The measurable way to make marketing contribute to sales
The good folks over at Marketo published some stunning numbers this week that should be a wake-up call for anybody running marketing today. Boiled down, the findings revealed that most marketing leaders have little or no confidence in their ability to drive revenue. Nine out of ten senior marketers surveyed “do not feel confident in their ability to impact the sales forecast of their programs”. And 20 percent of them don’t measure what they do at all.
Isn’t driving sales one of the fundamental purposes of the marketing function? There’s no one-size-fits-all strategy for closing deals and making the quarterly numbers. But this much is known for certain about today’s in-bound marketing world: those companies who keep their web site content fresher and publish it more frequently draw the most sales-validated leads. They consistently realize the highest conversion rates and apply measurement tools to clearly demonstrate the results of programs that contribute to bottom line revenue. Can’t blame them.
Yes, Marketo is in the business of measurement software, but the connection of quality traffic volume to SEO rankings is driven by nothing more or less than the content sought by customers constantly on the lookout for fresh information relative to their specific needs. Recognizing these needs and publishing relevant and engaging content is what separates the “10-percenters” who are successfully driving revenue generation from the other 90 percent who aren’t. Those in the tip-of-the-pyramid ten percent club have figured out the correlation between publishing engaging content with regularity and making it count on the bottom line.
Are you in the 10-percent? What are you doing to stay there, or get there? How do you keep your marketing content fresh and relevant?