Change Marketing from a
Cost Center to a Growth Driver

Building a healthy pipeline and supporting revenue growth are critical for business success. Across industries, the same nine steps can yield consistently strong results, helping you achieve predictable pipeline and accelerate growth.

Step 7:  Automate and  Scale

Modern marketing is powered by specialized technology. To reach and engage your target audiences effectively, you need to have the right tools in your tech stack and use them well. This can save you time and effort, increase your reach and impact, and allow you to clearly quantify the results of your programs.

The foundation of a comprehensive demand generation program is a good Marketing Automation Platform (MAP). This essential, powerful resource lets you easily manage outbound email campaigns, digital ad campaigns, paid social promotions; monitor prospect activity and engagement across platforms; and hand off leads to sales at the ideal moment. You can also automate much of this activity, enabling you to  build efficiently and then easily scale as needed to encompass new markets, audiences, platforms, campaigns, journeys, and more.

If you don't already have—or aren't taking full advantage of—a MAP, options to get started or improve results abound. Leading platforms like HubSpot, Marketo, Pardot, and Eloqua (among many others) often offer free or reduced-costs trials, as well as a range of pricing tiers. Even better, these solution providers are often a great source of educational and on-the-job resources, including videos, ebooks, worksheets, and training and certification courses. Wherever you may be in your journey with marketing automation, you can likely find information and solutions to support your current needs and enable rapid progress.

Learn More  •  Get a Free Consultation

Step 8: Measure and Report 

A modern MAP can offer benefits beyond efficiency and scalability.  From a marketing leadership perspective, sophisticated reporting and analytics capabilities may be even more valuable. No longer limited to qualitative assessment and inferred measurement, today's marketing via digital channels can generate a wealth of detailed data. Within your MAP, you should have the ability to monitor, measure, and optimize key success metrics across the board.

In addition to core digital marketing metrics like asset and campaign performance, conversion rates, and cost per lead / acquisition (CPL / CPA), you can configure your MAP to support measurement of vital pipeline metrics. Example including total and weighted pipeline, pipeline velocity and run rate, and volume and conversion across the sales funnel (MQL, SAL, SQL, etc.).

Having these numbers will clarify the true business impact of the Marketing function, as well as the value of investing in marketing programs. With lead attribution and activity tracking, determining Marketing's contributions to pipeline—and, ultimately, revenue—becomes much more straightforward. Depending on how successful specific programs or channels are, the numbers could make a strong case for significantly greater investment in marketing to help drive additional pipeline or accelerate growth.

Learn More  •  Get a Free Consultation