Unlocking Revenue Hidden Within a Marketing Database

If you’ve been tasked with hitting a certain marketing generated revenue number, what progress have you made in the first month of the year? Hopefully you are already well on your way… but if you haven’t even started, fear not! There’s still time.

One of the easiest ways for marketing to generate revenue is to tap the resources you already have. Here are a few ways to squeeze the most value from your marketing systems in 2014:

The CRM

SiriusDecisions offers a Demand Generation Waterfall that is extremely helpful and definitely worth mastering. From identifying marketing qualified leads to measuring the effectiveness of your campaigns, use the tool to get focused on your buyer’s journey and close the loop on reporting. If you have already mastered that, make customer marketing analytics a primary focus. By building out trend reports to better track customer needs, marketers can provide the exact solution needed at the exact moment necessary, while gaining valuable information to fuel demand generation campaigns.

The CMS

Expand your content marketing strategy. While having a company blog is a great way to establish thought leadership in a given field, it’s not the only valuable tool in the content marketing sphere. Consider adding videos, social media outreach, infographics or even an underground newsletter to the mix. The Content Marketing Institute is a great source for expertise and inspiration on all-things content marketing, so bookmark their site and check it regularly to stay on top of your game and ahead of your competitors.

The Database

This may seem elementary, but it’s critical to have a complete profile for every single contact or lead. Today’s consumers demand a certain level of personalization, which means you need more than their email address or phone number to qualify them as a lead. Start by spending time cleaning out the dead-end contacts in your marketing database—it will serve you well throughout 2014. With an organized marketing database, you can build out campaigns using trustworthy data, then more accurately measure lead conversion, average deal size and average sales cycle—which should now be much shorter given the improvements made on the CRM and content front.

Your CRM, CMS and marketing database are your lifeblood, so why not make them count? If you love your systems, they will love you back. Which will you make a priority in 2014?

If you’re looking for help with your 2014 content strategy, check out our B2B Marketing Planner. It will help you coordinate everything from blog posts to product launches throughout the year.

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