Marketing With Purpose Kit: Turning Marketing into a Revenue Engine

**SPEAKER_2** (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.

**Tullio Siragusa** (0:17)
Welcome back 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 Tullio, 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. So let's get started. Today, I'm joined by someone I'm a big fan of, Laura Rice. She's the owner of Rice Fractional CMO.
She's a growth strategy leader specializing in brand transformation, demand generation, and customer acquisition for multi-brand and franchise organizations. Laura brings nearly three decades of experience building scalable marketing engines across franchising, education, health and wellness, consumer brands, and even the government sector. Throughout her career, she has led integrated B2B franchise development and B2C acquisition strategies, managed multi-million dollar marketing budgets, and developed full funnel systems designed to drive measurable enterprise growth. Most recently, she helped accelerate franchise and revenue growth through omni-channel acquisition strategies, performance analytics, and data-driven marketing execution, aligned directly with aggressive expansion goals.
We're going to explore turning marketing into a revenue engine. And I'm excited to dive into how marketing and how marketing leaders can transform their teams from support function into strategic drivers for sustainable growth. Laura, thanks for being with me today. I'm excited to speak with you.

**Laura Rice** (2:14)
Thank you. I'm so happy to be back with you.

**Tullio Siragusa** (2:17)
So, before we dive in, I would love to hear why was turning marketing into a revenue engine the topic you chose? We give a few different topics for our guests. Why did you choose that topic today?
And what makes it so important like right now?

**Laura Rice** (2:34)
Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of times marketing was just looked at as a support function. Like, yes, our company has marketing, but now it's really, and it has been for a while, something that's really tied to all the KPIs, how we're going to drive money for the company. It's really the thing that I always say it's the oil of the funnel. Like, we start at the top, marketing has to drive everything that's going to go into the funnel, that's going to create customers, create retention, create loyalty. So it's critical that it's tied to a revenue component. I've seen a lot of new jobs that are like chief revenue officer. It is definitely something that is prevalent these days where that person could be over top of sales, operations, the customer experience and marketing. So all of those verticals are very aligned and they should be to be successful. And it just makes sense that CMOs aren't just coming in to strategy meetings and showing campaigns and pictures. They're showing this campaign drove this, it brought this amount of money to the company.
And if we keep that person, here's the long-term value of what we've generated. And a lot of times when you go and ask for money as a marketer, the CFO or the finance department wants to know, well, how much revenue is that going to bring the company? Like, what am I going to see in return? And you can't say, well, that's not trackable. So I think it's just something in the world that we're in now that we want to make sure that marketing is relevant. It's not something that goes away, it's cut.
And it really is a revenue driver for the business. So especially in like relationship industries, like early childhood education, home health care, things like that, trust and brand experience are so important, and they help create that long-term revenue, which you want, and that loyalty, and those loyal customers, which is going to be endless revenue for the company, not just always focusing on new.

**Tullio Siragusa** (4:24)
Absolutely. Now, CMOs are often pulled into bridging strategy and growth, and especially fractional CMOs, who often get brought in to fix what's broken or to get alignment for what's missing, or even in some cases, even just fine-tuning the branding and go-to-market strategy. So, the challenge is always balancing the near-term campaign results. You know, I need some results right now, and also building the long-term brand, which is important too. We talked about the funnel, right? You got the bottom of the funnel, that's the most immediate opportunities, but if you dry that out and you're not feeding the top of it, you're kind of like, you got a quarter, you're going to do well, and then what? So, there's always this balance, right? How do you ensure your marketing strategy stays aligned with the company's growth goals, and where do you find the biggest friction points in making that happen?