measure marketing ROI. But, what makes the process of tracking marketing revenue so challenging?
As much as 90% of the buying journey is now self-guided, and 77% of B2B decision- makers won’t speak to a salesperson until they’ve completed their own research.
This means that marketers must have a detailed understanding of the customer journey—from the moment prospects realise they have a problem to the moment they invest in a solution.
But the customer journey is complicated, spanning over months and a multitude of channels.
Related: Tips on how to reduce your sales cycle
It’s no secret marketers are struggling to track and understand leads throughout the customer journey.
Unfortunately, things are only going to get worse.
In June 2021, 51% of UK respondents revealed they would rather use apps or a company’s website than go into a physical branch or store to complete tasks such as shopping and banking.
As more users move online and the average customer journey continues to grow more complicated, so will the process of tracking visitors and leads over multiple touchpoints.
💡 Pro Tip
Customer journeys are complicated, but they don’t have to be. With a tool like Ruler, you can follow users’ movements across multiple touchpoints and figure out which channels, campaigns, keywords and ads result in the most value.
Download the guide on how to track your customer touchpoints
Most businesses are measuring the success of their sales and marketing performance in separate platforms.
Digital marketers, for example, will generally rely on Google Analytics to measure website metrics and marketing effectiveness. In fact, 90% of respondents consider Google Analytics their go-to tool for tracking marketing performance.
Related: 14 Google Analytics metrics for measuring marketing effectiveness
The sales teams, however, will use the CRM to collect contact information, move leads through the pipeline and convert opportunities into revenue.
Related: Integrate CRM data with Google Analytics for closed-loop reporting
As a result, sales teams don’t know what marketing activities generated their leads, and marketing can’t see which lead sources or campaigns contribute to closed/won revenue.
Revenue marketing is a must-have approach, but where do you start?
With the right tools, goals and process in place, it can be easy to track revenue and identify the marketing tactics that are delivering the best results for your business.
Below are a few tips to help get the wheels turning:
For a long time, leads have been the main measure of marketing success. In fact, 78% of marketers track their volume of leads to assess and determine marketing effectiveness.
Honestly, we can’t blame them. It’s hard not to fall into the lead generation trap.
Leads are easy to track and make your reports more interesting.
But, while lead conversion metrics and goals provide a simple means of tracking, they don’t tell you much about your impact on the bottom line.
If you’re currently using leads as the primary metric to measure campaign success, you need to reevaluate your marketing goals and objectives.
Today, marketers are being held increasingly accountable for the need to connect efforts with more than simple lead generation, and rightly so.
Revenue is the lifeblood of almost any business.
Before you start with revenue marketing, you must shift your focus away from lead generation goals such as MQLs, form completions and ensure your team is working toward the same end goal: increased revenue.
Also, by focusing on revenue goals, “you can look into which strategies provide the best results and convert the easiest leads in order to meet your revenue target,” concludes Kate Gross, Marketing Manager at FixThePhoto.
The idea that CRMs are just for sales is flawed.
Marketing teams can gather valuable information and benefit from the CRM too.
It’s a great tool for tracking leads throughout each stage of the sales cycle, plus plays a crucial role in increasing—and tracking—marketing revenue.
Related: The expanding role of CRM in marketing
In fact, when surveyed, 67% of respondents reported using a CRM for lead storage and tracking.
Business Strategy at Vem Tooling, Maximilian Zur Muehlen, told us: “as soon as a lead comes in, we create it within the CRM. We know where the lead comes from and to which marketing channel.”
Maximilian added: “This lead hopefully becomes an opportunity and leads to a sale.
The revenue is directly attributed to the lead, and this provides us with a healthy amount of data to evaluate our marketing strategies.”
There are a wide range of benefits marketers can take advantage of by accessing and using the data collected in a CRM. By sending leads to the CRM, marketers can:
All useful information, we’re sure you can agree.
But, to gain access to this level of insight and successfully track marketing leads in the CRM you must need to enhance data with marketing variables across multiple touchpoints such as first/last click marketing source, landing page.
And, the most effective way to achieve this is to…
The easiest way to track leads in the CRM and get started with revenue marketing is to invest in attribution software.
Andrew Maff, Founder & CEO at BlueTuskr, agrees: “the easiest way we attribute revenue to a direct marketing strategy is typically by using attribution tracking.”
