As a marketer, have you ever found yourself stuck in a cycle of sending more emails, spending more on paid digital campaigns, and trying to build even more partnerships? It's easy to get lost in the data, assuming that driving more traffic and leads will ultimately lead to revenue growth. However, what I learned through my years in event and media marketing is that the traditional approach isn't always the best one. In this blog series, I'll share my journey to discovering a better way to align marketing with revenue goals and secure a seat at the revenue table.
I started my career in event and media with a large event and media company working in event sales marketing. During this time, I used to sit in on calls with potential exhibitors to learn how to sell better. I created collateral for sales reps but often found that what we created was not used. Despite the challenges, I continued to help create fantastic-looking event prospectuses that would contain stats from the attendees of the prior year. Afterward, I transitioned to working with the company's media business, where I repeated many of the same things we did on the events side. The most significant piece of work every year was the media kit, where we tried all sorts of ideas, from creating packages that combined events and media to building out directories and channels on websites. A few years later, I moved back to managing attendee marketing. Here, we employed all sorts of innovative ideas to drive registration, from giveaways to flash sales, all to ensure that we'd have enough attendees at the event and hit our attendance goal.
Marketing reported on our KPIs: lead generated, traffic to the website, paid digital performance, number of registrations, number of actual attendees, saturation of attendees to exhibitor, and more. Sales reported on their KPIs: pipeline, new business, renewals, square foot sold, sponsorships purchased, and more. Then we rinsed, lathered, and repeated the same thing - year after year, event after event.
But there was always a common dialogue: attendee quality is not strong, more event attendees, more registrations for this webinar, more clicks on these ads, more subscribers for newsletters, more leads for this white paper, etc. So, marketing did what marketing did - send more emails, spend more on paid digital campaigns, rent lists, and try to build even more partnerships.
Then, one day sitting at my computer while reconciling the forecast it hit me…we are doing it wrong.
But what was uncovered was gold!
While H2K Labs isn't focused on typical marketing dashboards and audience performance, I learned some valuable lessons that apply to the work we are doing today. Over the next few weeks, I will share more about what I learned and how it applies to securing marketing a seat at the revenue table.
- The benefits of becoming gaining a seat at the revenue table
- Ensuring the marketing strategy is aligned with revenue goals
- Empowering sales marketing to work with account reps to improve outcomes for deals
- Delivering quality leads to the programs sales is selling
- Reporting on metrics that matter
- Identifying gaps with data
Are you tired of focusing on attendee quantity instead of revenue quality? Join me on this journey to uncover a better approach to marketing that will empower your team to work with sales account reps, deliver quality leads, and report on metrics that matter.
