Revenue marketing is an approach to business and marketing that links marketing efforts directly to sales and revenue. For small business owners, it can be difficult to justify investment into marketing channels, because the results are often cloudy.
However, with revenue marketing, you can better keep track of how much you spend on marketing, and the specific results. Once this connection is made, for a small business owner, their mentality shifts from “why do I need to spend money on marketing,” to, “how can I spend more.” The reason being, they see the proof of just how effective marketing is for them.
This quick guide will walk you through steps for setting up a system to track your marketing efforts. And exactly how you can track marketing and leads to sales and revenue, so you can tailor your marketing to real results.
6 Steps for Setting Up a Revenue Marketing System for Small Businesses
Setting up a revenue marketing system is simpler than it sounds. It’s about connecting the dots between what you spend on marketing and the sales that come in. Here are the steps for setting up the full system for tracking the marketing budget to sales and revenue.
Let’s start.
Step 1: Set Up Google Analytics
Google Analytics is your starting point. With Google Analytics set up on your website you’ll track visitor data and see what actions they take. As a local business, it is important to consider Google Ads. This paired with Google Analytics will allow you to track ads, and how well they are doing.
For this to work properly, you’ll need to set up goals or conversions in Google Analytics. This is how you’ll know if someone calls your business or fills out a contact form after clicking on one of your ads. It’s the basic layer of understanding how visitors interact with your site.
One important metric for small business reporting is how many leads you received. Google Analytics will help you gather this raw data on a consistent basis.
It also helps track how many users came to your site, and where they came from. Also helpful for many different revenue reports.
Step 2: Implement UTM Tracking
UTM tracking is about adding a snippet of text to your URLs. When someone clicks on a link with UTM parameters, you’ll know exactly where they came from, whether it’s from an ad, Google My Business, LSA campaign, or social network.
When you get traffic from these sources, often this is tagged with these UTM parameters. You’ve probably seen them.
For instance, say you click on a Google Ad to the URL https://yourbusiness.com/
When you click the ad, the URL you end up visiting looks like this
https://yourbusiness.com/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=spring_sale
Everything after the question mark (?) in this code is part of this UTM parameter. This tells you the click came from:
- Source: Google
- Medium: CPC
- Campaign: Spring Sale
By setting up your website forms to capture this UTM data, you can trace leads back to their source.
Step 3: Add Call Tracking for Revenue Marketing
Call tracking is similar to UTM parameters, but does it a more advanced way.
Tools like CallRail do this by showing a unique phone number to each user that visits your website. Then, when visitors make a phone call, this unique number ties their call back to how they found your website and adds these UTM parameters to the call data.
With this in place, you can now track the majority, if not all, of the leads your small business receives back to their original marketing source. We’re well on our way to creating a revenue marketing report that will give us the data we need.
Step 4: Integrate with a CRM
Now, we need to integrate this data into a CRM. A (CRM), or Customer Relationship Management System, stores the data of our leads, customers, and sales.
The goal here is to attach each individual lead to its marketing source. You can either automate the process or manually tag new leads manually, but either way, the outcome will be the same. Remember that your site itself can contribute to how your business’s site ranks. That’s why it’s so important to ask the right questions when choosing a web designer, depending on what your business needs is essential so that your site suits the needs of your customers.
Now, when you pull data out of the CRM, each lead, and sale, will be tagged with its lead source. By tracking lead source data, and sales data, in your CRM, we have all the data we need to link marketing costs with actual business revenue. Local businesses can significantly enhance their visibility and reach to potential customers by focusing on improving their rankings on Google My Business, especially by emphasizing the importance of customer reviews.
Step 5: Create Reports with Looker Studio
Now, we need to create reports that will help us see our marketing and revenue data in an easy to digest format.
Online reporting tools, like Looker Studio, can take this raw data and turn it into understandable reports. These reports will show you how much revenue each marketing channel brought in during a certain period. Exactly what we want to see.
Step 6: Compare Costs with Revenue
Finally, we need to connect your marketing costs with the revenue data. This could mean manually inputting cost data or linking your marketing accounts for automatic updates.
This way, we can show the marketing spend that occurred during a specific date range, and match that up with revenue and sales.
Why Revenue Marketing Matters for Small and Local Businesses
That’s it, now we have everything in place to pull these types of reports often. Some businesses want to see these reports weekly, others monthly. And you may want to account for some lag in your system. For instance, if your sales cycle is typically a few weeks long, then it may be better to pull reports on a 30-day lag so that the majority, if not all, of your leads, have had the chance to go through the full sales cycle and become revenue-generating customers.
For small business owners, seeing the direct connection between marketing spend and sales revenue changes everything. It turns marketing from a cost into an investment. When you can see which channels bring in sales and how much, you’re in a better position to allocate your budget effectively. It’s about moving from guessing to knowing, from spending to investing.
By following these steps, you can set up a system that not only tracks your marketing efforts but also ties them directly to sales and revenue. This way, you can focus on what works, adjust what doesn’t, and grow your business with confidence.
The goal is to change your mindset on marketing. When you see exactly how your marketing spend is making you money, then your mentality changes from “Why do I have to spend on marketing” to “How much can I spend.”
That’s how you become a successful business owner.
Why Choose Brightbeam?
With Brightbeam, you can trust that your business will grow and thrive, with our hands-on marketing approach. We can help your local business find success through all avenues. We offer Boise website design services, Boise Google Ads management, and Boise SEO services. Contact us to learn more.
