When marketers develop their inbound marketing strategy, they’re typically focused on two primary objectives. First, they want to extend their brand. Then they want to generate leads. So, they’re creating content, plans, campaigns, and tactics to build an audience that drives traffic to their website.

But you don’t want traffic to just show up and leave. You want to build functionality, tactics, and content that will grab the attention of those visitors and get them to convert leads —into sales opportunities that they can transition to their sales team.

Those are two great objectives to try to accomplish, but there’s a third objection that marketers often forget or ignore — your marketing strategy.

Your marketing strategy should produce a meaningful and measurable return on investment (ROI). Therefore, you invest a lot of time, money, and resources in your marketing efforts. The ultimate objective of marketing is to sell something, but we never want to fall into the trap of just doing marketing for marketing’s sake.

Jumpstart Revenue Growth from Marketing Activity

Your marketing strategy should include a road map to producing that meaningful and measurable return on investment, and part of that road map should have a plan as to what is the shortest route to revenue. You want to gain traction early and drive it as quickly as possible. Here are three ways to find your shortest route to revenue.

1. Don’t Forget the Established Contacts in Your Marketing Database

We often spend a lot of time and energy trying to create brand-new leads (which is appropriate), but don’t forget about the leads generated last month or even last year. Maybe these leads didn’t close because timing wasn’t right —maybe it’s right today.

This is a shorter route to revenue because you’re eliminating a lot of the process. When you start out with a brand-new lead, you must:

• Attract that person to your website
• Establish credibility and trust
• Convert them into a lead

If you have a known contact that seems to be qualified to buy your product or services, you’re eliminating the front-end piece. Now it’s just about connecting with them again, engaging with them, and starting the sales process.

2. Talk to Your Salespeople

Salespeople have target accounts they work on; accounts they identify as “sweet spots.”  From their research and insights, these are the ideal companies and prospects to do business with; they just haven’t been able to engage them. These are your next steps:

• Find out who these targets are and why salespeople haven’t been able to engage
• Leverage content you have as part of your marketing strategy
• Repurpose and customize content
• Build-in functionality and tactics that salespeople can deploy to get those target accounts attention and engage with them

3. Look at Referrals

Referrals are often your best leads because you don’t have to recreate trust and credibility. It’s already been done on your behave when the referral is made. The hardest thing about referrals is just getting them. The reason more and more companies don’t have referral business is because they simply don’t ask for them.

One thing marketing can do is create content, strategies, tactics, and campaigns that will help remind customers and your centers of influence about the impact that you’re having on their business and your expertise. Simply ask them to refer business to you. You can build content and mechanisms to help accomplish this to make it easy for your centers of influence to pass along referrals to your organization.

The ultimate goal is to maximize ROI, create the shortest routes to revenue, and drive revenue faster. This thought structure should be a big piece of your strategy and things you’re thinking about as you’re building out the tactics that you’re going to deploy.