Marketing: Not Just a Cost Center Anymore

The traditional view of marketing is that it’s just an expense: you pour money into advertising and promotions, in the hopes of seeing a lift in sales. You know your work is making an impact, but it can be hard to prove. And when it’s time for budget cuts, well...you know what’s coming.

But marketing isn’t just a cost center -- or, at least, it doesn’t have to be. There are four ways you can go from being the first budget on the chopping block to the last one anyone wants to touch.

1. Deliver value beyond your department (help everyone else)

One way is to create valuable, meaningful content by working with industry analysts and media partners. Through surveys and other research, you’ll get a view into the market and access to some really smart people. Use the opportunity to generate great content while also helping your R&D or product development teams figure out what the market needs. There are lots of ways marketing can add value across an organization:

• Sales: hand over qualified leads and smart account strategies, plus tools and processes to close new business
• C-suite: arm them with customer and market insights to inform their decisions
• R&D / dev: get the answers they need to develop what buyers want
• Ops / IT: centralize all lead and customer data and conversations
• Finance: save money while also making money (we’re about to get to that)

2. Optimize your budget (get more from your money)

As you gather data in your marketing automation and CRM platforms, use it to get better at campaign targeting while also zeroing in on the types of content your leads and customers actually want. As you get more targeted with paid efforts and your audience grows organically, you’ll be able to reach further while spending less. Invest the savings in even more high-quality analyst research...and start the cycle over.

Another way to lower your expenses is with partner marketing (a.k.a., cooperative marketing). Find partners in your space and tell the story of how you work together to solve customer problems, then split campaign costs and share the leads. You’ll both get more reach at a lower cost per lead.

3. Connect marketing activities to sales metrics (prove your worth)

I know the temptation: report on metrics like clicks, opens, views, downloads. They’re a reflection of your activities, and they have value to you -- plus they’re easy to pull. But they don’t offer any real value outside of your department. 

The challenge is connecting marketing activity to revenue. You know that’s what your boss and shareholders want. But it’s not easy. Even today, with all our martech, there’s no one-size-fits-all software that calculates marketing ROI with the click of a button (or if there is, someone please tell me). The right reporting strategy is different for every organization, based on technology, sales structure and a lot of other variables. Figuring out how to measure revenue influenced by marketing isn’t fun, but it’s time that has to be spent.

4. Create new revenue streams (bring in new money)

This is my favorite. Yes, the marketing department can actually generate revenue of its own. How? Let’s go back to the partner concept. Find a way to deliver real value to your partners -- enough that they’ll pay for it. Host a virtual event that gives your partner network direct access to your customers (or perhaps, to your sales and distribution network) and they’ll invest in the opportunity to get their message to the right people.

Ready to think even bigger? If you’re already putting out tons of great content and growing your organic database (with the right opt-in permissions, of course), the time may be right to launch your own media property...with your partners as advertisers. Yes, really. I’ve seen it work.