Focusing Your Marketing on REAL Results

For most of us, marketing’s primary objective is to generate revenue. I doubt there are many who’d argue this point. However, we shouldn’t forget that revenue generation isn’t the only way marketing can benefit an organization.

For most organizations, REAL (yes… another acronym) marketing results can be realized in one or more of four areas. They are:

• Revenue generation
• Expense Reduction
• Asset building
• Liability minimization

Revenue generation is the most obvious way marketing can benefit an organization but some marketing can reduce expenses as well. For example, one of my clients used to fly their sales reps all over the United States to do product demos. With the marketing budget, we duplicated the rep’s demos as live Web conferences for a lead generation campaign. The Web demos cost almost 65% less then the in-person demos and were very well received by prospects. This strategy was quickly adopted by the sales team and my client realized a tremendous opportunity to reduce travel expenses.

An organizations number one asset is its customer and prospect database and their ability to turn that data into revenue. Yes, even more valuable then products, buildings and any other tangible a company might own. The simple reason is that a clean database and a reliable marketing (and sales) methodology will insure future sales. Almost nothing else will.

Generally when an organization thinks of liabilities the focus is on financial obligations. Rightly so but, liabilities are really anything that holds a company back. From that prospective, consider an organization without an effective marketing program going head-to-head with a marketing savvy competitor. Get the picture?

So, when assessing the value of your marketing or determining a marketing return on investment, consider how much revenue your marketing is generating and the other REAL results you’re creating.