Digital – A Massive Revenue Opportunity for Technology Companies
The blog talks about the new digital revenue engine that high-tech marketers must adopt to justify ROI.
Marketers in technology companies rely on digital demand generation for a majority of their acquisitions. Since the early 2000s, technology companies have adopted, honed and attained digital higher marketing maturity as compared to most other industries. Because of this, marketers in technology companies are among the first to be charged with revenue related performance metrics.
"There is an opportunity for high-tech companies to measure and optimize every digital interaction with their prospective and existing customers. A solid digital marketing strategy not only drives revenue for the business, but it creates efficiencies regarding how advertising and marketing budgets are spent; every campaign can be measured for its effectiveness and optimized to yield the highest returns." - CMO Exclusives
Naturally, most of these marketers have quickly realized that generating quality leads is but one aspect of performance. Converting these leads to a revenue pipeline for sales is what truly matters.
To move towards a revenue impact model, one of the first things that technology marketers need to do is to integrate their marketing technology eco-system to create personalized experiences across digital channels and seek to optimize their content marketing efforts to improve acquisition.
Other key milestones that marketers need to achieve in this revenue journey include:
Being everywhere - Your marketing goal should be to spread out as many online assets as possible so that a prospect searching for solutions lands on your content. With this, focus on high ROI tactics such as blogs and search engine optimization. You will realize lots of “free” traffic through these early investments.
Managing leads before generating demand - Most early stage buyers do not like taking quintessential follow-up calls from sales reps. Hence, your target should be to excel at lead management, especially using automated lead nurturing to develop relationships with qualified prospects.
Source: Smart Insights
Investing in right tools - We believe it’s absolutely impossible to manage a prolific marketing function without technology support. You're floating your content on multiple channels, many of these content assets/campaigns require customized efforts for testing, analytics and targeting. Automate your processes now and spend the valuable time you save in focusing on strategic and creative aspects of marketing that drive ROI.
Establishing marketing’s credibility - In a world where you know marketing folks have the highest rates of involuntary turnover in the enterprise, make efforts from day one to use ROI justifications for every penny spent on marketing. By talking about marketing in the same financial language as other functions, you'll be able to establish marketing as a key driver of revenue alongside sales.
Uplifting your potential gradually - It feels great to get the basic website up and running, but what’s next? Continue augmenting your capabilities. Begin with your first AdWords campaign and capture the first lead. Enhance website content, social media pages and keep adding new capabilities, with no end. Take a leap with a step up. At every stage, you must grow the marketing function in maturity and increase its operational capacity.
To gain more insight into maximizing revenue and ROMI through digital marketing, read our brand new eBook, Drive Revenue Through Digital - A Guide for Technology Companies.