Budget-Friendly Breakthroughs: How Research Drives Revenue

Revenue Rehab

This week our host Brandi Starr is joined by Liz Harr, Managing Partner at Hinge Marketing.

Meet Liz Harr, an accomplished entrepreneur and executive specializing in brand management and growth strategies for professional services firms. Leading Hinge Marketing's client delivery team, Liz helps businesses solve critical marketing and brand-related challenges.

With co-authorship of several influential books and research studies, including the Visible Expert Revolution and Hinge's annual high growth reports, Liz is a regular speaker and writer in professional services circles.

In this episode of Revenue Rehab, Brandi and Liz dive into the power of research-driven marketing strategies. They'll uncover how understanding your target audience's behavior can lead to spending less while achieving significant revenue growth. Get ready to explore actionable tactics for developing a science-based marketing strategy that drives relevance and revenue.

Bullet Points of Key Topics + Chapter Markers:

Topic #1 The Importance of Market Research [04:18] “When you approach your marketing with that formula in mind, your strategy is gold,” Harr emphasizes, identifying the powerful impact of research-driven strategies. She states, “Research yields relevance, and relevance yields revenue.” This key insight shapes the way marketing leaders should understand the behavior and needs of their target audience, ensuring that marketing efforts are not just aimless shots in the dark but are strategically aimed at achieving the highest impact.

Topic #2 Conducting Effective Behavioral Research [07:45] Liz Harr underscores the need for structured conversations with your ideal clients: “You need to understand what keeps them up at 4 AM,” she says. Harr elaborates, “What are your chief organizational challenges? What criteria are important to you as you're whittling down that list from like 10 to 5 companies?” This type of research, focusing on why customers choose or reject certain solutions, is essential for crafting relevant marketing messages that resonate deeply with the target audience.

Topic #3 Efficiency in Marketing Spend [16:48] Harr shares a poignant case study: “Instead of promoting some salesy aspect…you're actually promoting a piece of content,” she recalls, detailing how a client slashed their budget in half by switching to content marketing from costly, ineffective paid ads. She concludes, “We wrote some content and brought visibility to these executive guides…yielding better results with less spend.” This illustrates that understanding the target audience and meeting their needs with insightful content is more effective and economical compared to traditional, broad-spectrum advertising.

Buzzword Banishment

Liz’s Buzzword to Banish is “actionable insights.” Liz finds this term redundant and unnecessary, stating, “None of us have time for unactionable insights. We don't want unactionable insights. So just call it insights. That is what we mean. Let's just say what we mean.”

So, What’s the One Thing You Can Do Today?

Liz’s ‘One Thing’ is to delve into your metrics to uncover the priorities for your marketing strategy. "Look at your metrics. Those are probably the truest measure of how you're performing. And I would look at things not, I mean revenue growth. That's all important. Those are the obvious ones. But I would take a look at some more granular ones. Trends such as your sales cycle, has it been lengthening or shrinking your win rate? What are the trends going on there? Your win loss intel? Why are you winning? Why are you losing? So I would look at some of those more granular metrics to tell you just how or to signal to you how prioritized should a reworking of your marketing strategy be and whether you need to invest in research now or six months from now or a year from now. I think the metrics are going to give you the answer."

Links:

Get in touch on:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eharr/

Website: https://hingemarketing.com/

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