Research from ExactTarget and Deloitte recently reported that over half of marketing executives indicated that their role had a significantly-increased responsibility for growing revenue. That’s a significant departure from ‘The Department of Pretty Things’ or other less-than-stellar descriptions marketing has been given over the years.

As marketing cements its role as revenue driver, it has become increasingly important that this function optimize its intelligence. What do we mean by that? Essentially, it’s using data sources to uncover insights, then using the insights to drive the building of your company’s experiences.

The good news? According to Millward Brown Vermeer, 73% of the top-performing companies by revenue are already doing this. But for this many organizations there’s still work to do. To begin with, you want to try and achieve two things simultaneously:

• Become an ‘intelligence bureau’ for your various business insights
• Use data-driven insights to drive revenue goals

Establishing personas

An easy way to achieve the first objective is through the use of personas. Oftentimes, though, we marketers speak about personas as a generic, umbrella-level concept. But it’s a lot more nuanced than that. There are three types of personas that can guide how marketing approaches content development and new targets:

• Persona Firmographics: Company size, headquarters/markets, product offerings and major clients
• Persona Demographics: Role title, seniority and the core functions of their job (** this is how most people construe ‘personas’ **)
• Persona Psychographics: Challenges, pain points, knowledge sources, etc.

Once you’ve established all three you can truly start driving data-driven marketing insight.

Creating knowledge briefs

One of the other core ways to optimize marketing intelligence and sales-marketing alignment is through knowledge briefs. These are short explanations of major business value concepts. Some examples we’ve seen marketing departments create include:

• Competitive landscape briefs
• Persona briefs
• Market trend briefs
• Product knowledge briefs

Knowledge briefs provide easy-to-find, easy-to-digest ‘consumable’ content that can instantly jump start a conversation. They gently nudge us back to our product’s core value proposition, reminding us of where its value lies and where it fits in the larger market. Ideally, they should be stored in an easily accessible location where anyone from your organization can find and refer to them.

Download The Marketing Optimization Toolkit

As marketers, we measure almost everything — campaigns, landing pages, conversion rates, you name it. Almost anything that can be tracked and optimized will be. But things like content production and distribution, campaign operations, and the alignment of sales and marketing can get lost in the mix.

To help you identify these often overlooked aspects, we’ve published an entire eBook on marketing optimization. Download it here and check it out for yourself.

Once you’ve gone through it and made some notes, feel free to contact us directly about the specific pain points of your organization.