In a capitalist society, the objective for companies is to make more money! In the classic B2B world, the business objective may be to create shareholder value and increase revenues. The challenge for marketers is to strike a balance while working to continually expand their portfolio of digital tactics. The key is in determining the right marketing mix to increase revenue shares in the coming year.

Set Your Business Goals

To drive more revenue, one goal might be to determine how many total leads you can generate in X number of months. From a marketing point of view, how many total leads can realistically be generated and converted to increase sales? The trick is to nail down the sales number and how much marketing can do.

For instance, if your objective is to increase sales by 20%, you reverse engineer the process and backtrack to set marketing goals. Say you are doing $5MM and want to increase by 20% to $7.5MM within 6 months. How many leads do you need to close that many deals? Average how much one contract is worth, then determine how many marketing leads are routinely converted to sales leads.

Goals need to be clearly defined and measurable. For example, identify:

• how much revenue you want to generate (over last year, for instance) from your inbound marketing efforts
• your closing rates and how many opportunities you need
• how many leads you need
• how much traffic it takes to reach your goals
• benchmarks

Determine Your Digital Marketing Tactics

Once you set your business goals, look at the balance of marketing tactics you need to reach the desired results.

Choose from the three classic buckets:

Organic or Earned – SEO, social media

These are earned over time and take a while to grow. If you continually work to improve your SEO and social media posts, the results are worth the time and effort! However, the process is not instantaneous so be patient.

Paid – Display ads, paid advertising

If you have aggressive goals, there’s only so much you can do with the organic methods. That means you may want to spend more money with paid advertising. But beware, it can get expensive.

Owned – Email marketing, nurturing, content

Your owned resources like email lists and content in the form of ebooks, blog posts, articles and publications take time and energy to build, but are valuable owned assets that help you grow your business.

Depending on your goals, you choose a balance of tactics that works best for your budget. Your decisions can be backed up by data.

Make the Connection

Tie digital marketing tactics to business objectives by determining your average allowable Cost Per Lead (CPL) to acquire a new customer. Your acquisition cost becomes your marketing budget. Based on that budget, results, while not instantaneous, can be measured by setting benchmarks.

Look to your SEO data to measure your results. From the data, determine which tactics are working and go from there. By nurturing your leads, you can convert them into Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs) which can be handed off to the sales team. More leads equal more revenue which leads to more market share and happy shareholders … and in a capitalist society, that’s the name of the game!