If you’re a marketer, you have more strategic impact than you may realize. If you’re a business owner, don’t overlook the impact that your marketing program can have on the total value of your business.

Here are five areas where smart marketing contributes to greater enterprise value:

Revenue

This is the most obvious. By generating leads, getting more from your distribution channels and enabling sales to be as effective as possible, marketing directly drives revenue growth.

A solid message, a smart strategy and great execution skills are critical. But to truly maximize results, you also need valid insights. With the right marketing framework and technology tools, you track every closed sale back through the buying process to gain actionable insights into what tactics worked and what messages resonated most.

You should also analyze your marketing as an integrated system, understanding that it is a smart combination of tactics, vs. one tactic, that creates the best opportunities, and the first point of engagement is rarely the first time a prospect has heard about your company. Full attribution is complex, but having a complete data picture can help you understand more clearly what’s driving revenue and guide you in continually adjusting your tactics to accelerate your customer journey and improve marketing ROI.

Customer Mix

In addition to revenue growth, you should execute your marketing efforts with a strategic awareness of revenue type. This means identifying and then pursuing your ideal customer mix, which can make a tremendous difference in enterprise value.

For example, you might have a few clients that represent an outsized percentage of revenue. This risk lowers enterprise value, because if one of those whale customers leaves for any reason, the business takes a huge hit. Here, marketing builds enterprise value by helping your business diversify its client base.

Alternatively, your company may be looking to join with a strategic partner. Marketing can help shift your customer mix towards a particular industry, or type or size of customer, that would be valuable to such a partner.

Lastly, marketing can help drive more recurring revenue customers vs. project-based customers. In most cases, the certainty of recurring revenue will positively impact enterprise value.

Culture

The value of a business is often closely tied to the value of the team. Lower employee turnover, more engaged employees and success in recruiting can all have a major impact on enterprise value.

Just like you market to prospective and current customers, you should also be marketing to prospective and current employees. This process is called Talent Marketing. Too many companies leave culture communications solely to Human Resources. HR is critical in ensuring that you have something to sell (including a good benefits package, training programs, etc.), but it’s marketing that has the communication skill set to help sell those benefits to employees and recruits.

Operational Excellence

A marketing system with data-driven actions, repeatable processes and scalable operations can be a major factor in calculating enterprise value. Not only does this make marketing more effective, generating more results for any given level of investment, but it also lowers risk because the results are driven by data and not by luck.

This also drives innovation, as insights gained through market research are combined with data, outcomes and creative thinking to help ensure that new products and services lead your competition and are priced to maximize profitability. As your marketing becomes a continually optimized embodiment of operational excellence, your enterprise value increases.

Brand

Finally, a strong brand increases company value by creating multiple advantages. When more people know and feel good about your company, it drives more inbound referrals and revenue. A strong brand also builds trust (which shortens your sales cycle because customers don’t require as much proof and sales can close faster) and enhances profitability by helping you command a price premium in the marketplace.

When you pull together business strategy, sales and marketing into a cohesive process, you create value. Our framework, The Revenue Tower^®, is a Marketing Operating System designed to do just that. You can learn more about how it helps you address these five areas of enterprise value here.