Marketing With Purpose Kit: Turning Marketing into a Revenue Engine

**SPEAKER_1** (0:04)
The Bliss Business Podcast, the show about empathy, connection and consciousness in business. Today's episode is brought to you by Zero Company, your paid search, social media, and programmatic ad experts.

**Michele Brasfield** (0:16)
Welcome to Marketing With Purpose, a segment of The Bliss Business Podcast, where we explore what it really takes for marketing leaders to create impact that goes beyond the numbers. I'm Michele, and in each episode, we sit down with marketing experts to explore their leadership approach and strategies that drive performance and resonate with their audience. Together, we'll dive into what's working, what's not, and how purpose and empathy can transform the way brands connect with people. Let's get started. Today, I'm joined by Paul Waithaka, account executive at Zero Company. Paul brings a strong analytical mindset to digital marketing, putting his master's degree in marketing research to work every day as he builds, analyzes, and optimizes PPC and social media campaigns for clients across a wide range of industries. He focuses on turning data and performance insights into campaigns that really drive measurable results. We're going to explore turning marketing into a revenue engine and how disciplined analysis, optimization, and strategy can transform marketing efforts into real business growth. I'm excited to dive in. Paul, before we dive in, I'd love to hear, why was turning marketing into a revenue engine the topic you chose to explore with us today and what makes it so important right now?

**Paul Waithaka** (1:45)
Well, turning marketing into a revenue engine is very important because a lot of companies, when they face hard times, one of the first major cuts they make is the marketing department. I've been through major cuts in the past, because I've worked in the marketing industry for close to 20 years now. I've been through cuts before and I saw the reason why they did this, because they did not understand what companies didn't understand what the marketing department was for, because we looked at a cost center. We're costing the company money and not actually giving them money. That's one of the major reasons I actually picked this topic, because I've been affected with it in the past and people even now, are still being affected with this issue right now. I'm sure it's the same thing in the future, where they think, marketing is just a cost center, it doesn't give us anything, because they don't understand that marketing is an actual revenue generator or can be looked at as a revenue generator.

**Michele Brasfield** (2:35)
Great. That's a great lead in to our next question coming up. CMOs are often pulled between near-term campaign results and long-term brand building. How do you ensure your marketing strategy stays aligned with the company's growth goals? And where do you find the biggest pain points in making that happen?

**Paul Waithaka** (2:54)
The biggest pain point is honestly leadership.
But by leadership, I mean also not just the CMO, but also the executives. Because some of them decide that they have that knee-jerk reaction where I want to see revenues and profit now. But then as a marketer, we know, yes, we can do that, but at the same time, it's not only not profitable, but it's not manageable because in the future, that's almost a thing into getting a one-time customer and then having them. But by building a brand, then you actually keep recipe. That's what I was looking for. You get a recipe when you get that one client and then you lose that client. When you build a brand behind your product, behind the service you're selling, then again, that's a recipe of building a repeat customer. That's probably my biggest pain point is just how to deal with the different personalities of the executives or the boss, the C-level executives that you're dealing with. That's what I came to realize. But in the actual work itself, it's actually not that difficult to be honest, because you can run separate campaigns that are working at the same time. You can run a short-term revenue generating campaign for a month or two, but then you can also run a long-term brand campaign the last six months to 10 years, just depending on how long you run that for a small budget. That's actually not the most difficult part. The difficult part is dealing with the personalities, to be honest.

**Michele Brasfield** (4:16)
Yeah. That takes some openness and empathy too, right?

**Paul Waithaka** (4:22)
You're right. You have to be able to massage that. That's another thing I have to learn over the last 20 years of working. It's like in the marketing is you have to learn how to massage your words. Not because I'm not trying to give it to you straight, but because I realize if I give it to you straight, it's not going to sound nice. That's another recipe for disaster where you're like, I don't want to talk to you anymore. Hit the door or whatever. It's one of the things you have to learn to massage the message for you to get understood.