Revenue Architects had the pleasure of presenting a workshop entitled “Designing the New Revenue Engine in the Age of Digital Marketing” to members of TiE Boston. Unfortunately, A/V malfunction, room reshuffling, and a little “musical chairs” delayed the presentation. We had to cut the workshop portion examining the revenue engine in greater detail (my personal sweet spot). Rats.

The workshop participants were engaged and raised many good questions. Several questions were centered around the metrics and cost/benefit benchmarks of social networking and digital marketing. Is it worth investing the time, energy, and expenses in building a web presence strategy, or is this all just a fad? I’m pretty sure we agreed that social media and digital marketing are here to stay.

Why? The explosive growth of social networking – with tools like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, BlogTalkRadio, and YouTube – has fundamentally changed the way customers learn, evaluate and ultimately make their decisions. Anyone trying to grow their business and generate revenue knows that they need to have web presence, beyond just a website.

What role does social networking and digital marketing play in the revenue engine?

First, fundamentally, a revenue engine is comprised of:

• A well thought out market strategy, at any level (enterprise or campaign specific)
• A customer-centric process for finding, attracting, nurturing, acquiring and caring for customers
• A set of tools/technologies that enable the process
• The people who are skilled and organized to follow and execute the process
• GOOD CONTENT (not just quantity, but quality and different from the competition)

Next, you need to determine what kind of social networking / digital marketing makes the most sense for your business. For example, would your target customer…

• Use LinkedIN?
• Follow you on Twitter?
• Subscribe to other sites/groups to get more information?
• Are members of special interest groups?

Then, examine if your sales and marketing teams have the process, tools, and skills to deploy social networking /digital marketing to:

• Attract leads
• Nurture leads who are “on the fence”
• Convince leads to buy
• Create advocates / best customers

Finally, but most importantly, determine if you have or need to create valuable content.  Also, it helps to determine the right mix:

• Written (papers, briefs, emails, blog posts, new website content)
• Audio
• Video
• Web or live events
• Direct mail
• Email drip campaigns

Let’s face it. We’re in a social/digital world. There are massive amounts of information out there. If you’re going to include social networking / digital marketing in your revenue engine, at the very least, be sure your content doesn’t get lost in the crowd. Make sure it is searchable and relevant. Also, don’t forget the “long tail.” If you’re very focused in a certain niche or in a specific target industry, you’ll have a better chance of standing out and increasing your conversion rates with “a long tail” approach.

Anyways, these were some of the key points we hoped to discuss in the workshop.

Maybe we’ll just have to record a webisode and post it on our youtube channel.

John Stone spoke at the Charles Schwab Impact2010 for a second year. At this event, John led two sessions on digital presence and social media as well as hosted guests for informal presentations at the cyber lounge on the main floor:

• One session was focused on emerging digital trends and social media explore ways an RIA firm can use social media and web presence effectively for growth and relationship development. John presented a “Day-in-the-life” of an advisor engaging social media naturally to drive and extend relationships.

• A second session focused on the emerging trends in web digital media and explored ways that an RIA can plan and build a Revenue Architecture to deepen and expand relationships with existing clients.