The best marketing attribution tools can unlock powerful data and prove which marketing sources have the greatest impact on your revenue.
Also, “attribution tools help marketing teams show the executives what strategies are working to justify increasing or maintaining their digital budgets,” says Charlotte Spence, Head of Sleep Health Research at Mattress Nerd.
Take Ruler Analytics, for example. With Ruler, you can get full visibility of every lead and all of their touchpoints. Plus, tie revenue directly back to your channels and marketing campaigns they engaged with along their journey.
Related: How to view full customer journeys in Ruler
Ruler works by tracking each and every anonymous visitor to your website using first-party cookies.
When an anonymous visitor makes a conversion via a form fill, phone call or live chat enquiry, Ruler captures the lead’s contact details and marketing touchpoints, such as the source, campaign, keyword and more.
The lead information is then sent from Ruler into the CRM or wherever you store your leads for the sales team to process.
Each deal in the CRM is then enriched with marketing source data sent from Ruler. This helps create a better alignment between sales and marketing.
When a lead converts, the customer’s information, such as the revenue amount and marketing source data, is sent back to Ruler.
The revenue generated from each customer gets attributed back to its initial touchpoints, allowing you to track and report on marketing ROI with complete confidence.
Related: How Ruler attributes revenue to your marketing
It’s worth mentioning, Ruler also automates the process of connecting online leads with offline interactions in Google Ads and Analytics. We dive into more detail about that in our guide on how Ruler sends offline conversion data to Google Analytics.
💡 Pro Tip
Considering a marketing attribution tool to better report on your marketing impact? Download our guide on Ruler and see how it can provide visibility of every lead and all of their marketing touchpoints.
Download why you need Ruler Analytics
If you promote your business online and generate a lot of leads over the phone, then you should be using call tracking.
“Call tracking technology enables you to place a unique tracking phone number in every marketing source, such as your PPC ads and offline tactics, giving you the capacity to see where your calls are coming from. Many call tracking technologies record the call so you can reach further insight into your leads,” says Daniel Foley, CMO at Scooter Guide.
Most call tracking tools pinpoint where your leads are coming from by correlating inbound phone calls back to the source that influenced the interaction.
However, with our own platform, Ruler, you can do a great deal more:
💡 Pro Tip
Want to learn more? Go beyond call conversions and identify which marketing sources drive the most revenue and long-term value with our free guide on offline conversion tracking.
A complete guide to offline conversion and phone call tracking
Not quite ready to invest in marketing attribution or call tracking tools? Another alternative is to collect data on your leads by adding a “how did you hear about us” field to your forms.
You can ask your customers how they first discovered your products or services, then track and assign their leads sources in your CRM.
“We usually have a short question during registration which simply asks the prospective customer where they have come from. We find this direct approach gets quite good results without the trouble of running separate platform campaigns across multiple sources,” says Amy Troutman, Head of Business Operations at Resourceful Compliance.
While self-reported data has its benefits and is a useful method for tracking your “less measurable” channels, it isn’t perfect.
For self-reported attribution to work, your leads need to fill out the “how did you hear about us” field.
But, it’s not uncommon for users to forget specific interactions throughout their customer journey. So instead of giving you a detailed description of how they first heard about you, leads will often attribute themselves to “Online” or something similar.
Our study backs it up. We analysed 350 leads. 47 (13%) of these leads attributed themselves to “Online”.
It’s for this reason that many of the most successful companies use marketing attribution tools and self-reported data together.
Marketing attribution tools like Ruler automatically keep a record of your customer’s touchpoints on your website and self-reported data helps monitor your less trackable channels like LinkedIn.
💡 Pro Tip
While asking people to fill out a survey can provide some basic insights, is it enough on its own to accurately attribute where your leads are coming from? We put it to the test. Find out our results below.
Why asking how leads found you isn’t enough
As a marketer, you should always be proving why your work matters to your company, and using the revenue marketing approach is the perfect way to do that.
And remember, with the help of Ruler, you can connect revenue from your CRM with marketing source data to track visitor’s multiple touchpoints and attribute value accurately across the entire customer journey.
Want to learn more?
See how Ruler attributes revenue to your marketing campaigns. Or, book a demo and see Ruler’s attribution in action for yourself.
This article was originally published on 16th December 2019 and was last updated on 10th October 2022.
